The San Jose City Council held a study session on April 13, 2026, to review the Deferred Maintenance and Infrastructure Backlog (DMIB) report. The session, chaired by the Vice Mayor, featured presentations from Public Works Director Matt and Budget Director Jim Shannon, highlighting a $2.6 billion one-time backlog and $259 million annual ongoing need to prevent further deterioration. Councilmembers discussed funding challenges, equitable prioritization, and potential strategies including new revenue sources, asset sales, and public-private partnerships.
No consent calendar items were discussed.
No members of the public spoke during the session.
Good morning, everyone. It's 9 30, so let's get started. I'm filling in today for the mayor. So you got me. I'd like to call to order the study session on deferred maintenance and infrastructure backlog. Tony, will you take the roll, please? Cohen? Here. Ortiz? Present. Mulcahi. Here. Juan? Here. Candelas. Casey. Foley. Here. Mayhand. You have a corn. Great. Thank you. So as this is a study session, we start off with a presentation, then we go to council questions, and then if time permits, we go to opening to any comments from the general public. So I see we have Matt and Jim in the box. Let's get started. Well, welcome all. So we have about 20 slides to get through with a decent amount of content. If you made it through the report, uh you're probably better than most. It is sort of a beast, and it's not even all of the work that gets done around our infrastructure and our maintenance. So I'm here as a public works director, but I am by no means the only department that runs or does maintenance or deals with infrastructure. We have many people here, and many of our departments are represented to talk. If there's very specific questions that Jim or I can't cover, we'll bring in some folks from the audience to support the different areas. And so we'll work through of um what is deferred maintenance and infrastructure and why and what we want to talk through there. The key is and infrastructure, because we as we continue to study what is going on around our ecosystem here in San Jose, um, we find things that are short of what we expect. And our community tells us what's we're short and what they expect. And so we keep um cataloging and understanding it some more. We'll walk through the current DMIB, and that's uh we'll keep saying that over and over again, but that's the deferred maintenance and infrastructure backlog report. Um we'll talk about some critical near-term things that we would like to that we will be addressing. Um, and you'll see in front of you a different forums to make decisions that we'll be asking you for things. And then uh Jim will very specifically talk about some strategies to help with this because the backlog really is about money, and so if we had the money that's listed in this report, um, we would have a plans around it and we'd be in our capital program and or our maintenance opportunities with our operating budgets to maintain them. So we would these shortfalls that we'll be talking about. Um we wouldn't be here talking about them, you'd be seeing them in the different other reports, and then we'll have time for discussion and questions and so forth. Here we go. Um so what is the DMIB? It's the list of all the repairs and upgrades and replacements of all the different assets, and we're endeavoring to keep them in good condition and serviceable conditions, both and we obviously focus on safety as a primary thing, but we also functionality and uh ease of use and what our community wants. Um why it's deferred, it's either noted because it was never brought into our CIP in terms of capital as we study things through master planning and so forth, or there's just lack of resources for us to do the maintenance in the timely way, or we made decisions about maintenance and how we do repairs and so forth. Um then the infrastructure gaps is when we'll do studies. In particular, we'll keep saying this about storm. If you look just at the chart on the early couple pages of the report, the storm um DMIB number jumped quite a bit, and that's because we completed a master plan and identified um some very large um vulnerabilities that we have in our storm system. And so those numbers and so it's a gap that we would describe.