For some time, we’ve been hearing Oakland’s politicians talk about a budget crisis. And everybody should be forgiven if they’re numb to this whole discussion. But guess what? There really, really is a crisis, and it’s going to have a huge impact on all of us, particularly if we, as a city, don’t take action.

While I’m one of the leaders of Make Oakland Better Now!, I’m writing this post on my own behalf, and the opinions here are only mine. But my opinion is that every thinking person in the City of Oakland needs to focus on what the city’s current budget problems mean for all of us, and what we as a community can do about them. Without focus and united action, we will lose all hope of controlling our municipal destiny, including our ability to effect desperately needed improvements to public safety.

For the first time in my twenty-six years in Oakland, we have a Chief of Police who is energizing the city, the department, and our citizens with practical solutions to seemingly intractable crime problems. For the first time in anybody’s memory, we have police management prepared to tell us hard truths: that Oakland has to fix its gun, drug and crime problems before it can fix anything else. And now, the city tells us we are on the verge of a financial catastrophe so great as to threaten its ability to fulfill its most essential obligation: keeping citizens safe. What are we to do?

First of all, we recognize the problem. In talking to neighbors, folks in the community and political activists, as well as seeing what’s out there in the “blogoaksphere,” there are clearly lots of people in denial. Even among Make Oakland Better Now! members, there is a lot of belief that our problems could go away if we could just figure out more efficient and less wasteful ways of doing business.

I believe that the City of Oakland, like the Defense Department, General Motors, and virtually every other large organization, is very, very inefficient and wasteful. That is the nature of large organizations. Trying to eliminate all organizational waste is a noble goal and a fool’s errand. Instead, we have to deal in the world as it really exists. And in the real, Oakland world, I am convinced of the following:

• Out of the city’s $421 million general purpose fund budget, there really, really is a shortfall of nearly $19 million for the 2009 – 2010 fiscal year. There are many things to blame the mayor and city council for, but (a) the immediate shortfall probably isn’t their fault; and (b) whether it is or is not, the shortfall still has to be fixed.
• In his December 17 report to the council, City Administrator Dan Lindheim identified three primary causes of the shortfall:
  • $10.8 million sales tax shortfall (in his report, Lindheim ascribes this to the “State-imposed correction to the ‘triple flip’ portion of the sales tax;” I admit to not knowing what this means, but in a meeting with him about six weeks ago, he told me the problem was an overall reduction in retail sales, particularly in the retail motor car industry);
  • $4.5 million in budgeted, but not realized Coliseum ticket surcharge (at the same meeting, Lindheim told me this income item was always illusory, because nobody expected the teams to pay it without a lawsuit); and
  • $4.29 million in overspending, “primarily in the Police Department” (I understand from other sources that there was also significant overspending in the mayor’s office, which Lindheim conveniently doesn’t mention; while this omission doesn’t say much for city transparency, the Police Department certainly is the largest player).
• Of the $421 million general purpose fund budget, all but $93 million is essentially mandated by Oakland’s voters or the officials they elected. Here’s how it works:
  • $242 million is for Police and Fire services (that’s 57% of the general purpose fund). We enacted Measure Y, after the city negotiated a deal with the fire fighter’s union that if Measure Y passed, Fire Department staffing couldn’t be cut. So FD staffing is locked in place.
  • Measure Y also added 63 officers, but provided that the funding for all of them would be lost if the authorized OPD sworn staffing went below 802. So if the city reduces authorized sworn police staffing by one officer, they lose the Measure Y money and have to eliminate another 62 officers. Which means that the city doesn’t save a dime on police salaries until it eliminates its 64th officer.
  • $19.9 million is for Kids First!, a voter-enacted set-aside only somewhat ameliorated last summer.
  • $9.06 million is for library services required under Measure Q.
  • $14.9 million is for other local mandates previously enacted by the voters and grant match requirements (ok, that isn’t all the voters’ fault, but most of it is).
  • $42 million – ten percent of the general purpose fund budget – is for debt service. Remember that when somebody tells you a bond issue doesn’t cost anything.
• And that leaves $93.14 in pin money for the city. Except that $15.6 million of that is for “self-insurance liability” – the city’s settlements and judgments. I suspect the city could probably stand some risk management auditing to figure out ways to reduce this figure, but the fact is, cities get sued, they have to settle cases, and if they don’t, they get hit for judgments even bigger than the potential settlements. So I see no way to eliminate this category of expense.
• And $26 million is for “essential internal services.” Now I’m prepared to assume that some of this is actually a waste and slush fund, but, on the other hand, some of it is police and fire department radios, and those seem kind of important. So I’m not quite prepared to shut that whole category down, although I realize it needs some looking at.
• After we cut the City some slack on the “self-insurance liability” and “essential internal services,” there’s still a thumping $56 million left in other city programs and services that we can readily use to balance the budget, right?

