The City of San José Community & Economic Development (CED) Committee met at 1:30 PM on Monday, April 28, 2025, in Council Chambers. Chair Pam Foley, Vice Chair Rosemary Kamei, and Members Peter Ortiz, Michael Mulcahy, and George Casey were present, establishing a quorum. The committee reviewed the work plan, heard annual and quarterly reports from economic development staff, and voted to accept the reports.
Yes, let's begin. It's 1 30. I like to start on time. As you all know, I say this every time we start a meeting. Welcome to the CED meeting. Could you take the roll, please? Casey? Okay. Here. Ortiz. Present. Vice Chair Kimmy. Here. Chair Foley? Here. You have a quorum. Great. Thank you. We uh the first item is to review the work plan on uh there's one item, the housing ballot status report is being deferred to May 19th to give time to present it to the HCD committee before it comes to us. Is there any members of the public who wish to speak on that on this item? No public comment. Okay, then do we have a motion to approve? Sorry. Any discussion? If not, let's vote. Thank you. Moving on to the reports to the committee. The first item is a business development division activities annual report. And I believe Blog A is going to kick this off. Good afternoon, Chair Foley and Committee members. The blog is the Lolich, Deputy Director in the Office of Economic Development and Cultural Affairs. And I am pleased to be here alongside Vic Farley, my colleague in the department, to present to you the annual activity report of the Business Development Division. Today we'll walk you through the breadth and range of work managed by the Business Development Division, focusing on key highlights over the past year, and also provide you with key goals for the year ahead. To successfully deliver this work relies on the support of colleagues across all city departments, and importantly the engagement of multiple external partners, stakeholders and contractors. The division is grouped into three teams. The first covers both small business and neighborhoods, and then we have our work in the corporate outreach and engagement with medium and large size companies, and finally our team leading the efforts for continued economic vitality and vibrancy in our city's urban core. I'd like to just briefly acknowledge the work of Nathan Donato Weinstein, our downtown manager, who as of yesterday actually took up the position as the first economic development manager for the city of Campbell. So we're sad about that. But he has led by example and has been instrumental in many of the successes across the division over the past year. In addition to our three teams, we have Carlos Velazquez, our public information officer, who leads all of OD OEDCA's communication work, and we are nearing the final stages of recruitment for economic data analyst position. Looking at the key numbers that highlight the city's economic vital signs, we can see that in 2024, our stock of businesses remain broadly the same. However, we did lose approximately 20,000 jobs, with the largest losses being in the professional scientific and technical services as well as manufacturing and retail. Nevertheless, unemployment remained roughly the same at 4%. This shows the turn in the labor market and the resilience of the Silicon Valley economy in keeping the resident workforce stable through change. Regarding real estate, we saw small reductions in office and retail vacancy rates. Industrial vacancy rates slightly increased, but we are also seeing significant new industrial development, and there continues to be strong demand for relatively limited amount of industrial space in the city. Consumer spending resulted in a record sales tax for restaurants. However, overall, there was a small dip of one percent, largely the result of declining EV car sales and lower gas prices. This was the first decline in sales tax in three years for the city. Business investment held up in 2024 and contributes a much more significant percentage of sales tax generated, close to 30% than in most other California jurisdictions.