San Jose City Council members are pushing back on Mayor Matt Mahan‘s proposal to hold elected officials accountable by tying a percentage of their pay to performance metrics.
If Mahan and the City Council members’ collective performance falls below 100% of the adopted targets for the city, 5% of their salaries will be proportionately reduced based on the actual achievement of the prioritized targets.
This is not sitting well with at least five City Council members, who said the policy could lead some to focus more on the mayor’s popular priorities rather than addressing the lesser-known specific needs of their constituents.
“It’s straight out of the toolkit of authoritarian governments where they’re trying to quell dissent,” Councilman David Cohen told SFGate. “In a representative democracy where we have 11 elected officials trying to make decisions, every vote shouldn’t be unanimous. We should accept the fact that people have different ideas on how to get to the solution.”
Mahan hit back at the criticism, saying he’s “tired of my fellow Democrats crying authoritarianism whenever they disagree with something — that is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly or used as a catchall for discontent.”
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Author: Marty Kaufmann
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