Santa Clara County supervisors say they are ready to at least talk about a local reparations policy for Black residents, a step supporters see as overdue acknowledgment of discrimination they say hollowed out Black-owned businesses, homeownership and generational wealth in San Jose. The proposal has been sent into the committee maze instead of straight to the full Board, and it still does not have a firm hearing date, so community groups are pushing hard for a local study with a concrete timeline. All of this is unfolding while county leaders insist they are staring down painful budget choices, a tension that could decide how far the reparations conversation really goes.
As reported by San José Spotlight, Supervisors Sylvia Arenas and Betty Duong backed a move to bring a discussion on a reparations policy to the full Board during a Jan. 22 Children, Seniors and Families Committee meeting. That item has since been left off several follow-up agendas. At the January hearing, both supervisors spoke in favor of studying reparative measures and framed the work as part of broader restorative efforts for African American families in the South Bay.
Budget reality complicates the push
The timing could hardly be tougher. The county is wrestling with an approximately $470 million budget shortfall that officials say will mean program cuts and layoffs, a crunch public leaders have linked to shifts in federal funding and rising costs, according to ABC7. Department heads have warned that reductions could hit mental health care, safety-net services and other programs that advocates say are vital to the very residents a reparations policy is supposed to help. The political dilemma practically writes itself: how do you sell new forms of investment while you are cutting existing services.
State task force gives context
California has already done some of the homework. The statewide AB 3121 task force on reparations released an interim report in 2022 that laid out how state and local policies fueled long-term harms, including racial violence, housing segregation and economic exclusion. The California Attorney General’s office published the task force report and related materials detailing its findings and early recommendations aimed at remedying those harms. Local organizers have pointed to that body of work as a blueprint of sorts and argue that Santa Clara County should dig into its own history and options for redress.
Advocates pressing for a local task force
Community groups, including the African American Community Service Agency, are helping drive the effort on the ground. Lavere Foster, associate director at AACSA, told San José Spotlight that advocates want a shared vision for how reparations should work locally, stressing that the goal should be building generational wealth rather than cutting a one-time check. The African American Community Service Agency is among the organizations urging the county to create a local task force that would study specific models and outcomes for reparative investments.
A committee of the county Human Rights Commission has already voted to send a recommendation to the Board to consider forming a local reparations task force, and organizers say they are watching the Board calendar closely to see when the item finally lands. Local reporting notes that the proposal has not appeared on several subsequent agendas, and advocates say they expect supervisors to set a public timeline for next steps…