Well, not actually. Here’s why: As I write this post, it’s December 23, 2009. The City Council will next meet on January 5, 2010, and I’m not even sure it will meaningfully address these problems at that meeting. Even if it does, there seems no chance any cuts will take effect before February 1, 2010. The fiscal year runs from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010. If the Council actually attempts balancing the budget out of the $56 million available to it, by February 1, $30.4 million will already have been spent. So out of all the city programs and services available to potentially close the budget gap of $19 million, there will be a grand total of $26 million available from which cuts can be made.

To put this in perspective, the entire Park and Recreation general purpose fund budget is $11 million. If the city decides to close the whole department down February 1, it probably realizes a savings of $4.6 million.

How about the Human Resources department? Its budget is $4.5 million for the fiscal year. So there’s maybe $1.9 million left if we shut the whole thing down come February 1.

Then there’s the mayor’s office. If you’re like me, you think we haven’t gotten a dime’s worth of value out of the mayor’s office in the last three years. Suppose we have him close shop too? Sorry, not much impact: Annual budget is about $2.4 million. If we save all of it after February, 2010, we save a thumping $998,000. And since we’re beating up on the politicians, let’s close down the City Council, too. No more salaries, staff, nothing. Total savings: $1,476,000.

So, let’s look at how we do at closing the budget gap just by slashing and burning our way through Parks and Rec, HR, the Mayor’s office and the City Council:

Park and Rec savings: $4.6 million
Human Resources: 1.9 million
Mayor’s Office: 1.0 million
City Council: 1.47 million

Total savings: $7.97 million

Nice start. All we need to do is find another $11 million and we’re all set until July 1, 2010 – when the gap becomes $25 million.

Is there another way? There’s got to be. With V Smoothe’s kind hospitality, I’ll put up another post in a couple of days (probably after Christmas), and look at what just might be a politically practical solution.

Councilmembers Ignacio De La Fuente, Pat Kernighan, Jean Quan, and Jane Brunner were present for Monday’s meeting, as were City Administrator Dan Lindheim and Assistant City Administrator Marianna Marysheva-Martinez. Notably absent from this particular Mayor’s town hall meeting was Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums.

We started with statements (some brief, some not so much) from each of the Councilmembers, which basically all said the same thing – the City has no money, very little of the City’s money is discretionary, there is no easy answer, everything will have to be cut, the deficit is unprecedented, they’re exploring all their options. Nobody said anything particularly noteworthy.

City Administrator Dan Lindheim then explained that the Mayor was unable to attend because he had the stomach flu and didn’t want to infect everyone at the meeting (What-ever. I mean, for all I know, the guy spent his entire day huddled over the toilet vomiting uncontrollably and really couldn’t make it, in which case, I feel terrible for him and hope he gets better soon. But it’s hard not to notice the Mayor seems to have kind of a tendency to get sick when he’s scheduled to appear in public.) Anyway. Lindheim’s comments were otherwise uneventful. We learn that after all the many, many hours he’s spent studying all the minutiae of the budget, he’s come to the fascinating conclusion that the big issue here, what makes things different now from the way they were a year ago, is – wait for it – the revenue. As in, we have less of it now than we wanted. Crazy, I know. He reminded the crowd that we’ve almost completely drained our reserve fund, noting that it is expected to end the year at roughly $5 million. Nice, huh? He said that most of the problem is the decrease in the Real Estate Transfer Tax, but also complained of reduced sales tax revenues and property tax revenues (due to “an assessor who is very aggressively assessing properties down”).

He said that in an effort to close the hole, the City has applied for every stimulus grant we possibly can (which doesn’t sound very strategic to me, but what do I know?), including a $20 million/year grant to fund police officers. (Assistant City AdministratorMarianna Marysheva-Martinez later clarified this was a $23 million/year grant). Then he said that if we don’t get this particular grant, we will be forced to cut the police department’s sworn staffing to 599 officers. That would mean no longer collecting the Measure Y parcel tax, and therefore no longer employing the 63 officers funded by Measure Y, and reducing the sworn staffing by an additional 140 officers beyond the pre-Measure Y total of 739.

Okay, I don’t have the foggiest idea why he said this, because we will obviously never do that, whether or not we get this grant. People would not stand for it – between the sizable portion of the population clamoring for more police and all the recipients of Measure Y violence prevention funding, no remotely sane Councilmember would ever even dream of consenting to such a thing. The suggestion is so preposterous and outside the realm of reality that I can’t imagine why he even mentioned it.

He also said that the City has asked the unions (other than police and fire) for a 10% give-back, but that this will save only $7 million, and they don’t think they can ask for any more than that. I submitted a question asking for elaboration/clarification of that 10%, is that in the form of salary reductions, increased retirement contributions, medical cost sharing, or what? My question was not answered, but I can only assume that at least a few other people asked similar things, because Ignacio De La Fuente said twice during the meeting that there were a number of questions about what was being requested from the union, but that he did not think it was appropriate to discuss the issue in public. I wholeheartedly disagree, but this post is going to be long already, so we’ll save my little rant about transparency for another day.

Okay, on to the Q&A. I stopped counting so I can’t be sure on the number, but there were like 8 or so people from Uhuru, who, expectedly, have little worthwhile to say, and of course, were not the least bit interested in listening to reasonable responses to their comments. The City’s proposed budget expands the prison-industrial complex, it’s a “war budget,” and so on and so on. Blah blah blah.

