Highlights from last night’s Council meeting

Did you skip the show last night? Had something better to do with your Tuesday evening than stare at KTOP for seven straight hours? Don’t worry. I watch these things so you don’t have to. Here’s what you missed: Read more

The story with CompStat and Oakland

So, Chip Johnson’s column today is sort-of about general problems with the police department and sort-of about CompStat. I’ve noticed that the word CompStat is getting thrown around more and more often in discussions about OPD, and while I’m thrilled about that because I think we desperately need to do it here, I also think that it sometimes seems people aren’t exactly clear on what it is. Read more

Measure OO: the worst thing on your ballot

For some reason, I find myself, way more often than you’d think anybody would, arguing with people about how much people pay attention to local government. Ever the pessimist, I maintain that significantly more than half the population doesn’t have even the faintest idea what goes on at City Hall, or maybe even who the Mayor is, and doesn’t care to learn. Most people tell me I’m wrong, and that everyone, if nothing else, reads Chip Johnson, which gives them at least a modicum of insight into the workings of Oakland’s government.

Maybe. We’ll find out one way or another soon enough, because Measure OO on this November’s ballot is a pretty damn good metric of whether people pay even a little bit of attention or they just show up at their polling station and vote at random. Read more

Budget debate over, for now.

So the Council passed their budget adjustment last night and we get to stop worrying about it for a while. Well, for a little while, anyway. As time goes on and we either do or don’t receive the revenue we budgeted for, the Finance & Management Committee will have to make monthly adjustments. Read more

Save the arts? At the expense of what, exactly?

So, tonight the City Council hopes to finally pass their second budget for the year and close the $42 million deficit hanging over our heads. The biggest point of contention tonight is likely to be suspension of the Cultural Arts funding program.

What program, you ask? Here’s the deal. Every year, we award grants to roughly 70 non-profits and individual artists to, well, make art. Read more

We’ll be keeping the park rangers after all

So, it looks like the City won’t be shutting down on Fridays after all. (Or closing parks!) You may recall that when Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums submitted his budget proposal a couple of weeks ago, he left a $10 million deficit and told the Council to figure out how to close it (offering them three options). Subsequently, Dellums explained that he actually didn’t want the Council to make their own decision, and instead expected to save the money by closing the City every Friday, cutting the pay of every non-sworn employee by 20%. Read more

What Measure Q? More broken promises from the City of Oakland.

So the biggest point of protest during the public comment period of Tuesday’s budget meeting was the proposed elimination of the Library’s Second Start Adult Literacy Program. The Second Start people played the pity card big time, Read more

Dellums on the budget

So, last night, the City Council had its first special budget workshop of this year’s second round of budget adjustments. The first round took place last spring, and culminated in the Council approving a mid-cycle budget with $15 million in cuts. Read more

Mayor’s new budget proposal now available

You can view it here (PDF). I haven’t had a chance to digest the whole thing yet, so I’m going to hold off on commenting until I do, but here’s the basic plan, as outlined in the letter (PDF) the Mayor sent to city staff: Read more

Banner summer for Oakland

So, to recap.

The general political climate in Oakland at the beginning of the summer was best summed up by the Trib in their Council race endorsements, which they introduced by saying “If there were ever a city crying out for leadership, it’s Oakland,” then proceeded to endorse the re-election of every single incumbent. Oakland voters followed suit at the polls in early June, and sent Nancy Nadel, Jane Brunner, Ignacio De La Fuente, and Larry Reid back for four more years.

Mid-June news of a large-scale gang bust by the Oakland Police Department was almost immediately eclipsed by allegations that Oakland City Administrator Deborah Edgerly had interfered with the 2-month investigation by tipping off her nephew, a member of the Acorn gang and City of Oakland employee, that his phone was tapped.

Faced with widespread citizen outrage, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums took the opportunity to demonstrate his unique ability to find the absolute worst possible way to handle a municipal crisis, first giving her until Monday, June 23rd to either resign or be fired, then pre-empting his own deadline by sending out an e-mail on Friday, June 20th directing all department heads to report directly to him. Nevertheless, Edgerly remained at the helm at the beginning of the following week.

