Oakland is worth fighting for. But how exactly should we fight for it?

Here are my priorities:

#1 Focus on the immediate reduction of crime.

We must support rebuilding sworn and civilian staffing in Oakland’s police department and support reforms to improve policing, as well as maintain successful prevention and intervention strategies. Also, we know that per-employee benefit costs are rising steeply over the next five years, so even if we can afford increased spending on non-public-safety positions today, it will seriously jeopardize our ability to increase or even maintain public safety funding in the future.

These threats still exist in the proposal from Councilmembers Brooks, Reid, and Gallo, which I oppose. That proposal would create a $9 million deficit, cut ALL new civilian positions proposed for the Oakland Police Department, and end ALL assistance from California Highway Patrol, and it would dramatically increase permanent funding for non-public safety staff. Instead, I support Council President Kernighan’s proposal, which balances our need to increase public safety, stabilize other critical services, and maintain some fiscal discipline. (Full analysis of both proposals here).

#2 Admit we are in a fiscal hole and don’t dig it any deeper.

I would love to give city workers raises – I unequivocally believe they deserve them, particularly our lowest-wage temporary workers. But how can we take on new compensation obligations when we haven’t figured out how to pay for the obligations we already have? Oakland has $1.5 BILLION in unfunded benefit liabilities. The proposals discussed above don’t put a single dollar towards paying this down. Our five-year financial forecast shows that if even if we resume our actuarially required payments for these benefits, along with necessary capital spending in our next budget, Oakland will still be $200 million over-budget in five years. We can’t ignore this threat any longer. Our predecessors did, and look where it’s gotten us.

As with raises, we must also exercise extreme caution in adding new permanent City positions. Oakland is continuing to pay for on-going expenses with one-time revenues. It might look balanced this year, but it’s not sustainable.

Despite our differences, I believe all of Oakland’s officials are in public service with a sincere commitment to doing what’s best for our communities. Please appreciate how hard it is to say “no” when every advocacy group is begging you to say “yes”, and when the needs are very real and pressing. Please urge Oakland’s Council to face-up to Oakland’s fiscal stability right now, or else ALL the services we value could be even further decimated in the future.

A CALL TO ACTION: BE HEARD ON JUNE 27^TH!

Our Oakland is worth fighting for. Arm yourself with information and come fight for your priorities. There’s an excellent comprehensive link to budget materials and press coverage at http://oaklandwiki.org/2013_Budget_Discussion and great in-depth analysis by Make Oakland Better Now at http://oaktalk.com/ . You may email all Councilmembers your thoughts at DL-Councilmembers@oaklandnet.com and/or attend the Budget Adoption Meeting Thursday, June 27^th at 6:30pm.

Our Oakland is worth fighting for. Thanks for being in the fight with me.

Editor’s Note: This piece reflects an individual opinion and is not a reported story from Oakland Local. Oakland Local invites community residents to share their views about events and issues in Oakland; we have invited all city council people to post on OL and welcome their contributions, as well as your own.

“This issue has come up and its been here awhile,” said Gallo, the District 5 representative. “And for this council to sit here silent – we are leadership-less.”

Gallo urged for City Auditor Courtney Ruby to respond to the Council’s questions over her scathing audit alleging Brooks and Reid of 14 total violations of the city charter’s non-interference laws.

“I think these two individuals are members of my team and the issues out there aren’t going away,” Gallo said.

The impromptu comments by Gallo’s ignited pointed responses from both Brooks and Reid to condemn Ruby’s allegations against them.

“To respond would assume the report has some validity,” Brooks said.

Gallo, however, tried to clarify his remarks, but was interrupted by Brooks. “I want to hear from the auditor,” he said before Brooks abruptly cut him off.

“I want to finish,” she said curtly.

Brooks continued a similar argument from two weeks ago when she charged Ruby with providing a report without evidence that she and Reid overstepped their Council authority by allegedly directing city staff on two projects in Brooks’ district and a construction contract at the Oakland Army Base.