Someone asked about employees earning over $100,000/year, and one of the Councilmembers responded (I feel like an idiot, but I somehow forgot to write down who, and I don’t trust my memory enough to say who I think it was) that actually, 99% of the people earning over $100,000 annually are police officers and firemen who earn that much because of all their overtime. Oh. My. God. Perhaps this will seem like a petty thing to pick on to some of you, but everyone has their own little pet peeves, and here is mine: I HATE IT when people say things that are not true. Particularly, when people speaking in an official capacity representing the government say things that are not true.

I understand the point that the Councilmember was attempting to communicate – that many of those 1,418 over $100k earners are police and fire. They could have said that. They could have said “most” or “the overwhelming majority” or any number of other phrases that would have communicated their point clearly and effectively and would not have been wrong. This happened so many times that night – I heard like five different figures for the estimated deficit, six different numbers for the percentage of police and fire budgets in the General Fund, and four different numbers for the discretionary portion of the General Fund. This in spite of the fact that all that information was clearly displayed on a giant chart for everyone to see in front of the room. Unacceptable!

I am confident that none of the many wrong numbers that were tossed out over the course of the night were intentionally meant to deceive or mislead. But things are either true or they aren’t. Motivation is immaterial – when you have Councilmembers just randomly making up numbers off the top of their head to answer questions from the public, the bottom line is this: you are my elected representative and when you tell me something I cannot feel assured that it is true. This type of behavior erodes the already fragile trust in government and discourages civic engagement, and I find it so upsetting. For the record, policemen and firefighters constitute 73% of the city employees earning over $100,000/year, not 99%. OMFG.

Anyway. Someone asked about using more redevelopment agency funds to make up for the General Fund deficit, and Dan Lindheim said that we already fund some police officers with RDA funds and that he thinks we’re pushing the edge of what State law allows as it is, so we probably can’t dip into that well any more than we already are.

There was a question I couldn’t really hear, something to do with taxes, and I’m assuming how a sales tax is regressive, because Pat Kernighan responded to it that the only progressive kind of tax is an income tax, which local governments don’t have the ability to do, and that she understands that, as it is now, “we tax every move you make” and that she would like to look at ways to increase revenue aside from taxes, but did not offer any suggestions about how she intended to do that.

Someone asked about raising parking fees, which Ignacio De La Fuente said they intended to do. Jean Quan added that they’re looking at adding automated credit card payment machines to some of their parking garages, because they can’t afford the staff to keep them open later than they are currently, but would like to earn more money by extending the hours. .

In response to a question about whether bankruptcy was under consideration, Dan Lindheim said that it simply “isn’t a very effective tool for us” because bankruptcy only really helps when you’re stuck in contracts that you can’t pay for and can’t get out of, which we’re not at the moment.

Someone asked if the City had considered renegotiating the debt on the Coliseum to something with a lower interest rate, and Marianna Marysheva-Martinez said they’re examining their entire debt portfolio looking for options. Jean Quan added that the City refinanced a lot of their debt two years ago when they had a $39 million deficit, which saved roughly $20 million/year, and there’s not much left to do.

Someone suggested the City sue the banks, which Dan Lindheim pointed out we’re already doing. Someone asked why the staff furloughs weren’t rotated throughout the workforce instead of having the entire City shutdown, and Dan Lindheim responded that basically our agreement with the union won’t allow us to do them “rationally,” so the furloughs have to be imposed as layoffs and you can’t pick and choose who gets to work. In response to yet another rambling Uhuru comment (“You talk about the police union. Well, there’s no peoples’ union!”), Jane Brunner totally randomly told the room that she read a book about restorative justice over Spring Break and now thinks it’s like, the greatest thing ever.

There were a couple of questions about getting more revenue from the Port or taxing the Port in some fashion. Ignacio De La Fuente said that everyone on the Council wants to get money from the Port, but there are legal barriers in the way. Dan Lindheim pointed out that the Port is actually in deep financial difficulty and isn’t exactly swimming in excess revenue that we could take even if we wanted to, and noted that the City Charter gives us very little authority to take money from the Port. Marianna Marysheva-Martinez pointed out that the Port pays us about $7 millions/year for police and fire services.

Then, Jane Brunner, out of nowhere and for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, announced that she disagreed with Lindheim and De La Fuente about our authority over the Port, and doesn’t think the Charter is written in such a way at all. Which…okay, it’s fine to disagree. But then,, she goes on to say that she hasn’t actually read the City Charter in “several years,” but her memory is that it simply says the Port is a department of the City. OMG. Why, why, why in God’s name would you say something like that? I mean, okay, you’re the Council President, you haven’t read the Charter in years, wev, I’m sure you have lots of demands on your time and the whole thing could take as much as an hour to get through, depending on how fast you read. Fine. But if you couldn’t be bothered to read the Charter, why would you then feel qualified to announce that you disagree with people who presumably have about what it says? And why would it ever occur to you to announce at a public meeting that you haven’t read it? You don’t want to read the Charter? Fine. Don’t tell anyone. Or, you know, tell everyone and then be wrong about what it says. Either way, I guess. FYI, the Charter does say that the Port is a department of the City, but then goes on to explain how it is controlled exclusively by the Board of Port Commissioners and the City doesn’t have any power over it except to appoint those Commissioners. So I guess we could just wait until the whole Board turns over and only appoint people who want the Port to pay taxes to the City, but it kind of seems like it would be easier to change the Charter. Anyway, ugh.

