Council Meeting Will Reconsider LLAD Tax Hike

Under a barrage of criticism for stuffing the ballot box in a vote on whether to increase the Landscape and Lighting Assessment (LLAD), the city council has set a meeting for 9:30 a.m., Tuesday, July 22.

The staff attorney responsible for rigging assessment district votes offers the council three options: collect the LLAD tax without the increase; collect the tax with the increase, putting the additional revenue aside in an account for later disposition; or ignore all problems, collect the increase that voters rejected, and go ahead and spend it. (Nearly 80 cents of every new dollar would not be spent on parks, trees, and street lights.)

So far, the council refuses to recognize that City officials stuffed the ballot box. Instead, the professed reason for taking a second look at the LLAD scandal is a ruling by the California Supreme Court earlier this week. The decision strikes a strong blow against using Landscape and Lighting Assessment Districts to do an end run around normal rules requiring a two-thirds vote on new or increased taxes.

City Hall carried out several illegal and anti-democratic maneuvers to rig the LLAD mail-in ballot held this past April and May:

• City councilmember Quan and Public Works staff used public funds to produce a brochure crying about a phony shortfall in the LLAD fund, stuffing 90,000 copies in residents' garbage bill early this year.

• The City's contracted assessment engineer vastly overstated the alleged benefit received by the Port of Oakland from parks and such, giving the Port unwarranted votes in the LLAD balloting.

• The City simply added extra Port votes on top of the overstatement of benefit, weighting the Port vote by its total assessment while underweighting homeowners' votes at only the proposed increase in their assessment.

• The City tallied votes for numerous properties that are not subject to the LLAD, including airport property governed by federal law.

• Staff believed to be guided by mayoral aide Dan Lindheim lobbied the Oakland Unified School District to abstain from voting instead of discussing how to vote on the LLAD at a school board meeting. Consequently, a district that still runs a deficit did not even discuss whether it should throw hundreds of thousands of scarce dollars into a City LLAD fund that provides schools with minimal benefit.

According to Sanjiv Handa, the city council will meet Tuesday in closed session an hour before the public meeting on the LLAD.

Far more is at stake than the impact of a Supreme Court ruling, although that is significant enough in its own right. The LLAD voters clearly voted down the proposed increase. At stake is whether the city council will think twice about City Hall's blatant stuffing of the ballot box. At stake is whether Oakland will nail down its status as a banana republic.