Image generated using Dall-E
San Jose Mayor Mahan wants to tie merit pay raises for city leadership to outcomes across four key areas. In an Opp Now exclusive Q&A, San Jose native and licensed local real estate agent Mark Burns suggests adding “find and eliminate unnecessary expenses” to the list.
Opportunity Now: Do you support Mayor Mahan’s proposal to tie pay raises for San Jose city leadership to performance metrics?
Mark Burns: Yes. And why haven’t they done this before?
But if he has four goals—homelessness, community safety, cleaning up neighborhoods, and attracting investment in housing and jobs—I think the fifth pillar should be to find and eliminate unnecessary expenses. I guess I’m going the DOGE route for city expenses.
The top fire engineer has a salary of $165,000, but he also gets paid $411,000 for overtime.
ON: Why do you think cutting costs isn’t one of the areas of focus?
MB: I think he’s making it pretty enough that everybody will vote for it. Otherwise, the unions would simply respond with, “You can’t touch what we already agreed to. We’ll spend as much PAC money as necessary to put someone else in your place.”
ON: Mahan’s proposal also doesn’t affect the COLA raises, or threaten to cut pay. Are the proposed merit-raises going to be enough to incentivize change?
MB: I’ve been on nonprofit boards of directors for a combined 75+ years: my local association, Chamber of Commerce, and several others that have overlapped over time. I haven’t been paid a dime for any of those positions.
ON: And why’d you do it?
MB: I always walked in the door and said, “What can we fix today?” And I don’t think that that’s the hat that city leadership is wearing when they show up for work. They all need to wear a little hat that says, “What are we going to fix today?”
ON: If you were still a San Jose resident, would you vote for Mahan’s pay-for-performance proposal?
MB: It’s hard to vote when it violates what you’d like them to be doing in the first place. So I might vote no, because it’s the tip of the iceberg of reevaluating what their jobs are and what they’re supposed to be bringing to the table.