SJ Mayor Mahan on new SJPD districts and prepping for El Niño

Well, the city of San Jose getting ready for the rainy season by clearing trash and debris along Coyote Creek. Community members gathered this past Saturday to remove debris at Selma Allender Park. They're trying to prevent a so-called trash raft during El Nino storms, which can block waterways and lead to flooding. Volunteers include San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who joins us now with more. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Good morning, Andre. All right, so Mayor, tell us about the cleanup effort. It was a great team effort. We had a bunch of neighbors out there along with Keep Coyote Creek beautiful and we were taking debris out of the waterways. As you mentioned, these trash rafts can be really dangerous in the winter because they can form blockages that are not normal. It's one thing to have trees and shrubs and things in the waterways, but when encampments have pushed. Metal and plastics, it can get really stuck and then back up and flood a neighborhood. So as we've moved thousands of people indoors, led the state in reducing unsheltered homelessness, we're able to go down into the waterways and really start to restore the habitat, get out all that debris. Yeah, so tell us about some of the other preps you all are taking right now in San Jose to prepare for El Nino. Yeah, we've got an item coming back to our city council. We just did a study session with Valley Water, which is our water district. We've worked collaboratively with them to identify the greatest flooding hotspots in the city and where the risks are. They've built levees in some places. We've been working together to get debris out of the waterways as appropriate without damaging the habitat. We're also doing a lot of awareness raising. We want residents to be prepared. We have downed power lines. Folks should know how to be ready for what could be many hours, even a day or two without power in the worst case, hopefully. So just a lot of education, identifying those hotspots, getting debris out of the waterways. We'll have sandbags ready to go for folks as we get closer. And then a lot of it's just real-time monitoring and making sure we're responding to issues as they arise. The final thing I'll just note is people can adopt their local storm drain and help us get ahead of this by keeping leaves and other debris away from and out of those storm drains. And that helps relieve the pressure on our limited crew capacity out there. Helps when people in the community can just be right there. When they live there, they can look outside and see and really help pull anything that might be an obstruction out. Let's switch over to the police department now. San Jose police undergoing a redistricting change right now. Beginning Sunday, the department From 16 to 12 districts, tell us your thoughts about this change. Yeah, well, this is really a data-driven approach. The chief, Chief Joseph, has worked with his team to be ready to implement this redistricting effort, as you mentioned. And the whole idea is to speed up response times. We have low staffing. We want our units to be able to get to calls for service as quickly as possible. The old boundaries, which had more districts, as you noted. We're not necessarily optimal for our current staffing levels. And so the idea is to be able to respond faster. We'll be following the data, though. As with all things in San Jose, we will be transparently reporting the performance. If response times don't go down, it means that our analysis was off. And then we'll reflect and say, well, how do we adjust or what do we do? But we believe this will reduce response times and improve service levels. All right, Mayor, this is the first time we're talking to you since the midterm election here. We're gonna hear you and other Big Bay Area City Mayor's push for the regional transit measure overwhelmingly passed in all five counties. Your reaction to the transit measure, which, you know, we've had you on the talk about in the past here. Yeah, well, as I mentioned before, you know, on the one hand, it gives us an incredible infusion of public resources to shore up transit. But I've been really clear that this has to be deployed in a way, particularly here in the South Bay, that makes transit an attractive alternative for riders, especially riders of choice. We need to build a world-class transit system if the Bay Area is going to continue to grow. BART to Durand Station and connect rail around the bay. We've got to increase bus service levels. We have to get the basics right. Transit has to be safe and clean. Or, you know, most folks don't want to ride it. So I'm pushing our local agency, VTA, to have a very aggressive, data-driven plan for deploying these resources to speed up service levels, increase frequency, make trains and buses and the stations safer and cleaner, and really make this an attractive option for more people so that fewer of us are sitting in traffic for an hour each way to get to work. And that benefits everybody. Do you think the cleanliness and the timeliness of these transit has been a hindrance to people who don't have to take transit and choose to drive instead? I do. I think that being safe, clean, and on time are the basic expectations. And if we're not consistently meeting them, and I think the truth is many of our transit agencies. particularly during the pandemic, struggled with that. You saw BART actually install fare gates and reduce fare evasion. That then led to less crime, less vandalism, lower maintenance costs. It made the system safer because it had that upfront barrier that meant people were actually paying for the service. That, I think, proves that as we invest in a system that is safe and clean, You know, our cost structure can come down. We'll see more riders. But beyond that, we have to increase service levels. Nobody wants to wait for a bus that might come every 20, 30 minutes. We need to get down to about 15-minute headways to really make it convenient for folks. All right. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, thank you for joining us this morning and providing your insight into all the major things happening down in your city this morning. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right.