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.

Edgerly on paid administrative leave

And the guy who doesn’t write reports the Council asks for if he doesn’t feel like it is now in charge! Check it out on Future Oakland. I love this town.

Thank you, readers! Also, Deborah Edgerly.

First, I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me in the East Bay Express poll! I’m thrilled to be named Readers’ Choice for best local topic blogger. In your face, Mayor of Claycord! Take that, Lauren Do! Anyway, I just wanted to say how happy and flattered I was for the recognition. (And a special thanks to Becks for pimping ABO!) You guys rock. As a thank you, I’m going to write about something that I wasn’t planning on writing about, but based on the e-mails and comments I’m getting, you guys clearly want me to.

I haven’t said anything about this Deborah Edgerly mess partly because I’ve been out of town, but also because I don’t care. Okay, that’s not true. I care deeply in the sense that I think the whole thing is just horrible. The situation makes Oakland look totally bush league, and it makes me want to cry. But I don’t really care to write about it because, well, this just isn’t my thing. Obviously corruption in City Hall is terrible, and should be investigated and uprooted. The nepotism that goes on in City hiring is a damn travesty. And if the allegations the Edgerly tipped off her nephew about the upcoming bust are true, she should go to prison. But I have no way of knowing if that’s what happened or not (that’s for the FBI, not me, to figure out), so I don’t really feel like I’m in any position to comment on it. In any case, policy is my thing. Land use, transit, boring city reports - I know what I’m talking about and have lots of opinions developed over long periods of time and significant study. Scandal? Not so much. So I feel like I’m in kind of unfamiliar territory posting about this. But you guys asked, so here you go.

I think that Dellums made a huge, huge mistake in letting her stay on until the end of July. Again, I’m certainly not in a position to know enough about the situation to say whether or not she should be fired, but regardless of whether the allegations are true, they have crippled the public’s already shaky faith in our City government, and that is reason enough for her to be removed from her post. If Dellums doesn’t want to fire her, he should at the very least put her on paid administrative leave until her retirement date and appoint an interim replacement to run things in the meantime. I know people are worked up about her still getting paid and still getting her pension and all that, and I’m not going to say that those concerns are unreasonable (although I’ll again point out that we really aren’t in any position to know whether that’s justified), but I’m willing to take what I can get, and personally, all I want right now is her out of City Hall. I don’t understand how anyone is supposed to work with her at this point. The reasoning behind Dellums’s decision to let her stay active through July completely eludes me - seriously, I spent the better part of my flight last night from Salt Lake City puzzling over it, and I just cannot see any rhyme or reason there. Willingly forfeiting the public trust is never okay.

And I have never felt so bad for the City Council as I do right now. Their constituents are completely up in arms about this situation, and with good reason. Yet they are not empowered to do a damn thing about it! The City Charter gives them no authority whatsoever here, and even worse, they’re totally beholden to her if they want to accomplish anything. Some commenters have suggested that they should be all over the media about this, but I just don’t see how that would be productive. The Mayor is apparently not interested in responding to citizen or media pressure, and the City Administrator has all the power, and things have to get done before recess, so I can’t see how anything would be accomplished by making what is likely an already strained working relationship even worse.

The other thing that bothers me about all the uproar is that I think too much focus is being placed on Edgerly as an individual. People are crying for her dismissal and screaming about her corruption, and I think that in doing so, they may be losing sight of the larger problem. Singling Edgerly out as the source of all that is wrong with Oakland makes it easy to forget about the serious structural problems with our government. Intense focus on a lone individual can lead to a situation where people start internalizing the idea that if we just got rid of this one person, things would all of a sudden be just fine. And that isn’t true. First, there’s the issue of who will replace her. We deserve a superstar from some far away place who knows nothing about Oakland, but knows all about a well-run city. Who knows what we’ll get, but something tells me it won’t be that. Second, the City Administrator just has too much power. The way resources are allocated in Oakland doesn’t give Councilmembers sufficient opportunity to make real progress. We need charter reform, and the one good thing that may come out of this whole disaster is that it will hopefully be the push the Council to start thinking seriously about that. I can’t say right now exactly what all the reforms should be - there are some things I’ve wanted to see for a long time, but talking in detail about all the changes I think we need, well, that’s going to me some time and quite a bit of research, so I’m just not ready to put anything out there quite yet.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about that.

UPDATE: Okay, so based on feedback on this post, both in comments and in person, I think I failed to communicate that I do think this situation with Edgerly is a serious problem. Rest assured, it upsets me, it frustrates me, at times, it has made me want to throw my hands in the air and give up on the City and just return to putting all the energy I spend on this blog into non-political community improvement efforts. I hate everything about it. All I was trying to say, and I guess I didn’t make it very clear in the original post, is that I love, and want to write about, policy, and I hate politics, and I don’t know if that’s a distinction that makes sense to anyone besides me, but that’s what I want this blog to be about, and that’s why I haven’t been writing about the Edgerly debacle. It just isn’t what I do. And I really am worried about people ignoring larger structural problems that this issue should highlight in favor of focusing all their ire on one person.

Deborah Edgerly update

There’s been plenty of talk about the Deborah Edgerly mess in local media this week. Finally, Edgerly herself has released a statement. Read it on Future Oakland.

Related Posts:

• 06.25.08: Thank you, readers. Also, Deborah Edgerly

Breaking: City of Oakland wastes money! Shocker!

I know I already said this, but after waking up this morning to three more stories about it, I really have to wonder about all this fuss over a report that basically says we should have firmer guidelines for off-cycle payroll. It just isn’t that sexy.

Allowing people to buy-back vacation is a fairly normal business practice, and Edgerly’s correct when she says that it’s cheaper to let employees do it sooner rather than later (the cost of vacation increases over time due to pre-negotiated annual salary raises). So yeah, fix the guidelines so they make more sense, make sure that Administrative Instructions gel better with our various MOU’s, and maintain better documentation. It’s not rocket science. But while everyone is busy getting all worked up about giving city employees a total of less than $400,000 in performance bonuses over three years, remember that the Council is about to approve an expenditure of $575,000, $375,000 of it being Measure Y money, over the concerns of the Measure Y Oversight Committee, for the world’s vaguest RFP. I mean, come on.

I wrote already about how the Oversight Committee asked the Mayor’s office to return with more details about their proposal. After their meeting, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums sent a letter to the Council asking them to ignore the Committee’s concerns: Read more