2007 City Crime Rankings Released

And Oakland moves down a slot, to number five on the list!

Doubtlessly, this news will result in the same litany of excuses from the Mayor and Police Chief that we heard last year about how the rankings (PDF) aren’t accurate and besides, most of the good citizens of Oakland can rest easy at night, safe and sound, because crime isn’t a problem in their neighborhood. Remember this gem from last year: 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

Spotted: Near Riot at the West Oakland Multi-Purpose Center

V Smoothe, here. Your one and only source on the scandalous circus that constitutes Oakland politics.

Okay, it wasn’t quite so bad as the headline suggests. But OMFG, last night was like, the mother of all meetings. Well, at the very least, it was hands down the best one I’ve been to in the past year. 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.

Public Service Announcement

I have some excellent advice for all my readers. Back up your hard drive. Now. No really, right now. Do it! Because if you don’t, you could lose everything at any moment. You could be, for example, happily putting the finishing touches on a project you’ve spent a month creating, when poof! Computer dead! You already know this, of course. Sometimes you say to yourself, “Gee, I really should back up all my music and photos and work and papers and like 40 blog drafts that all took hours to research. Because it would really suck if they all went away forever. Eh. I’ll do it later.” Don’t do it later. Do it now. Seriously. If you don’t have an external hard drive or some other back-up method, go out and buy one. Immediately.

Now that I’m done playing Ann Landers, I’d like to thank Kent Lewandowski, Chris Kidd, and Vivek B. for very kindly filling in while I was taking my little break. If you somehow missed their excellent posts about the clean trucks Port rally, the Estuary Specific Plan, and crime trends since 2005, you should go read them immediately. Well, immediately after you back up your hard drive, which, seriously, you should do right now.

Anyway, I’m feeling a little out of practice here after my little vacation. I’m going to need to ease back into this blogging thing. So I’m just going to start out today with some pointless whining about something that frustrated me.

So Tuesday was National Night Out, right? Which I think is really nice and everything, for people to say that once a year, they feel comfortable standing outside on their street for an hour in the early evening, or whatever. There was no party in my neighborhood as far as I could tell, so I went with a friend to an event elsewhere downtown. I had some soda and chips and got a City of Oakland refrigerator magnet and a cool coloring book and talked to some nice people. I hear that Lincoln Park had an awesome party with like 10,000 people and music and dancing and like an Olympic ping pong player or something. That was more exciting than the event I went to, which was kind of winding down by the time I got there, a little after 8. Anyway, National Night Out overall seems like a nice holiday or whatever, although I do have to wonder, what with all the promotion I’ve been seeing for months, just how much money the City has spent on this year’s National Night Out, and whether it’s, you know, the best possible use of tight funds.

I also find it super lame that despite the endless promotion, the City couldn’t like, put together a list of all the registered National Night Out parties so that you could find one near where you live. A friend of mine wanted to attend an event in his West Oakland neighborhood, but didn’t know where there was one. I suggested (in retrospect, I have no idea why, I should have known better), checking Nancy Nadel’s website to see if she had a list of parties. Of course she didn’t! She just had a link to the City’s National Night Out page, which does not list parties that are happening. It just tells you how to register your own party. Compare this to Jean Quan’s National Night Out page, which lists every party in all of District 4. By beat! Then I suggested (again, foolishly) trying the Mayor’s website, but that was also a bust, featuring no information at all about National Night Out except for a press release (PDF), dated August 1st, begging people to register parties before the deadline of 5 PM July 28th. Unable to determine where there was a party, my friend ended up staying home. If the City wants people to celebrate National Night Out so bad, maybe next year they’ll think about telling people where to go to do it.

Nancy Nadel fiddling with JLS mixed use parking permits

Nancy Nadel has requested some changes (PDF!) to the Jack London Square mixed use parking permit program which will come before the Finance & Management Commitee next week. Residents of the area who spent years trying to get the permits are, to put it mildly, not thrilled. More at Jack London News: Read more

The debate on government

So last night, I checked the early returns on my way out the door to Sean Sullivan’s party, and my heart sank. Even then, I really thought we’d make it to a run-off (which is still a possibility), but it was crushing nonetheless. Now, I usually cry at the drop of a hat, so I was incredibly proud of myself for holding it together and not bursting into tears during the party, or the after-party, or even the after-after-party. But when my last guest finally left early this morning and I closed my apartment door behind him, I just fell apart. It’s tough to take.