“She has tarnished the name of myself and Mr. Reid without a shred of evidence,” Brooks said.

Later Brooks urged the Council to, instead, investigate Ruby.

“We need to spend money to audit the auditor’s audits,” she said.

Reid said he “concurred” with Brooks’ argument against Ruby and added the auditor was not accountable to anyone at City Hall. After reiterating Brooks’ call to “audit the auditor” – almost using it as likely slogan in defense of the charges alleged – Reid immediately leaned back in his chair and flipped out his cell phone.

Tuesday’s discussion, which, again, included various residents speaking in support of Brooks and Reid, is the third consecutive meeting where the allegations laid out in Ruby’s report took center stage, but without any officials comment or action by the Council.

Council President Pat Kernighan said the item could be scheduled for discussion as early as this Thursday’s Rules Committee, to which the Council could begin sorting out how or when it will discuss the charges.

In the days after the March 23 report was released, Kernighan said the Council would likely broach the subject in a month’s time, while raising the possibility of censuring her council colleagues, if the charges are proven.

Cross posted from East Bay Citizen, http://bit.ly/174QRJc.

The PEC’s decision is in response to a recent letter sent by Oakland City Auditor Courtney Ruby’s office that said ABC Security – an Oakland-based company – may have violated the law when it donated money to Council members while it was bidding on a $2 million contract to provide security for Oakland City Hall.

Political donations made by Sam Tadesse, managing partner at Marina Security, which bid on the contract, also will be investigated.

The commission will now wait for a preliminary fact gathering report from its executive director, Daniel Purnell.

Separately, the City Council is scheduled to take up a vote on the contract today at its regularly scheduled meeting.

Check back with Oakland Local Wednesday for further details.

Under the proposed contract, Urban Strategies will be paid $116,000 for city-wide spatial crime analysis that will begin next month and end October 2011.

The city did not put the contract out for bid because Urban Strategies was the only organization with existing memorandums of understanding with local, state and county agencies that authorize information sharing, said Police Capt. Ersie Joyner. These agencies include the Oakland Unified School District, the Alameda County Probation Department and others.

The decision by the public safety committee – consisting of Vice Mayor Jean Quan, Councilwomen Pat Kernighan and Nancy Nadel and Councilman Larry Reid – will go to the full council for approval on Tuesday, Oct. 19, Councilwoman Desley Brooks said this week.

The City Council will need to approve a resolution waiving the city’s advertising and request-for-proposal-and-qualifications requirements for crime data analysis services.

The Council also will need to approve acceptance and allocation of $34,143 from the Juvenile Accountability Block Grant program and $3,413 from the State COPS XIV grant. Various other grants will cover the remainder of the cost of the contract.

Michal Migurski of San Francisco-based Stamen Design said it was understandable why the city was not putting out the contract for bid, since Urban Strategies has relationships with government agencies that provide critical information. But he said it pointed to the difficulty of attaining government information that perhaps should be more readily available to the public.

“It doesn’t smell fishy to me,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, but not fishy.”

Joyner and Junious Williams and Steve Spiker of Urban Strategies did not return phone calls seeking comment for this article.

For the last 18 months, Urban Strategies has worked with Councilwoman Brooks on a pilot project in Police Area 3 – central-east and all of east Oakland – to support the police department’s efforts to implement intelligence-led policing in the city.

The new contract will be for work that is citywide and the data will help the police department focus its efforts to suppress and prevent crimes that impact juveniles, such as human trafficking and child prostitution and gang activity and truancy, according to an Oct. 12 report written by Capt. Joyner.

The analysis will be a critical tool that will improve the collaboration between the department and other agencies by targeting resources toward geographic areas and individuals with the greatest need, according to the report.