Then on Tuesday, June 24th, Dellums held a press conference announcing that Edgerly would retire from her post, at the end of July (although she would continue to work for the city for as long as six months while selecting her own replacement) but claimed that the announcement was unrelated to the brewing scandal, saying her retirement plans had been in place since January. When pressed for details on the search for Edgerly’s replacement by Chip Johnson on KQED Forum, Dellums Chief of Staff David Chai remained insistent that the plan had been in place since January, but refused (or was unable) to answer follow-up questions about when the search for a replacement had begun.

By Friday, June 27th, Councilmembers Ignacio De La Fuente and Pat Kernighan were calling publicly for her to be placed on administrative leave until her retirement date, and Dellums finally did so that night, naming his interim CEDA director Dan Lindheim acting City Administrator. Edgerly fired back the next Monday, claiming that Dellums didn’t have the authority to appoint her replacement, in response to which, the Mayor finally fired her on July 1st, then told reporters the following day that claims he had behaved indecisively were “absurd.” Ultimate fallout of the Edgerly scandal is yet to be determined, awaiting the results of an FBI investigation, for which subpoenas were issued in late August.

Reaction to the Edgerly mess from the rest of City Hall varied widely. Oakland City Attorney John Russo, Oakland City Auditor Courtney Ruby, and Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente stepped in with government reform packages, offering proposals ranging from a new anti-nepotism law to an audit of hiring practices to records reform, while District 3 City Councilmember Nancy Nadel called such actions “opportunistic power grabbing (PDF)” and warned that we should wait for all the facts before “rushing to judgement.” Calls to eliminate waste in Oakland’s government were met with derision by District 4 Councilmember and wanna-be Mayor Jean Quan, who announced in a newsletter that she believes the worst case scenario is that the City has less than a million dollars in waste that could be cut.

The administrative crisis was compounded by a financial one. The Council passed a mid-cycle budget with $15 million in cuts in June, but got two bits of unpleasant news the next month. First, in response to findings of vote counting irregularities with LLAD from activist David Mix and ORPN founder Charles Pine, the Council admitted defeat and agreed not to collect the tax, putting them another $12 million in the hole. Then Dellums acknowledged that the revenue estimates he had presented in his (late) budget proposal were inaccurate by millions of dollars and announced he was bringing in former City Manager Robert Bobb to sort out the mess and find a replacement for Edgerly. Bobb announced two weeks ago that the actual deficit was somewhere between forty and sixty million dollars. Matier and Ross later reported that Oakland’s fund reserve dropped from over $60 million last year to $22 million currently. Although the City is unable to account for where the money went, Finance and Management Committee Chair Jean Quan tried to put a rest to concerns, saying “It’s not like the money was stolen.”

Things just got worse in August, when the City experienced a spree of local business robberies that appeared to have no rhyme or reason, with targets ranging from a pizzeria on Skyline to a nail salon in Temescal to a monument to mediocre cuisine in Rockridge. Dellums responded by blaming the economy, informing the citizens that the apparent crime rise is perception, not reality, and calling in the volunteer Guardian Angels to patrol our streets. The spate of high profile crime wasn’t limited to restaurant robberies - Oakland residents also got to deal with arsons in West Oakland, a four year old boy getting hit by a stray bullet, and this weekend, the second murder this year of a pregnant teenager. A Labor Day shooting in East Oakland brought the year’s homicide tally to 95, up from 88 this time last year.

In response to rising concerns about crime, the Council agreed to place a parcel tax on the November ballot that would hire 105 additional police officers and 75 additional police service technicians over the next three years, at a cost of $275/year for Oakland homeowners. Dellums named former County Health Department director Arnold Perkins as his temporary Public Safety Director. Although the public will have to wait until September 11th to see the Mayor’s full public safety program, residents got a preview of Perkins’s answers for the Oakland crime problem in a Trib editorial this weekend, where Perkins suggests to Martin Reynolds that citizens combat the crime problem on their own by bringing fried chicken to the groups of young men loitering on their streetcorners.

