At the Make Oakland Better Now! budget meeting on January 11, we passed out a ballot asking members in attendance to give us their views on where the city should make the cuts that are going to be necessary to balance this year’s and next year’s budget.  We had around30 people at the meeting, but only about 15 cast their ballots.

So, we decided to put a slightly expanded ballot on line and give people another chance.  On line, more  than 100 Oaklanders  sent a message about what they thought, and the message was pretty consistent:

• Hands off the police department budget, at least as to sworn officers;
• You can’t fix this with program reductions;
• City salaries and benefits are out of control; and
• Fixing this problem will take broad-based, across the board personnel cost reductions in every department.

There's much more, and tables with a lot of the results, at www.Oaktalk.com.