Don Perata for Oakland Mayor?

How funny, I was just talking about this last night. I’m not particularly interested in speculating on who’s going to be Mayor two years from now - I’d rather focus on what’s happening in the City right now. But I’m sure that Chip Johnson’s column today about Don Perata, barring indictment, running for Mayor of Oakland in 2010 will get some of my readers fired up, so rather than having the issue clutter up the comments section of an unrelated post, I’ll give you guys a space to duke it out. 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

Jane Brunner and Nancy Nadel say no to anti-nepotism ordinance

So earlier this summer, Oakland City Council Ignacio De La Fuente introduced an anti-nepotism ordinance (PDF). It first came to the Finance and Management Committee before recess, and it failed to pass onto Council.

A revised ordinance (PDF) came back to the Finance and Management Committee today. Read more

City Council says no to Ada Chan

Last night, the Oakland City Council rejected Mayor Ron Dellums’s nomination of Ada Chan to fill the seat left vacant by Suzie Lee on the Oakland Planning Commission by a vote of 3-4-1 (Y: Quan, Brunner, Nadel; N: De La Fuente, Kernighan, Reid, Chang; A: Brooks). Lee’s term expired on May 5th. Dellums did not bring a nomination for a replacement Commissioner to the City Council until July 1st (PDF). When it became clear that the Council was unlikely to confirm Ms. Chan that night, the Mayor withdrew the item.

Chan was back on the agenda last night, at the first post-recess Council meeting. Despite having had two and a half months for the Mayor and Ms. Chan to persuade those concerned about her suitability for the position, both declined to make any effort to do so, instead using the time to marshall strident support from union and affordable housing advocacy organizations while shutting out the business community. Read more

Council says no to Jean Quan’s Kids First Compromise

The vote was 6-2, with only Jean Quan and Nancy Nadel voting in favor.

Pat Kernighan and Ignacio De La Fuente patiently provided the large audience of extremely rude teenagers very clear explanations of why the City simply cannot afford the increase, although Pat said that she would be requesting the Council increase the Oakland Fund for Children and Youth funding to either 3% or 3.5% of the unrestricted General Fund (up from 2.5% currently). I’m not entirely sure how that’s going to fly in light of a budget deficit rumored to be around $90 million, but I guess that’s an issue to be worked out later.

Ignacio De La Fuente said that placing a compromise measure on the ballot would only lead to further ballot box budgeting, and that if they consented to this, they could expect similar set-asides for seniors, parks, and whatever else people desperately want and just doesn’t get enough funding.

Jane Brunner made me happy by including a brief comment in her remarks about how programs funded through OFCY should be scrutinized more heavily for their outcomes, so that we can give more money to the ones that work better. That’s all I’m saying!

More later.

Police parcel tax for November ballot (Updated!)

This morning, the City Council’s Rules Committee will consider placing a parcel tax for police services, requested by the Mayor, on the November ballot. I’ll be on an airplane, and therefore tragically unable to watch the discussion. Curses!

Anyway, here’s what Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums is asking for. The idea is to add an additional 35 police officers and 25 police service technicians (PSTs) every year for the next three years. By the end of that period, we will the have an additional 105 police officers, bringing the total authorized force to 908, and an additional 75 PSTs, who can perform department jobs that don’t require a sworn officer. They’re cheaper. It’s a refreshingly realistic timetable. Read more

Army Base at CED

So CED yesterday about the Army Base wasn’t terribly exciting it terms of anything unexpected happening, although the lengthy public comment period was super entertaining.

A number of speakers showed up to protest that staff’s recommendation did not involve asking the RFP respondents to incorporate space for PCC Logistics in their final plans. PCC submitted a response (PDF!) to the City’s RFQ, asking for 14 acres on the Eastern Gateway, where they’re currently located, to basically keep doing what they’re doing - container freight, customs inspection, and so on. I particularly enjoyed this part of the meeting, not just because I think they’re totally right that we need to make sure these services are incorporated into the development plan, but also because I got to hear people say “efficient ancillary maritime support services” over and over and over again, which has now replaced “environmental remediation” as my absolute favorite phrase. Efficient ancillary maritime support services. Don’t you just love the way it rolls off your tongue? Read more

Army Base, quickly

Aah, I had so wanted to write a whole bunch of posts about the Army Base last week before the item came to Community and Economic Development Committee (CED) today, but I just couldn’t find the time, and while I still hope to get to it later this week, I wanted to say something before the meeting.