You know, following this stuff day to day, you’re always angry, of course, but as with anything, after a while you just sort of get used to it. There’s outrage, sure, but somehow it just gets dulled over time. I had a wake-up call this weekend, watching the way people not from Oakland reacted to my telling them, in this kind of jaded, matter-of-fact way, about the restaurant robberies and the statements in response from Dellums and Tucker. Their response, which was just complete disbelief that anyone would tolerate living in such a place, made me realize just how totally, totally fucked-up the situation is in this town. (I am sorry for the language. Although I may have a few sailor-like tendencies in person, I do try to restrain myself on the blog, but sometimes there are no other words.) The people of Oakland deserve better, and there is absolutely no reason we should tolerate the status quo even a day longer. Immediate action is needed from City Hall. As for what that action should be, well, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow on my thoughts there. Today is just about reveling in completely justifiable outrage.

Oakland salaries higher than Bay Area averages

So, a couple of weeks ago, I posted some Census Bureau data listing employees per capita and average monthly payroll for the largest cities in the US. The chart raised quite a few eyebrows, as Oakland had by far the highest average payroll on the list. Those interested in our comparative rate of compensation may find this document (PDF) even more revealing. It compares salaries in Oakland to the median and mean of salaries for the same positions in the 13 largest cities and counties in the Bay Area, and finds that in almost every case, Oakland’s salary is significantly higher than area standards, as much as 20% higher for many positions.

But the most interesting part of the report to me was the last page, which compared Oakland’s Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA) to the increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) between 2002 and 2007. CPI rose 13.9% in that period, while we agreed to COLA increases totaling 24%, meaning that the City salaries increased 10.1% more than CPI. Damn.

BTW, I’m very happy to now be hosting TagamiVision here on A Better Oakland, so if you missed the interview with Kerry Hamill that went up Friday evening, make sure to watch it today!

Mayor Ron Dellums to review his own budget

So Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, who apparently thinks the appropriate action to take after performing just about as poorly as a reasonable person could conceive of, and when one’s job approval is only thirty-five percent, is to strut around grandstanding, is now announcing (PDF!) “that he will be reevaluating the city of Oakland’s budget deficit.”

So…remember how all Spring, everyone was saying $50 million, $60 million for the budget deficit? Then the mid-cycle budget came out, and it was only $15 million, and it was all surprising and everyone was so relieved? Of course now we all know, as the Mayor’s press release puts it, the budget deficit “could be significantly higher than what was presented during the previous mid-cycle budget review.” So…yeah, I think it’s pretty clear to everyone that someone’s going to have to review the budget, now that we’re all aware it was wrong. And I’m sure we’re all very happy the Mayor has decided to join the party.

Let’s take a second, shall we, to step back and remember who was responsible for this budget in the first place. It’s him. The Mayor submits the budget to the Council! Remember how he turned it in two weeks late? Back then, he was all pleased with it:

This was a very difficult process, but in collaboration with city department heads, I have put forth a series of budget proposals to ensure that Oakland maintains its ability to provide the highest quality services for our residents and businesses.

You know, when I was little, I also used to resort to the passive voice when I had done something bad and didn’t want to get spanked:

Dad: V, what happened to my creepy fossil?
V: It got knocked onto the ground and broke!
Dad: How did it get knocked onto the ground, V?
V: I don’t know, but I’m going to order a review of the event.

Even at six years old, I pretty much knew it wasn’t going to work (although I think this tactic had a significantly better chance of keeping me out of trouble than my little sister’s, which was “Grandpa did it.”) That sort of crap might be mildly cute when a child is saying it, but when it’s coming from the mouth of the, as the Mayor loves to keep reminding us, “Chief Executive” of the City, the refusal to acknowledge any responsibility is just plain pathetic.

Related posts:

• 10.02.2008: What Measure Q? More broken promises from the City of Oakland
• 10.01.2008: Dellums on the budget
• 09.26.2008: Mayor’s new budget proposal now available

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