Oakland Mayor Jean Quan slashing salary 25%

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is seen on Jan. 25, 2011 in Oakland, Calif. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is seen on Jan. 25, 2011 in Oakland, Calif. Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Oakland Mayor Jean Quan slashing salary 25% 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is voluntarily giving back 25 percent of her $183,397-a-year salary.

Quan will make $137,000 - or about $46,000 a year less than her immediate predecessor, Ron Dellums.

"We are going into some very, very tough times, and I wanted to lead the way," Quan said.

Oakland is facing a $40 million-plus deficit that, in addition to cuts in services, probably will lead to continued furlough days and layoffs of city workers.

"I don't ask people to do what I'm not willing to do," Quan said.

Quan isn't the first mayor to take a pay cut. Former Mayor Jerry Brownturned down raises and kept his salary at $115,000.

Dellums, who followed Brown, kicked off his term by asking for and getting a $68,000 raise.

When times got tough for Oakland, Dellums said he would forgo 10 percent of his pay, just as other city workers were being forced to do.

But he never did. He did, however, begin contributing 8 percent of his pay to his pension.

Quan, who also pays 8 percent into her pension fund, said she would take the salary cut on a year-by-year basis.

"If the economy picks up," she added, "I would love to have the whole thing back."

On the home front: San Francisco SupervisorMalia Cohen has joined the ranks of the foreclosed, having lost her $581,178 condo to the bank.

The 33-year-old Cohen was a community organizer and ran a social-media business before her election in November from District 10. She says she was the victim of a predatory bank loan on the two-bedroom condo she bought with no money down in 2006 at 501 Crescent Way just west of Candlestick Park.

Cohen said before the election that the foreclosure was being "rescinded." However, efforts to renegotiate the loan failed, and she moved out Jan. 4, four days before she was sworn in.

"It was underwater, so I let it go," Cohen said.

These days, Cohen says, she's living in a rented apartment in the district. She declined to disclose the address.

As for her former condo, Wells Fargo bank has put it back on the market for $314,900.

Building momentum: Big coup for state Sen. Leland Yee, who just won an early endorsement for his San Francisco mayoral run from the building trades unions.

The endorsement was made over the objections of plumbers union honcho Larry Mazzola Sr., who wanted the group to wait until everyone was up and running for the November election.

Yee's friends in the ironworkers, glazers and operating engineers unions pushed for an early endorsement - and, after sit-downs with five of the declared candidates, won it for their guy.

Sham U: There were plenty of signs that something was wrong at Pleasanton's Tri-Valley University, a diploma mill that the feds suspect of being a front for foreigners looking to establish U.S. immigration status.

As of May, according to a civil fraud complaint that the U.S. attorney's office filed recently against school founder and President Susan Su, the university had 939 students - 95 percent of them from India.

All paid $2,700 a semester in tuition for visa-related documents that allowed them to live and work in the country on student immigration status.

More than half the students were reported to be living in a single apartment at 555 E. El Camino Real in Sunnyvale, according to prosecutors' filing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

When the feds came knocking, however, they found that just four students had ever lived in the apartment. Authorities suspect that many of the rest are living outside California.

As for Su, prosecutors say she stood to collect $4.1 million from the fall term.

Su did not return our calls. But in an earlier interview, she said she had not broken any laws.

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