Okay, so when we last visited the Army Base question, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums wanted what he referred to as a “vision-based” development strategy for the Army Base, which basically involved asking developers to come up with a plan that would incorporate like every conceivable use on the land. In one of their better moments last year, CED wisely rejected the recommended “Mixed-Use Oakland” plan, dismissing the “vision” with one of my favorite lines from Jane Brunner ever, “This isn’t a vision. It’s a list.” Henry Chang had had enough, and awesomely suggested that we just wash our hands of this neverending saga and just sell all the land to the Port, and then use the money for like, affordable housing, or whatever. Read more

Deep. Structural. Problems.

So everyone is still all caught up in the Edgerly scandal and nobody seems to want to talk about anything else. Meanwhile, I’m still sitting by myself in the corner all upset about structural flaws in Oakland’s government that make it difficult for elected officials to accomplish anything. And a perfect example of the sort of disfunction I’m complaining about just happened to fall into my lap at Tuesday’s CED committee meeting.

Okay, a little background. Oakland has this thing called the Workforce Investment Board (WIB). The WIB gets to allocate the millions and millions of dollars worth of federal job training money that flow into this city. The bulk of this money currently goes to the Oakland Private Industry Council (PIC), run by Gay Plair Cobb. PIC has previously come under fire for their high cost per trainee ($11,000/person, compared to say, $1,880/per person at the Unity Council).

So the WIB contracts are awarded in July, with some organizations getting two year or three year contracts and other getting only one. The WIB is currently working on next year’s budgets and will make decisions about what programs they fund next month. At the Community and Economic Development Committee (CED) on Tuesday, the Committee was supposed to hear and discuss an evaluation of the programs that are currently receiving said funding. But when they got to the item, there was, to the extreme consternation of the Committee members, no report.

This prompted an argument with the City Attorney’s representative about whether or not they could discuss the item without the report. The Attorney’s office said no, that without a report, the item had not been properly noticed to the public, and therefore the Councilmembers were not allowed to discuss it. Jane Brunner and Ignacio De La Fuente were insistent that they should at the very least be allowed to ask questions about why they didn’t get a report. Jane Brunner was on fire, righteously pissed about the whole situation:

I don’t care! I don’t care! You can take me to court! We are discussing this item, I don’t care! Staff had a conversation with me, they told me they weren’t ready, I said “Put something in so we know what your procedure is and what you’re gonna do”, and it’s blank!

After the discussion, the City Attorney’s office clarified their position, that the Council was indeed allowed to ask why there was no report, but that they couldn’t talk about anything beyond that.

Ignacio De La Fuente was right there with her:

That’s a discussion we should have. The reality is that seven million dollars a year comes into this program. And the reality that there’s no report, there has been no updated reports and no information provided to the public, that’s the point of discussion. Ms. Brunner’s correct, I’m sorry, Ms. Brunner’s correct. If all we’re going to do is that staff don’t write reports, and that way items don’t be discussed, I think that we have to absolutely, the system is not working. Obviously, there’s a reason that nobody wants to submit a report. Mr. Lindheim, I know that you are new to the CEDA agency, but the reality is that it is a problem where the WIB and the job training programs are not providing reports, and there’s a reason why they’re not providing reports. Because every report that was provided two years ago and three years ago showed that they had spent ten times more than any other organization provided per individual. So it is a discussion that we should have, and I think there’s a reason why Ms. Brunner is upset, and I think that I absolutely disagree with the ruling that if an item is on an agenda, and all you have to do is not submit a report and we’re not going to discuss it, excuse me, but that’s not acceptable.

When Brunner asked Community and Economic Development Agency director Dan Lindheim why there was no report, the response she got was smug, rude, and curt:

There’s no report because there’s no report written.

