How to Run a City in the Silicon Valley | Mayor of San Mateo, California David Lim

So what I want to do is I am going to give you some dry facts, some early facts just to let you know where you are because you're going to be here for a while. So you're— this is home for you for what, 6 weeks? 8 weeks. 8 weeks. So this is your home for 8 weeks. You need to know a little bit about your new town. City of San Mateo has a population of 97,207 according to the 2010 census. We were incorporated as a town in 1894. Prior to that, for centuries, it was the home of the Ohlone people, the Native Americans who lived here undisturbed for years from the Pacific Northwest down to Southern California. We know that, we all know our California history, or I know that I think 40% of you are international students, so you may not know that the Spaniards were the first to colonize California. They established a chain of missions, Catholic missions up and down the California coast. You can actually still go see most of them. They're still around as tourist destinations. The Spanish settled it. You can tell by the way our street over here is called El Camino Real. El Camino Real. The Street of Kings. After the Spanish missionaries, after the Spanish-Mexican War, the Mexican government took over California, and that was the era called the land grants or the great ranchos, and it was mainly large ranches up here held in title by single individual owners. Of course, the Mexican-American War ended all that. The Americans asserted their dominance and took over this land from the Mexicans and established the Republic of California for a few days, and then ultimately in 1850, we all know California became a state. When California became a state, this area known as San Mateo fell under the influence and was once part of the city and county of San Francisco. Actually, not the city of San Francisco, but was part of the county of San Francisco. And for many, many years, it was the playground for wealthy San Franciscans, you know, the Mark Hopkins, the Huntingtons, You know, people whose names are now lost to history, but they owned large tracts of land down here. And if you've ever been up to San Francisco, you know that Mark Twain said very famously the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. So in the summer, the well-to-do in Nob Hill would come down, take the railway to San Mateo, and sit on their large estates. In 1898, San Mateo incorporated as a town. The County of San Mateo was born. Those tracts were cut up. Growth in San Mateo really didn't begin until after World War II when you had the baby boom generation. All these tracts in the hills that you see now were all cut up, subdivided, and turned into the homes you see today. The house that I'm living in, one of the coolest things that happened is my wife and I bought it in 2001 when we got engaged. And like any good young couple, we did all the remodeling ourselves. And one day we were tearing down some walls in the garage and we found the original inspection certificate. from the City of San Mateo from 1949 that had been tacked into the garage and then covered up by drywall. So we took that out, we framed it. All the homes you see in the hills are mostly 1940, 1950 vintage. That's the City of San Mateo that you're now living in. A little bit, because you are entrepreneurs, I wouldn't be a good mayor if I didn't give you a little bit of statistics on our business employment. We have a total number of businesses of about 7,190. We employ about 72,000 people on a daily basis. You can see the breakdown of the services or the areas in which our business employment works. One of the things that we're really excited about doing is we do want to become bigger in the tech industry, in the startup industry, which is why we are all very excited to have all of you here. We are hoping very much that having started here, having incubated your ideas here, that you will like what you see here and decide to call this place home. But this is sort of an overview of where we are as a business. City of San Mateo, what do we do in terms of government? We have 5 city council members elected at large to 4-year terms. We stagger our terms, so I'm up for reelection this year with 3— 2 other council members, and then the other 2 council members will go 2 years after me. We are all part-time. Being a city council member pays a whopping salary of $600 a month. For that, I get to work basically a second job. I figure I put in 20 to 40 hours a week as a city council member, most of it very early in the morning if I wake up early, or most of it in the evening after I put my kids to bed from about 9 to 1 o'clock. Other than that, I work a full-time job as an attorney down in Santa Clara County. I've been a prosecutor for the Santa Clara County DA's office for a year. Prior to that, I was a DA in Alameda County for 13 years. Because of that, we have what's called a city manager form of government. Think of it as a business organization. The city council is your board of directors, your city manager is your CEO. Our city manager runs the day-to-day affairs of the city. So we are not— I'm not in City Hall, you know, sitting there presiding over what staff does. It's our city manager who makes the day-to-day decisions. She makes the hiring and firing decisions. City Council sets policy, so we set the broad policies. We set the budget, we pass the budget, and we approve any contracts over $100,000. Everything else falls under the ambit and the daily operations of Susan Loftus, our city manager. The funniest thing I always get is when people call me and they're like, hey, Mayor Lim, I'd like to set up a meeting with you. Can I get a hold of your staff to set up that meeting. I'll be like, you're talking to staff, I'm in. I have no staff, I have no budget for staff, I do everything on my own. You know, or people will call and say, hey, I'd like to come into your office and have a meeting with you. And I'll say, well, I'm down in San Jose. Oh, are you down there for meetings? No, I'm down here working. You know, I gotta pay the bills, gotta keep the lights on for my kids. So it's fun being the mayor, it's fun being a city council member, but in some of these smaller suburban areas of California, we still have part-time city council members. Our operating budget in the City of San Mateo has really outgrown what we started as a small suburban city back in the '50s and '60s. Our annual general fund operating budget is now $82 million a year. And we— you can see the source of our revenue is primarily property taxes and sales tax. We get other revenue in lieu fees from license fees, some hotel taxes, some business license. But you can see that over 50% of our revenue sources come from property taxes and sales tax. That's why the recession, when it hit and property values tanked and people stopped spending as much money on goods, really hurts small cities. 58% of our general funds, so over half of the $82 million we spend, goes to 2 departments: police and fire. So if you were to ask, What is the main purpose of a local government? It is to keep our communities safe. And given what we saw over this past week and what's going on right now in the greater suburban Boston area, you kind of get a better feeling for why it's so important for local municipalities to have strong emergency services to protect their communities. So we have a great San Mateo Police Department. We have a great fire department. We maintain local control over them. to make sure that they are part of our community and not just policing it. And that's the one thing we're proud of, that all our police officers, our fire department firefighters are all people that belong to our community. You know, they're not just people that walk around with a badge. They're friends, they're community members, they go to our schools, they worship in our churches, they eat in our restaurants. 15% of our general fund goes to parks and recreation. So if you go over to our Central Park and enjoy our Central Park, 15% of our revenues is going to maintain our quality of life through Parks and Recreation services, you know, Little League for the kids, dance classes for seniors, hot meals for the seniors. You know, we have a great senior center that we contract out with a nonprofit organization, and that's part of what we do through Parks and Rec. Public Works is 6% of our general fund. So street maintenance, sewer maintenance, all the things that aren't real sexy, but I learned a lot about once I got on the City Council. And our public works director, Larry Patterson, is here, and you're gonna hear from him at different points in this conversation. He's a great public works manager, but a lot of what we do is keeping our roads passable, keeping our sewer systems good, because what I always say, you know, you're not gonna get reelected if people can't flush their toilets. That's just bottom line. You gotta be able to provide basic services. Thank you.