If approved by the Oakland City Council, the Urban Strategies Council
will be called on to do the following analysis for the police
department:

1. City-wide crime trend mapping and analysis
2. City-wide hot spot analysis on a quarterly basis
3. Area-wide hotspot and trend analysis for each police command area
4. Expanded analysis of the connections between gangs, violence and guns
5. Calls for service analysis to complement the crime reporting data and
   to help with the allocation of resources both geographically and
   temporally
6. Drill-down analysis into the major crime hot spots in each area

It’s a problem rooted not to an unwillingness to disclose the information, but to a records management system “that doesn’t work very well,” according to City Auditor Courtney Ruby, who has been pushing for reform since she took office in 2007.

“When we go to look for records we can’t find them,” Ruby said. “It shouldn’t be a hunting expedition.”

Progress was made on July 20 when the Oakland City Council unanimously approved a resolution authorizing the city clerk’s office to commence with development work for drafting a comprehensive Citywide Records Management Program.

Although the city adopted the existing Citywide Records Management Ordinance in 1991, authorizing the creation of a program, the ordinance was never codified and full understanding, legal participation and legal requirements of the city’s records policies has not been achieved.

“Right now, that policy is very fractured and so this program is designed to get the city’s arms around its very, very many records and begin to put them into a comprehensive, organized format,” said Daniel Purnell, executive director of the Public Ethics Commission, which has become involved when records are not produced to citizens in reasonable time.

Modernizing how records are kept is critical for Oakland because it is one of the oldest charter cities, established more than 150 years ago, said Councilwoman Jean Quan, chairperson of the Finance and Management Committee, which adopted the program resolution.

“The whole idea of how you keep your history is a big job,” Quan said. “The amount of information is growing geometrically and now we have to keep track of emails and all sorts of other things.”

On Dec. 15, the Finance and Management Committee considered a staff report and a series of proposed amendments to the existing ordinance. Implementation of the ordinance was delayed until the city clerk’s office was sufficiently staffed to develop the program.

With the hiring of the new records manager in April, the city clerk’s office is now capable of moving forward. There is “a long list” of analysis work to be done, including interviews with each city department to see how each handles, processes and scores records, said the new records manager Deidre Scott.

“As we gather information, we’ll be making changes to the program as need be,” Scott said. “We have several months ahead of us of research and things to look at.”

An effective program is good news for other city officials including City Attorney John Russo, who advocated for a more orderly system since his first term in 2001 and co-wrote Op/Eds with Ruby that were published in The Oakland Tribune in 2008 and 2009.

The city attorney’s office “is really interested” in the effort because records from various departments are necessary in lawsuits, Russo’s Communications Director, Alex Katz, said.

“When someone sues, we have to go back and look at what the (documents say) and unfortunately, sometimes we cannot do that because they’ve disappeared or because the city deletes emails from its server after a really short time,” Katz said.

The draft program will go before the Public Ethics Commission and Rules Committee for review within the six-month development period, before Council members discuss the schedule of implementation. Costs associated with implementing the program will be determined as the draft program is developed with more research, Scott said.

Regardless, having a comprehensive system would save the city time, money and resources, Purnell said, and “hopefully improve the city’s ability to respond to multi-departmental requests.”

In addition, the program will establish much-needed guidelines for what information must be kept and what can be disposed of, said Rules Committee Chairperson and Council President Jane Brunner.

“It’s very cumbersome to keep every single piece of paper that comes into the office,” she said. “There are a lot of technical things … want to make sure we understand, know what the rules are.”

Apart from city officials, one nonprofit organization – the League of Women Voters of Oakland – has consistently advocated for the program.

“We want the records to be there for people to be able to see them,” said league member and former president Helen Hutchison, 57. “We believe very strongly that that’s part of being a transparent government.”

If you'd like to see continued coverage of this topic–records management–let Oakland Local know–either by responding i n he comments or sending an email to editor@oaklandlocal.com

Here's an example of what I mean. Want to find the latest reports and recommendations  from the City Administrator, Dan Lindheim? You can't. 

Even though much of his office's work is a matter of public record, there's no directory or folder online where interested citizens could access his reports are they are published.  Instead, an interested person has to go to the meetings site for the City, download PDF agendas for each meeting, and see whether a file or note from Lindheim has been embedded in one of those documents. 