And I guess that was pretty much it. During the entire meeting, there was a grand total of one thoughtful and informed spoken comment from a member of the public. Let’s try to do a little better next week, folks. Next Monday! 6:30 PM! Lakeside Garden Center, 666 Bellevue! Be there! Tell them what you think they should be doing to balance the budget. Cause right now, all they’re hearing is crazy people telling them to get rid of the police. It isn’t helpful.

• 05.05.2009: Budget bomb hasn’t gone off yet.
• 04.30.2009: Understanding employee compensation
• 04.29.2009: A look at General Fund expenditures
• 04.21.2009: Where does our money go?
• 12:24.2008: Surprise! Budget outlook = grim

City Administrator Dan Lindheim is quoted in the column saying that he’s just trying to protect employee privacy, suggesting that the request for supervisors to disclose their relatives and cohabitants who also work for the City was too invasive, and that he doesn’t trust Ruby’s office to keep confidential information confidential. In remarks at an event on Friday, Lindheim called the column a “hit piece” and assured the audience that there was “not a fact in there, period.” He went on to say that “As to the nepotism and cronyism ordinance that it was referring to, that it is being absolutely implemented. So, in case anybody has any questions about that, just be assured that this bureaucrat is in fact doing what the Council has determined ought to be done.”

So…there were actually many independently verifiable facts in the column that are a matter of public record, and the column was about the hiring practices audit, not the cronyism ordinance at all. But aside from that, it’s not inconceivable that Johnson got some of the details wrong – it wouldn’t be the first time. However, also on Friday, City Auditor Courtney Ruby sent out a message to her mailing list saying that Johnson’s column was accurate, and that “the Administration is trying to withhold key documents essential to my audit of the City’s hiring practices.” Ruby asked that residents contact the Mayor’s office and demand that the Administration provide the necessary documentation to complete her audit.

I’m definitely not Courtney Ruby’s biggest fan, but I also have no reason not to believe her when she says that the City won’t provide her with the documents she needs. I certainly trust her more than I trust Dan Lindheim.

So Johnson wrote about the issue again today, this time talking mostly about Ruby’s e-mail and responses to it from various City officials. In today’s column, Lindheim once again questions the appropriateness of the information employees are being asked to disclose:

On Monday, Lindheim re-iterated his concerns about employee privacy and used employees in a secret same-sex relationship as an example.

“This ordinance is not just about nepotism – it asks about who you’re sleeping with, and that, in and of itself, is delicate and can play out in the workplace, but more an issue for non-heterosexual couples. If the information gets out, then they get outed,” Lindheim said.

So…this is outrageous. Dan Lindheim is the appointed City Administrator. It is his job to do what the Council tells him to do. It is not his job to decide whether he approves of the Council’s instructions. The objections to employee disclosure over privacy concerns were aired and discussed at great length, both by the Finance & Management Committee and the City Council as a whole. The Council heard the objections, listened to legal counsel, and then made a decision. It is now the City Administrator’s job to ensure that their direction is followed. That’s how government works.

How is it possible to have an orderly, efficient, or accountable government when bureaucrats decide they have the liberty to ignore Council direction if they don’t like it? Councilmembers are accountable for their decisions – if they make bad ones, they can be voted out of office. City staff is accountable to no one.

This is not the first time Lindheim has behaved as though he is above listening to the Council. Last March, when the Council was poised to vote on a motion regarding zoning near the Central Waterfront, Lindheim (then acting CEDA Director), approached the mic and told the Council that they were not empowered to do so. Ignacio De La Fuente responded that of course they were, and that he was obligated to do as directed in their motion. Lindheim then complained that he didn’t like the motion and got all huffy when they passed it anyway.

Then, of course, there was the time this summer, when (still as acting CEDA Director), Lindheim simply didn’t submit a report requested by the Council about what’s happening with the millions of dollars a year the City allocates under the Workforce Investment Act. After refusing to provide the Committee with an explanation for his failure to produce a report, the Committee tried to reschedule the item for a few months in the future, and Lindheim told them that they could schedule it for whenever they wanted, but he wouldn’t have the report for them then either.

At the aforementioned event last Friday, Lindheim also spoke about the ongoing zoning update process:

We’re in the process now of redoing the downtown area to make it consistent with the General Plan, which means that there’s this fight back and forth between what does the General Plan really mean? Because the problem is most General Plans or most planning exercises don’t mean much until you have a twenty foot building sitting in your backyard, and then you realize that maybe you didn’t want that.

This is now the third time I have listened to Lindheim suggest that our new zoning should not necessarily follow the dictates of the General Plan, because he doesn’t think people like the General Plan. Nevermind that the General Plan is the official document governing land use in Oakland, or that it was adopted by the City Council a decade ago after being craft with years of public input and debate.

