Speier hosts town hall in San Bruno

Despite the county being the wealthiest in California, there are 30,000 children living in poverty, Speier said. One of her efforts as a supervisor is to focus on providing opportunities and lifting those children out of poverty. 

The Jackie Speier Foundation will be launching its Baby Bonus Program in coming weeks, which will grant 600 children born in the county $300 a month for the first three years of an infant’s life if they are eligible for Medi-Cal. The foundation has already raised $9 million to do so, Speier said, and her time as a supervisor will be dedicated to making sure children are lifted out of poverty. 

A lofty goal of Speier’s is to establish 5,000 workforce housing units within the next 10 years throughout the county, using surplus land and offering it at below market rate. Speier said she is taking notes from the San Mateo County Community College District. 

“They took surplus land and built housing for their employees and faculty, offered that housing at half the market rate, and guess what, they stopped losing staff and faculty,” Speier said. “Why not do that?” 

While workforce housing hopes to keep employees able to live in the county in which they work, Speier also has the intention of making countywide jobs more known and sought after. A job fair will be May 2 at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds that Speier promoted. 

“If you live here, we want you to work here,” Speier said. “We’re going to encourage all the federal workers that just lost their jobs to come here and look at opportunities that exist here in San Mateo County.”

In addition to workforce housing, efforts need to continue to establish affordable units for low-income families, said Jennifer Blanco, a former San Bruno Park School District trustee and member of the county’s Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Commission. Speier said “it’s all workforce housing.” 

A new program called “county core” that Speier hopes to establish also would look to encourage young people ages 16 to 24 to “get them hooked on being in public service.”

Speier also threw out the idea of a quarter-cent sales tax that would be dedicated to addressing the need for affordable child care. Though concrete plans to do so are not in the works, she said, such a tax could generate $50 million a year to be dedicated toward developing facilities and training workers.  

“Next to a mortgage, sometimes higher than a mortgage, is the cost of child care in San Mateo County,” Speier said. “I don’t know if that’s going to pan out, but there are things we can do and must do to reduce the cost of child care.”

County staff members gave presentations about wildfire safety and immigration resources. Sandy Firpo, coordinator of the county’s Department of Emergency Management, spoke to the lessons learned from the February fires in Los Angeles County, and Megan Gosch, a management analyst for the Office of Community Affairs spoke about the constitutional rights everyone has, regardless of citizenship status. 

In the presentation, Gosch described ways for residents to assert their rights and deescalate interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and promoted resources such as the county’s Rapid Response Network hotline — (650) 666-4472 — that will confirm ICE sightings or deploy legal aid services should an arrest occur. 

A resident asked Speier about the county’s policy to not cooperate with ICE, and the supervisor clarified that decision was made before she was on the board, and ultimately was one with which she does not agree. 

In 2023, San Mateo County Board of Supervisors adopted an ordinance prohibiting the use of county funds for cooperating with federal immigration agents. Then, Supervisor Ray Mueller proposed an amendment that would allow local law enforcement to assist with ICE transfers if the incarcerated person committed an act of murder, rape or child molestation. 

Speier said she supports such an amendment, and doesn’t understand why the county has such a blanket policy of noncooperation. 

“One of the reasons I ran for the Board of Supervisors was because I thought that they had made a mistake in not supporting the amendment that was put forward by Supervisor Mueller to exempt those three categories,” Speier said. 

Other concerns raised by residents included noise pollution from the San Francisco International Airport, the use of safe-and-sane fireworks in San Bruno, and the process to remove the sheriff. 

The recent approval of Measure A grants the Board of Supervisors the authority to remove an elected sheriff from office for just cause and by way of a hearing and vote of the board. When Speier was asked her position on the matter, she affirmed that she will have to serve in a quasi-judicial role and will wait until the hearings and due process before making her decision.

Note to readers: This article was updated to properly spell Megan Gosch's surname.