☆ Far-left attacks on Mahan full of misinformation, illiteracy
A collection of SJ's far-left advocacy groups protested outside the family home of Mayor Mahan last weekend—complaining about the Mayor's homelessness programs. The groups' promotional flyer included violent imagery (crossing out Mahan's eyes—invoking a comic book convention to indicate someone's dead), and a parade of misinformed howlers that we fact check, below. An Opp Now exclusive.
Claim: Mahan plans to imprison homeless people who can't find shelter.
Fact check: False, misleading.
Mahan's Shelter Accountability Plan won't imprison anybody. Rather, it aims to compel into treatment programs those homeless people who are:
Refusing legit offers of shelter, and/or
Disregarding city laws and ordinances, and therefore
Need extra help getting off the streets, as determined by outreach workers and the SJPD.
Let's be clear about this. Mahan's plan only applies to people who have shelter options available to them. Who have been offered this free shelter. And have rejected the offer.
That's light years from "criminalizing homelessness," and to suggest otherwise is intellectually unserious and bad faith argumentation.
And let's take a look at what the city's shelter offer looks like:
A private room with a door that locks
A community with referrals to supportive services like mental health counseling and addiction treatment
Three meals a day
A dog run
No curfew
Within walking distance of one’s current camp
The opportunity for a whole community of homeless campers to come indoors together
And just as important, the program is revenue neutral. Read more here.
Claim: Mahan increased the Police Budget by $61m, which put the city into a $50m deficit.
Fact check: Deceptive, economically illiterate.
This claim completely misunderstands how the city budget works. Projected City of SJ deficits are due to the combo of slowing revenue growth and continued cost increases to deliver baseline city services.
Here are the facts: revenues from property tax and sales tax—the City’s two largest revenue sources—used to have annual growth of 7.5% and 9%, respectively. But that revenue growth has diminished along with the cooling of the local economy, post-pandemic.
Check it out: starting last year and continuing into 2025–2026, growth in property and sales tax is forecasted to range from 2% to 4% annually—that's a substantial drop. Meanwhile, cost pressures continue, led by growth in salary and benefit costs in 2025–2026, followed in 2026–2027 by the full annualization of temporary housing costs to move people off of SJ streets and the costs to operate new Police and Fire facilities called for by Measure T.
Claim: Mahan gave his wife (Silvia Scandar Mahan, CEO of Cristo Rey school) $1m in taxpayer dollars to fund her private school.
Fact check: Deceptive, inaccurate.
The City of SJ has had a longstanding contract to employ Cristo Rey students as part of its Corporate Work Study program. Due to the potential conflict of interest, Mayor Mahan opted to recuse himself from the vote on CR. The City provides grants to a number of local schools through programs like SJ Learns and Bringing Everyone's Strengths Together (B.E.S.T.) grants.
Claim: Mahan let 12 SJ public schools close this year.
Fact check: False, misleading.
The City Council has no funding nor managerial control over SJ public schools; school districts do. In any case, enrollment has been dropping precipitously at local schools due to demographic changes, so it's not surprising that the school districts are consolidating their schools and campuses.
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