Given that Council has at least 24 meetings a month, with committees and all, you can see how security by obscurity comes into play. Only the most determined end up with consistent access to city documents.

Not only that, many of the documents the city publishes as PDFs don't transfer at all to other formats.  Ever try to copy and past part of an Oakland City government PDF report into another format, like Word, so you can study it? More than 2/3rd of the time, you end up with little black squiggles instead of letters because the documents won't let you copy and paste.  This is so wrong!

Why can't the city just have an archive–wiki, directory, database, newsreader–all would work–that automatically ports ALL the public city memos, reports, files, into  a back end with a  web-based front end that would date and list all public documents? This site wold make RSS feeds available so people could subscribe to get new data, not just nots there is new data, as we have today, and offer a searchable archive so people could FIND topic using metadata and keywords?

(Sorry if I am speaking geek, here, people.)

There is no reason Oakland can't make this happen, and at a low cost. We just need to take action.

I'd like to see Oakland take a leaf from the work done by Jay Nath and his team in San Francisco and start an Open City Records project to go with the internal-facing records revamp.  Oakland should, in the next 90 days take the following steps:

• Create an advisory committee or working group to advise on porting a revamped records management system to the web, specifically oaklandnet.com
• Use that group to identify best practices and standards for web-based open data access around the country and provide education and learning to the city team involved in the Records Management process.
• Create a budget and timeline for this work to happen as an overhaul of City Records  Management finally progresses.

Oakland Local would be happy to be part of a taskforce to work on this–for free. And we call on other who want to see more local government transparency on the web in Oakland to join us in asking Mayor Dellums, the city administrator and City Council to make real access to city data  a reality in Oakland.

Now that Oakland is getting a new City Records Management Program this is the moment to begin.

While many in the city are eager to see more money flowing into the city coffers, not everyone at the Thursday meeting liked the idea of the city taxing pot.

“You guys are turning into drug dealing tax mongers,” an angry James Archibald told the council before leaving the council chambers nearly twenty minutes before the council began its debate.

After a fairly swift discussion that drew only a small fraction of the people who spoke at Tuesday’s meeting, Kaplan attempted to make a motion to put a ballot measure on the November 2 general election that would establish a 10-percent gross receipts tax on recreational non-medical marijuana businesses, assuming voters also legalize marijuana. The measure would also give council the latitude to tax dispensaries at a rate of up to 2.5-percent and tax licensed grow operations as much as 8-percent.

It’s unclear how much money Kaplan’s proposal would bring in each year as it is radically different from the eight to 12 percent the council planned to consider before industry criticism prompted her to restructure the tax.

But no matter the tax-rate, any additional cost will get passed on to the patients who rely on their medicine being affordable, warned many of the people who spoke at the meeting.

“Things that everybody takes for granted are very important to me, and I wouldn’t be able to chew without cannabis,” said Angel Raich, whose use of cannabis to treat numerous serious medical conditions, including a brain tumor, was the center of a U.S. Supreme Court Case. “Having an adult-use tax is really important. … They don’t need to depend on it, and they can work as much as they want.”

But because the council didn’t announce that they would consider a tax on recreational pot, the city attorney cautioned that a vote would be nothing more than a straw poll.

While some of the council members appeared to support Kaplan’s proposal, it wasn’t clear that she had the votes needed to carry the motion.

Neither council members Larry Reid or Desley Brooks seemed to think that marijuana growers should pay a higher tax than dispensaries. And Council Member Ignacio De La Fuentes made an earlier motion to propose a significantly higher tax rate than Kaplan suggested.

Kaplan and several other council members seemed amenable to the idea of getting a formal read on where the council stood with her proposal, but Council President Jane Brunner wasn’t having it.

“We’re not doing a straw poll,” she insisted. She said the council had never done a straw poll before and it wasn’t going to start now.