This attitude is completely unacceptable. We cannot have unelected bureaucrats behaving like policymakers. Having the public’s business conduct in public is the cornerstone of transparent, accountable government. When the City Council makes a decision, staff has to follow it, whether they agree with the instructions or not. When the City Administrator himself, the most powerful official in Oakland, decides that it is within his discretion to ignore instruction, then what hope is there for transparency and accountability at any level within City government? The behavior is outrageous.

By the way…after reading a comment on The HarriOak News from someone who had tried to call the Mayor’s office about the issue only to be told that the Mayor’s office does not accept comments by telephone, I called myself. After all, I thought, such a thing couldn’t possibly be true? You can’t call the Mayor’s office to say what you think? It’s inconceivable! Sure enough, when I called, I got exactly the same response.

Dear Neighbor:

Last night, the board of the Oakland Builders Alliance took an emergency vote and unanimously decided to send an open letter to Oakland residents condemning the appointment of Dan Lindheim as the new permanent City Administrator of Oakland. It also voted to file a formal complaint against the mayor for Cronyism, which will be submitted Monday per the Enforcement Section of the Anti-Cronyism Ordinance.

Dan Lindheim’s appointment as City Administrator stands in stark contrast to the appointment of two highly qualified individuals, Marianna Marysheva-Martinez and Walter Cohen, both of whom come with substantial experience and proven leadership in their field. Unfortunately, they’ll be managed by someone with almost no experience. And Oakland deserves better.

Lindheim may be a “smart guy” – certainly he’s someone that Mr. Dellums has learned to rely on over the last 30 years. But this is not the time for a band-aid, learn-on-the-job solution. Oakland is hemorrhaging and we need someone with skills and experience who can stop the bleeding and inject new life into the city.

Mayor wastes $150,000 in taxpayer funds on “nation-wide” search, and then appoints friend.

Mayor Dellums stated that he spent $150,000 in tax payer funds to conduct a nationwide search for a City Administrator, only to appoint his long time friend and ally, Lindheim. Meanwhile, no one knows who else was interviewed. No list of applicants was produced. No disclosure was made of how the funds were used. When asked by city hall gat-fly Sanjiv Handa at yesterday’s press conference why he did not make the names of the finalists public, the Mayor stated that he did not have to. Why is our city council silent on this issue? Was the search just a sham? Did the mayor know all along that Lindheim would be his appointment? If so, why did we spend tax money to retain the Hawkins Company, a head-hunting fim?

Appointment flaunts Anti-Cronyism ordinance passed just weeks ago.

On December 8th, 2008, the Oakland City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting Cronyism in hiring practices. The language reads: “‘Cronyism’ means participating in any employment decision that may be viewed as a conflict of interest, such as one involving a close friend, a business partner, and/or professional, political, or commercial relationship, that would lead to preferential treatment or compromise appearance of fairness.” About the Ordinance, Councilmember Nadel, the author, stated “I see (cronyism) as being more of a problem than nepotism.” (Oakland Tribune, December 4th, 2008.)/

The Oakland Charter reads: “(The City Administrator) shall be a person of demonstrated administrative ability with experience in a responsible, important executive capacity and shall be chosen by the Mayor solely on the basis of his executive and administrative qualifications.“

The mayor’s own job announcement detailed the following mandatory qualification for the City Administrator position: “Twelve (12) to fifteen (15) years of senior level executive management experience preferably in a large sophisticated diverse urban governmental organization.“

While Mayor Dellums is mandating that all applicants meet this requirement he is allowing his political friend and ally to qualify with almost no experience, simply because he is “smart”. The is the very definition of cronyism. (Merriam-Webster defines Crony as “a close friend especially of long standing“, and Cronyism as “partiality to cronie especially as evidenced in the appointment of political hangers-on to office without regard to their qualifications“.)

The choice of Dan Lindheim as City Administrator flies in the face of the recent ordinance and the city charter. The question now is: will the Oakland City Council ignore its own Anti-Cronyism ordinance, and render it purely a grandstanding move, or will it stand behind its own commitment to outlaw cronyism from employment decisions?

Our Leadership’s acceptable of mediocrity a reflection of low self-esteem.

Oakland is battle-scarred. We’ve been through tough times. And as a result, our leadership no longer is demanding excellence, or even mediocrity for the most important position in the city. Instead, they are using standards such as “he works well with us” or “he’s smart” as the baromete of good management. The Oakland Builders Alliance believes that for Oakland to become a great city, we must demand great management. And residents should settle for nothing less. Marysheva-Martinez and Cohen are excellent choices for their respective positions, but they will be managed by someone who does not have the experience to steer Oakland out of the current crime and budget crisis, and position it for greatness when the economic recovery comes.

Oakland residents must demand excellent management and accept nothing less from our leaders. The voters are the ones who set the bar of expectations, unless we abdicate this to those we elect.

