Few people begin their careers in government as early as Santa Clara City Manager Jovan Grogan. He got involved in city government in high school, and was so certain of his direction in life that when it came time for college, he looked for schools with majors in city planning.
It all began when an Oakland city council member spoke to his high school class. At the end of class, Grogan spoke to the council member and was invited to join a city youth commission. Grogan went on to earn a Bachelor’s in city planning and a Master’s in regional planning from Cornell, working in local government during the summers.
“When I came back to Oakland for my first summer after freshman year, I contacted the city manager,” said Grogan. “I said, ‘Hi, my name is Jovan. I go to Cornell. I’m interested in cities and I’ll work for you for free for the summer.’ He replied, ‘Call me when you’re in town, and I’ll pay you.’ So I spent my summer breaks in freshman and sophomore year as an intern for the city manager of Oakland.”
Grogan is an Oakland native, with a father who worked in construction and a mother who worked for Kaiser Permanente. His roots in that city are deep, including a grandfather who was a founding member of Greater St. Paul’s Missionary Baptist Church in Oakland.
After graduate school, Grogan didn’t go directly into government; instead, going to work for a municipal management consulting firm.
“We studied every area of local government service,” explained Grogan. “I worked all across the Bay Area and the West Coast. What was great about that job was I didn’t just work for one city, where the issues in that city were the only things that crossed my desk.”
That job gave him cross-functional expertise as he tackled complex municipal challenges —from budget crises to hiring bottlenecks to airport studies. Two of his projects were the Vallejo and Stockton bankruptcies.
Following six years of consulting, Grogan worked as Concord’s budget officer and then Berkeley’s deputy city manager. Mentors in Berkeley began telling him it was time to move up to the top position, and he became San Bruno’s city manager. During his tenure, he brought to completion a major real estate project that transformed the dying Tanforan Mall into a housing and tech campus.
When Grogan came to Santa Clara in 2023, he saw several challenges facing Santa Clara. The city had been without a city manager for a year and had a contentious political environment. There are also the challenges of aging infrastructure, difficulty attracting and retaining staff due to high housing costs and a World Cup and Super Bowl on the horizon.
However, a healthy budget is fundamental for meeting Santa Clara’s future, and Grogan is launching a fiscal sustainability project for the city, with a long-term plan for short-, medium- and long-term plans.
“We know that we have a structural deficit to fund new services and infrastructure,” he explained. “We’ve been able to rebuild our reserves, but we’re not operating in a sustainable manner. The community wants more services like all communities. They want us to enhance our recreation offerings, improve our parks. And we need to provide capacity in the budget to do that.
“We want to develop a blueprint to ensure fiscal sustainability,” Grogan continued. “We’re going to look at revenue enhancements, [and] expenditure reductions. We have to look at service or program elimination and service delivery model changes. We provide services through government resources, but we will ask, ‘Can we provide them in other ways?’”
Grogran says his job is keeping the ship on course for a successful future.
“My job is just making sure that we have a modern, high-functioning, well-run organization, aside from whatever the hot button issue is of the day,” he said. “That’s the work that never stops. The job is ensuring that you don’t get distracted by the fires or the hot-button issues of the day, or even the amazing mega events that are coming in.
“You have to [leave] politics aside,” he added, “and make decisions about what’s in the best long-term interest of the community.”