Brunner lost her cool earlier in the meeting when she incorrectly assumed that patients don’t pay sales tax on their marijuana at the city’s dispensaries.

Dismayed laughter erupted throughout the room.

“Don’t laugh at me,” Brunner erupted at the audience. “I don’t laugh at you.”

The council will vote Monday on what tax proposal the voters will see in November.

See Oakland Local's coverage of the marijuana business here.

Poll volunteer Zach Seal said the city’s instant run-off voting meant that the City Council primary elections were put off until November, contributing to the low turn-out on Tuesday.

“It’s pretty slow,” he admitted.

Yet, Oakland voters had a range of issues to vote on – from choosing candidates for the governor’s race this fall, to voting on propositions. The ballot included the selection of the state superintendent of public instruction, though a number of local Alameda County seats had candidates that were running unopposed.

“It’s too bad it’s a low turn-out,” Seal said, “because there’s some important state-wide initiatives on the ballot.”

The statewide initiatives included Prop. 16 – a constitutional amendment that would impose a new two-thirds voter approval requirement before local governments could start up electricity services or expand electricity service into a new territory. PG&E largely funded the $44 million campaign in favor of the measure.

Mercury Insurance Company was behind the campaign for Prop. 17, which would permit companies to reduce or increase the cost of insurance depending on whether the driver has a history of continuous insurance coverage.

Looking at a voter guide he brought with him, retired public school educator Alvin Brooks said he voted for Props. 16 and 17 and also supported Attorney General and veteran politician Jerry Brown as the Democratic candidate for governor in this November’s election.

Ramona L. Wilson also supported Jerry Brown.

“He knows California, he’s been in government 25- to 30-some years,” she said.

Wilson said she opposed Prop. 17, because it would penalize young people who drove poorly. She opposed Prop. 16 and called the two-thirds voting requirement a smokescreen.

“I don’t think it serves a real purpose,” Wilson said, before walking into the polling place. 
Attorney Kendra Fox-Davis said she was motivated to vote for Kamala D. Harris as the Democratic candidate for state attorney general.

“I think she has good solutions for violence prevention,” Fox-Davis said, “and I like the program she has in San Francisco for the rehabilitation for young people caught up in the criminal justice system. I think she has a good model for the state.”

She said she was “definitely voting no” on Prop. 16, but wasn’t sure how she would vote on the remaining propositions.

“The primaries are hard,” she said. “I don’t remember voting for one (in the past).”

As of 11:15 p.m., and with some 36 percent of state precincts reporting, Prop. 16 was losing with 49.2 percent of the vote and Prop. 17 was winning with 51.3 percent, according to Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s election webpage.

Props. 13 and 14 appeared to be winning handily on election night with some 85 percent and 58 percent of the vote respectively, while Prop. 15 was losing, with 43.9 percent of votes against it.

Under Prop. 13, construction to seismically retrofit buildings would not trigger a reassessment of property tax value; Prop. 14 would allow all voters to choose any candidate regardless of the candidate's or voter's political party preference during primary elections; and Prop. 15 would lift a state ban on public funding for political campaigns.

Call to Candidates: Share your Platforms and Views on Oakland Local | Oakland Local http://bit.ly/ckJ6tN

Who is running for what? A reference list for Oakland and Alameda County | Oakland Local http://bit.ly/avuFNy

Note: Publication does not consider endorsement of any candidates or views.

See election coverage at http://oaklandlocal.com/tags/election

Give your input at one of three Community Budget Forums:
 
Wednesday, June 9 7-9 pm– Central Oakland
Glenview Elementary School
4215 La Cresta Avenue
 
Monday, June 14 7-9 pm — East Oakland
Eastmont Substation
2651 73rd Avenue
 
Thursday, June 17 7-9 pm –North Oakland
Peralta Elementary School
460 63rd Street
 
Please join us or send your suggestions to oaklandbudgetsuggestions@oaklandnet.com
Your opinion is important!

Follow
Oakland Local budget coverage here.