The Oakland Builders Alliance will continue to demand excellent management. We invite you to join us by writing or calling your councilmember and demanding excellent, proven leadership, especially at the top. Urge them to deny the appointment of Dan Lindheim as permanent City Administrator and to instruct the mayor to use the $150,000 in tax payer funds allocated for the search to look for proven leadership. Oakland deserves nothing less.

Lindheim, with his experience as an economist at the World Bank and as a longtime aide to Dellums while he was in Congress, is certainly more than qualified to serve in some sort of policy capacity, as an advisor to the Mayor, for example. But City Administrator is a whole different question. Let’s not forget that until just over a year ago, when Dellums named him interim CEDA director, Lindheim had no experience whatsoever in municipal administration.

Councilmembers Jane Brunner and Larry Reid praised Lindheim’s appointment yesterday, citing his intelligence and proficiency with budget issues. Even ignoring the problems that intelligence is not a substitute for experience and the budget he was so helpful with had to be developed with the assistance of outside consultants and relied heavily on direct service cuts (many of which were later fixed by the Council), Brunner and Reid are off base here. The Mayor is reorganizing the City Administrator’s office largely according to the recommendations in the PFM Group report (PDF), which means the Assistant City Administrator will be chiefly responsible for budget and finances. The City Administrator will not have direct responsibility for the budget, but instead be left to oversee direct services such as police fire, parks and rec, public works and so on.

The City Administrator is the single most powerful person in Oakland. With the police department currently in total chaos, why on earth would we hand responsibility for it over to someone who has no experience in such matters? Direct services to Oakland’s citizens and the primary responsibilities of City government – safety, blight clean-up, nuisance abatement – have been steadily eroding for the past two years. Particularly in light of the City’s forthcoming budget shortfalls, it is imperative that the person responsible for making the City run smoothly has experience in, well, making cities run smoothly. Or at all. Perhaps in boom times, when money flows freely to the City’s coffers, we might be able to afford a learning curve. But right now, we need someone who knows how to make do with less and who knows how to manage a large organization.

Lindheim lacks these skills and experience. While serving as interim CEDA Director, he frequently complained that the responsibilities of the office were beyond his capacity. When questioned about why this wasn’t happening or that wasn’t working, he would respond by talking about how hard it is to oversee 500 employees and that he doesn’t “have time” to fulfill all the demands of his job. While in this position, he ignored the direction of the Council, rendering them incapable of exercising their oversight abilities.

When Dellums fired Deborah Edgerly last summer, he said he was going to conduct a “nationwide search” for her replacement. But there appears to be no evidence that any such search was ever conducted. The only names ever floated for the position were formed City Manager Robert Bobb, who was currently consulting for the City and the Mayor’s longtime friend Dan Lindheim. It strains credulity to think that after spending an entire year hunting for candidates from all over the country, the most qualified person the Mayor was able to find to run the City had never worked in any similar capacity ever before. It appears that Dellums did not even make a good-faith effort to find the best person for the job.

The saddest thing about all this is that the City Council looks poised to confirm the appointment. The inclination is understandable. Nobody wants to further strain relations with the tremendously unpopular Mayor by rejecting his decision and his friend. Nobody wants to insult Lindheim, who is, after all, by all accounts, a nice guy, by telling him he’s unqualified for the job. And this is exactly what Danny Wan was talking about when he said that the desire to be civil and polite are holding Oakland back. Carlos Plazola is right – Oakland deserves better management.

The question now is, does the Council agree? We’ll find out next week, when the Council votes on Lindheim’s confirmation, what the priorities of our elected officials are. Do they care about providing Oakland’s citizens with the best possible leadership or are they willing to settle for mediocrity because they’d rather be polite?

The concern here is not whether Lindheim is nice or smart (I’m sure he’s both), but whether he has the administrative experience to run a City of over 400,000 people. Even the Charter says so:

Section 500. Appointment. The Mayor shall appoint a City Administrator, subject to the confirmation by the City Council, who shall be the chief administrative officer of the City. He shall be a person of demonstrated administrative ability with experience in a responsible, important executive capacity and shall be chosen by the Mayor solely on the basis of his executive and administrative qualifications.

Both Becks and dto510 are asking you today to please contact your representatives and let them know that you expect qualified and experienced management in Oakland. I’ll add my voice to the chorus. Oakland deserves better.

Mr. Lindheim served as Mr. Dellums’ legislative aide in Congress for over 20 years, as a policy person at the World Bank, and has also run a small business. But he does not have anywhere close to “12 to 15 years of senior level executive management experience preferably in a large sophisticated diverse urban governmental organization” (a primary qualification excerpted from the Mayor’s own job description (PDF) for the City Administrator position).

While serving as a council aide for almost seven years, I observed that the most important job a mayor can do is hire great administrators and department heads. One of the reasons that Jerry Brown was so successful at achieving his goals of attracting downtown housing, building two pioneering charter schools (School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute), reducing crime, and growing Oakland’s budget was because he was surrounded by national leaders in municipal management; people like Robert Bobb, known as a top leader in his field of government administration and management; Claudia Cappio, a top administrator in economic development; and Raul Godinez, Oakland’s current Public Works Director who is winning awards for his innovative management efforts.
In turn, Robert Bobb surrounded himself with highly competent staff assistants, with advanced degrees in public administration, who were highly motivated and ambitious; people like Edward Reiskin (then his deputy administrator) who is now Director of Public Works in San Francisco, and Rosie Rios (then Director of Economic Development) who now works for the MacFarlane Partners, an investment group that manages over 11 billion dollars in assets.