Then he told her he could probably get a report written for her by October. I really can’t imagine what Lindheim could have possibly done or said to make his contempt for the City Council more clear. It was just shocking. Brunner kept pressing him, saying that it was completely innappropriate that the WIB would be making decisions about funding in the next month with no evaluations of the programs they’re looking at, and Lindheim just sitting there, just totally uninterested in acknowledging there was any sort of problem, or doing a damn thing about it:

I can answer that in about three different ways, none of which are going to be satisfactory to you.

After it became clear that there wasn’t anything they could do to get some information for the board to make their decisions by July, Brunner suggested they just allocate funding month by month until they got an evaluation report, which she wanted to see at the first committee meeting after recess, in September. Dan Lindheim basically told her that she could schedule the report whenever she wanted, but that he wasn’t going to write it for then.

This is exactly what I’m talking about. This isn’t a new problem. I have complained before about the total lawlessness of the bureaucracy in City Hall. And it isn’t like that culture of disrespect for elected officials and their requests didn’t exist at the top levels of government before. But Lindheim has taken it to an entirely new level. It’s just jaw-dropping. The man just sits there in public meetings telling the Council and everyone else that he’s just not going to do what they direct him to. And there isn’t a damn thing anyone on the Council can do about it! Deep. Structural. Problems.

Thank you, Ignacio! Thank you, Jane Brunner!

So Dellums’s new parcel tax for police on the November ballot will be discussed at Rules Committee on July 10th, then at the City Council meeting on July 15th. I look forward to hearing the details. I’m highly skeptical at this point of the City asking Oakland residents for any more money at all, given the way they spend what we’re already paying, but I was much heartened by comments on the issue from City Council President Igancio De La Fuente and from District 1 Councilmember Jane Brunner at Rules Committee this morning. Read more

Ha!

So I don’t think I’m going to be getting to those school board debates after all, and I am sorry for that. I will be putting up an endorsements blog on Monday, so I’ll have a shorter overview of those races then. Right now, I’m completely spent on election stuff and exhausted and just wish Tuesday would be here already.

When you’re stressed and tired, humor becomes especially important for maintaining sanity. So I’d like to share with my readers the three things that made me laugh the most yesterday.

• On ABC7’s story about the District 1 Council race, Brunner mocked Patrick McCullough for being no Barack Obama. McCullough responded that she’s no Hillary Clinton. She certainly isn’t.
• I didn’t get to watch the budget meeting yesterday, but apparently Nancy Nadel asked at it if she could have the 12 extra unpaid days off, too.
• And the best comment I’ve heard yet on the mid-cycle budget, from a reader:
  

  It looks like the Mayor wants to de-fund the School for the Arts. And increase the non-sworn vacancy rates in OPD and OFD…I thought Republicans were supposed to be the ones who balanced the budget on the backs of children and public safety.

Patrick McCullough v. Jane Brunner: LWV District 1 Oakland City Council Candidate Forum recap

Finally, last one of these! So here we go - Jane Brunner has represented District 1 for nearly 12 years. She was elected in 1996 to fill a seat vacated by Sheila Jordan, now County Superintendent of Schools after a tough campaign against then-Planning Commissioner Peter Smith. At the time, Smith warned that Brunner was part of Ignacio De La Fuente’s anti-development political machine. My, how things change.

Although the North Oakland flats undoubtedly have their share of poverty and crime, much of District 1 is relatively wealthy and therefore well-maintained. Brunner has managed to mightily piss off both pro-development and anti-development types, and has been absent on rising crime, but she nonetheless ran for re-election unopposed in 2000 and 2004. While we have plenty of experienced and qualified candidates living in District 1 (two of them are currently running for At-large Council), nobody will step up to oppose Brunner because she’s perceived as unbeatable, since she has lots of money plus most voters live in the hills and are totally uninformed, but like her because she’s a woman and plants trees. So Patrick McCullough, a guy people in the Bushrod neighborhood know for his work cleaning up his street, and everybody else in Oakland knows as the guy who shot a teenager in his yard, stepped up. I’m not going to get into the shooting issue - you can read his story about it on his website, and I’m going to say now that I would prefer that discussion of the shooting not dominate the comments on this post. There are plenty of other forums available to do that, and I’d like to see the discussion here limited to questions stemming from the debate or either candidate’s platform.

So let’s dive in. Read more

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