Mayor Steinberg: Leading City of Sacramento was ‘tougher’ than leading California Senate

Leading the city of Sacramento was “tougher” than leading the California Senate, Mayor Darrell Steinberg said during his final State of the City address Thursday.

“I never thought the job of mayor would be easy,” Steinberg said during the speech held at the UC Davis $1.1 billion Aggie Square project under construction in Oak Park. “But, I guess I never expected that anything could be tougher than being Senate leader during the worst recession in 50 years. For not the first time in my life, I turned out to be wrong.”

When Steinberg ran for mayor in 2016, he wanted to help the city to “grow up” from a government town with core basic services, he has said. He wanted to help it flourish as a world class city full of art, music, culture and lots of new affordable housing.

“As mayor, I was directly accountable to an entire city whose residents are hungry for more, but whose local government has a much smaller budget and has always defined its role and responsibilities in a very traditional way,” Steinberg said.

While the state has a budget of about $450 billion, the city’s is about $1.6 billion, most of which goes to the police and fire departments.

Seeking to grow the budget early on in his term, Steinberg placed a controversial measure — Measure U — on the 2018 ballot to raise sales taxes. Steinberg’s popularity was high at the time and voters approved it overwhelmingly. The new revenue ended up saving the city from a deficit during the COVID-19 pandemic, when parking revenue tanked.

Last year, the looming deficit arrived. The council closed the gap to avoid staff layoffs. But next year, and in the coming years, the deficit is projected to grow larger, which will leave the council with difficult choices, including whether to close homeless shelters the city opened under Steinberg’s tenure.

When Steinberg became mayor, the city had less than 100 homeless shelter beds. Now, largely due to his leadership, the city has roughly 1,300 — fewer than the county, which has a much larger budget.

“I took the dominating issue of our time, unsheltered homelessness, and campaigned to make a difference,” Steinberg said. “I never promised to solve homelessness, but I know that I gave that impression. In 2016, I promised to get 2,000 people off the streets. Today, we have helped 25,000 people go from unsheltered to housed. We have thousands more affordable housing units and are the most progressive city in the country to remove limitations on the number of units built in a single family neighborhood.”

Still, there are thousands on the streets. There are 2,600 people on the waiting list for one of the city’s 1,300 shelter beds, as well as a whopping 840 families, according to city data.

The two candidates vying to succeed Steinberg, Assemblyman Kevin McCarty and Flo Cofer, have different ideas on how to address the crisis. They both attended the speech Thursday.

“Next year, for one of you, this will be your stage,” Steinberg, addressing both McCarty and Cofer. ”I will be both out of your way and available to do anything you ask to help you when it’s your turn ... It’s almost time for me to pass the torch. I have done my best and put my head and heart into trying to change the arc of our city in extraordinary times.”

Steinberg has said his political career may be over, or he may be interested in running for attorney general in 2026 if current California Attorney General Rob Bonta runs for governor.

Steinberg’s term as mayor ends Dec. 10.