People often forget that Oakland had relatively low crime rates in 2003, 2004, 2005, even though our police department was severely understaffed at the time. In 2004, for example Oakland had 82 homicides and less than 730 officers. This success was based on the fact that we had excellent management that demanded results from Oakland’s workforce.
Much of this success began to deteriorate after Robert Bobb left, and then Mrs. Rios, and then Mr. Reiskin, and finally Mrs. Cappio. As a result, the management of our city is in shambles, and no restructuring plan will save us. The only thing that will save us is decisive leadership, which Mayor Dellums is incapable of; and effective management, which Mr. Lindheim has no experience in.

Oakland has an opportunity to neutralize the ineffective leadership of the Mayor by filling the key positions of the city–City Administrator, Director of CEDA, Fire Chief, Police Chief–with proven leaders in their respective fields.

The appointment of Dan Lindheim as Interim City Administrator and interim Director of CEDA was a slap-in-the-face to Oaklanders in that it exemplifies the worst kind of crony-based governing, where it is more important to reward your friends, then it is to deliver excellent services to residents. Making Mr. Lindheim the permanent City Administrator, particularly at a time when Oakland is in crisis, would be unconscionable.
Oakland residents must demand excellent management of its city, or else we get what we deserve.

Carlos Plazola, former aide to Council President De La Fuente, now runs a small company in Oakland, and resides in the Fruitvale.

• Okay, first this Pay-Go nonsense. Desley Brooks turned out like an hour’s worth of really good speakers who listed the many tangible benefits District 6 has received from the type of spending Ignacio was trying to ban, including fields, skate parks, restored pocket parks, and play structures. Desley gave a long, probably a little too long, defense of her pay-go spending, and then started mocking everyone else’s spending, including Henry Chang’s $115,000 for signs at the zoo and “Five hundred thousand dollars for a panda cage for pandas we don’t have.” (Chang later defended the signs, but not the pandas.)

  Most of the Councilmembers waited for their turn in the queue to justify the expenses Brooks highlighted, but a visibly irritated Pat Kernighan just couldn’t hold it in, interrupting Brooks’s comment about some boat restoration in District 2 with “It was a play structure!” and moments later, interrupting her again to say “You know, I might support you if you don’t attack everybody up here!” Kernighan later called Brooks “one of the most difficult people I’ve ever worked with in my entire life.”

  The Council then proceeded to waste about forty-five minutes discussing the proposal, even though it was beyond obvious right off the bat that there were not five votes available for it. (This was one of three items during the meeting that made me question the ability of anyone on the Council to count.) Everyone kept saying that they’d be willing to support some kind of compromise and offering their own suggestions to make the entire situation more complicated. Ignacio De La Fuente, I suppose realizing what a complete asshole he looked like at this point, mostly kept his mouth shut and didn’t put up much of a fight for it. Eventually, he and everyone else seemed willing to just let it die, but Jane Brunner insisted on moving the item anyway, then when they went to call the roll, said they didn’t have the votes and forget about it. Of course, at that point, it was too late and they had to vote anyway. It failed.

  More than anything else, the discussion just reminded me what a complete disaster my own Councilmember is. Listening to the laundry list of park improvements and community events that Brooks provides for her constituents out of her pay-go money, and thinking about how badly District 3 could use some of those things left me seething. Four more years, ugh!

• Nancy Nadel tried to make it illegal to hire anyone you’ve ever met, or spoken to, or maybe just bumped into in the grocery store line. Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad. But Nadel did propose an amendment to the anti-nepotism ordinance that would prohibit “cronyism” (PDF) in City hiring, and just like everything else that woman puts forward, it was poorly planned and poorly written. For the purpose of combatting cronyism, Nadel proposed an amendment that would forbid anyone from participating in any employment decision involving “a close friend, a business partner, and/or professional, political, or commercial relationship.” You’d think that the woman who got so worked up over how is invasive it was to ask people to report to the City when they’re screwing their immediate subordinates would be disinclined to add language to make forbidden relationships even more sweeping, but I guess not. The question came up among the Councilmembers several times during the discussion – what the hell is a “political” relationship? Who decides who’s a “close friend”? No answers were ever provided.

  Apparently the City Attorney’s office helped craft the language Nadel proposed, but when asked what “close personal relationship” meant, the attorney present fumbled around for a while before coming up with the loose definition of “something significant.” Not comforting. There was some talk of sending it back to Finance & Management to hammer out the details, but then Desley Brooks offered a minor language change that she thought solved some of the problems (although it did not make things any less vague), and the Council voted on the proposal with that amendment. I don’t have a freaking clue whether this passed or not. I think it did, but honestly, neither I or my viewing partner were able to tell for certain because for reasons I don’t understand, the Council has taken to just saying all together “aye” or “nay” instead of calling roll and then afterwards nobody says the final vote tally. WTF?