I really thought it would be different this time, but it wasn’t, and like I do after what seems like almost every single election day, I found myself thinking about my man Herodotus, specifically a section in Book 3 usually referred to as the debate on government. It’s this awesome story about a group of Persians, all excited over their successful coup against the ruling Magi, sitting around and having, like, the Greekest discussion ever about what kind of government they should adopt next. 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.

Nancy Nadel needs to go. Now.

I met Nancy Nadel for the first time about a week after I moved to Oakland, to a beautiful and perfect downtown apartment, when I went to a meeting I had seen a notice for in the newspaper about retail revitalization in downtown Oakland. The meeting was really weird. It turned out to not be about retail revitalization at all, but a panel discussion about the Uptown development, with some representatives of Forest City, Nancy Nadel, Danny Wan, and a reporter from the Oakland Tribune (I kind of think it was Robert Gammon, but I’m not 100% on that). Jerry Brown came in about halfway through, clearly stopping by from running around the Lake, drenched in sweat, and stood in the back of the room, watching. The moderator kept asking him to weigh in, and he kept declining, saying he was just there to listen. At the end of the meeting, the moderator again asked Brown for a statement, and he went on this really weird thing about how he just returned from a trip to Florence, and he thought it was really pretty with their cute orange roofs, and he’d really support anything we could do to make Oakland look like Florence. Later he approached me and said he liked my bracelet. So bizarre.

Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to ask my question, so afterwards, I went up to my Councilmember, Nancy Nadel, to ask her. I introduced myself and said I’d just moved to Oakland, and wanted to ask about retail attraction in other parts of downtown. She asked me where I lived, and when I told her, she said that I wasn’t in her District, and should go talk to Danny. I said that was pretty sure I was, because I had looked it up on the City’s website, and could I ask her anyway since I was already talking to her. She said no, she was sure I wasn’t in District 3, that if I had questions, I really should talk to Danny, then turned and walked away. Things only went downhill from there.

Just in case anyone reading this hadn’t already picked up on this, I’m voting for Sean Sullivan on Tuesday. And tomorrow, I’ll tell you why you should, too. Today I want to talk about Nancy Nadel, and more specifically, why it’s time for her to go. So here you go: Read more

Banking on Nancy Nadel for a Better Oakland

Thanks to one of my wonderful readers, a great mystery has been solved! Turns out the reason the East Bay Young Democrats wouldn’t provide any justification for their endorsement of Nancy Nadel isn’t because, as I had theorized, they didn’t have one. They do, it’s just too embarrassing to publicize. She brings them chocolate! Seriously! The description of tonight’s “event” on Facebook:

Nancy consistently proves she is a good friend to the club: whether she makes us homemade chocolate; gets the City of Oakland to honor one of our own with a city proclamation; or protects the public’s health by advocating for access to health services and for a cleaner port! Let’s do what we can to turn out the vote for Nancy Nadel, Oakland City Council District 3. Join us for the 30 minutes or the full 3-hours before you head out for the evening! All are welcome.

And hilariously, the title of this post actually is what they’re calling their event.

Irresponsible endorsements

So we’ve got what, 11 days before the election? I’m so nervous! Anyway, next week’s blogs are going to be all elections, all the time, and since I’m finally done with some big projects I’ve been working on, I’ll actually have the time to write them! Part of next week’s election coverage is going to be endorsements. I take this seriously, and have spent a great deal of time researching the candidates, especially in races that I’m not terribly familiar with, because I want to be able to stand behind what I say and feel like I’ve made a recommendation based on as much information as possible.

Apparently, not everyone takes the responsibility so seriously. dto510 wrote last week about the misplaced ideology behind the Central Labor Council/Sierra Club/Central Committee/Green Party/Bay Guardian slate, a post which generated a number of comments from endorsers of the “progressive” candidates. The commenters were unable to provide any justification of the logic behind their endorsements, or answer questions about Nadel’s troubling record, instead falling back on vague statements like “V Smoothe, I know it must be eminently gratifying to pretend that people who reject your analysis only do so because of ignorance, but you know some of us pay attention and still think you’re wrong.”

What a horrible thing to say! It isn’t gratifying in the least to see people making bad choices about their government because they’re uninformed! In fact, it’s incredibly depressing! It keeps me awake at night. Anyway, while some of these groups, such as the East Bay Young Democrats, continue to fail to offer any argument supporting their endorsements (making it impossible to then rebut said argument), other endorsers of this slate have done so, and, as expected, their choices are, well, completely uninformed.

Take, for example, the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s endorsement of Nancy Nadel: Read more

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