• Oakland Post photographer Gene Hazzard threw a fit during Open Forum over a parking ticket he received on Veteran’s Day, wanting to know why every single employee in the City had the day off besides parking enforcement. (Really? I hope they at least made the firefighters work too!) Acting City Administrator Dan Lindheim, apparently unaware when Veteran’s Day is, eventually told him to bring the ticket to his office and he’d “take a look at it.”

• Nancy Nadel! Ugh! Okay, so one of the items was Redevelopment Agency loan (PDF) to this company Revolution Foods who are using it to move to Oakland from Alameda. They provide healthy lunches to schools, including some public schools, but none in Oakland. Here, they serve 17 of our charter schools .

  You’d think Nadel would be thrilled about creating some low-skilled jobs in Oakland and finding a use for some of that industrial land she loves so much, right? You’d be wrong. Here’s what she had to say about it all:

  I’m very concerned about our allowing – actually, helping a company make our charter schools more competitive, more attractive to our residents than our regular schools…They get these kinds of assistance from us indirectly that makes them more attractive to the public than our regular public schools and that constantly has a bad effect on the kids who don’t have options outside of our public schools.

  Apparently, children who dare to forsake the broken public school system for something that provides a better education don’t deserve to eat.

• The Police Department finally presented their Crime Fighting Strategic Plan (PDF) to the Council. I haven’t found time to really write about this document yet, but let’s just say that it says, um, amazingly little about reducing crime.

  Jane Brunner said a bunch of good things about how they need to start thinking about crime reduction, then told them to stop crying poor and just find the damn money for CompStat somewhere in their budget, because they have all the money in the City already. Jean Quan babbled endlessly trying to defend the indefensible cancellation of the December Academy, tossing out about six different excuses in the process, none of which were consistent with the others. Nancy Nadel told OPD to reformat their charts.

  Pat Kernighan suggested that the Department write themselves up an “action plan” with a firm goal date for implementing CompStat, noting that they shouldn’t be too worried that they’re unlikely to meet whatever goal they might create, because at least they’ll have tried. Dan Lindheim spent what felt like an hour trying to explain how the Academy cancellation and other financial issues with OPD weren’t his or anyone from the department’s fault. It just happened because they basically had no idea what they were doing, didn’t think anything through, and had planned poorly, basing their budget projections on “a little bit of hope.” (Yes, he said that!) Anyway, no use complaining about the Academy being canceled he said, they had to do it because they had already spent all their money. Desley Brooks noted that the Council had actually funded the December Academy in the budget they just passed, and that it was disingenuous for OPD to run around blaming the cancellation on the failure of Measure NN, when the real problem is their total ineptitude.

Back then, the Committee couldn’t discuss the issue as scheduled because staff failed to submit a report on the issue. When asked why there was no report, then-acting Community and Economic Development Agency Director Dan Lindheim helpfully informed the Committee that “There’s no report because there’s no report written.” When pressed further about why no report had been written, Lindheim added “I can answer that in about three different ways, none of which are going to be satisfactory to you.” The Committee then rescheduled the item for their first post-recess meeting, to which Lindheim responded that they could schedule the item for whenever they wanted, but he wasn’t going to write a report by that date.

So the first post-recess CED Committee happened on Tuesday, and I bet you’ve been on the edge of your seat wondering whether they ended up discussing the issue or not. They didn’t.

The whole thing was bizarre. So, there was, at least, a report (PDF) this time. I, personally, found the report really odd and difficult to understand. I thought that maybe the problem was with me, though. Maybe the West Nile Virus I seem to have picked up on vacation was hurting my reading comprehension capacity or something. So then I sent it to two of the smartest people I know and asked them what they thought, and both agreed that the report was weird. One agreeing with my own assessment, suggested “it’s written to be deliberately confusing and unreadable.” The other said he doubted it was bad on purpose, just very hastily and poorly prepared.

Anyway, so since I didn’t really understand the report, I was really looking forward to hearing the discussion about it at CED, hoping things would get cleared up there. But nope. When the item came up, Dellums’s Deputy Chief of Staff Leslie Littleton stood up at the podium, which struck me as really odd, since I thought the information was supposed to come from CEDA (The Workforce Development Department is a division of the Community and Economic Development Agency). So then Jane Brunner is all “Did you write this report?” And she’s all “No.” Then Lindheim explains that the report was prepared by someone else who was contracted by the Mayor’s office, but that that person couldn’t, for reasons I didn’t understand, speak to the City Council. All this was news to Brunner, who said that she had spoken with the Mayor’s Intergovernmental Affairs staff about the issue the previous day, and they had apparently forgotten to mention that the author of the report wouldn’t be presenting it to them.

There was some more confusing talk, and the Committee ended up having to reschedule the item again, for their next meeting, on October 14th. Anyway, I explain all this just to point out that we’re talking about an awful lot of money that’s getting spent with no oversight or accountability. Even when the Council tries to exercise oversight, they’re thwarted in their attempts by the bureaucracy and the Mayor. Nice.

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.