City Hall Budgeting Takes Oakland Down

Councilmembers are congratulating themselves for doing the best they can for the City budget. The fact is that they have deprived Oakland of basic services and public safety, including a cut of more than 50 police officers this year. It did not have to be this way.

During fat years City Hall ignored the basic functions of municipal government. The city council and mayor Dellums:

• let police staffing fall by dozens of officers in a city with half a police department compared with most major cities,

• let the backlist of street and sewer repairs extend out to an 85-year cycle,

• let park maintenance decay, and

• let sidewalk dumping and other blight issues pile up.

In short, Dellums, Quan, Brunner, Nadel, Kernighan, Kaplan, Brooks, de la Fuente, and Reid let all the basic functions of a city government decay.

Instead, the city council expanded barely-supervised grants to favored private social service agencies.

It stuffed major parts of the city into redevelopment districts and subsidized favored developers with tens of millions of dollars.

It shoveled money to favored recipients with a corrupt set of so-called Pay-Go slush funds for each councilmember.

It capitulated to operators of private youth programs and their Measure OO money grab.

It expanded the top-heavy bureaucracy, starting with more aides for the mayor and the city council.

Then the economy went sour, so the council turned around and cut basic services.

While councilmembers compliment themselves on crafting a budget without formal layoffs of police, they in fact are reducing the police force this year by dozens of officers.

Councilmembers just wrote a 2009-10 budget with no police academies, knowing that resignations and retirements average 50 to 60 a year. The councilmembers appropriated on paper for 803 police, but we have only 799 officers today, and it is all down from there – no recruiting, no academy, no replacements.

This farce is familiar to Oakland residents. Councilmember Quan and City officials insisted during the 2004 ballot campaign for the Measure Y taxes that the ordinance would guarantee at least 802 police. There was never a shred of truth to their statements. In the four and a half years since Measure Y went into effect, Oakland has had 802 officers for less than seven months. Those seven months are over, and the police force will be understaffed and below a minimal 803 for as far as the eye can see.

In this tradition of claiming to provide officers while actually cutting them, councilmember Jean Quan wrote in a broadcast email on July 31, 2009, "The Council closed the legislative year saving all of our police officer and ranger positions." No, she and her colleagues just began the legislative year scheduling a cut of 50 to 60 police officers. Gloomy novelist George Orwell called it doublespeak because he lived in England. We call it Oaklandspeak.

Facing a budget crisis, councilmember Quan led the charge to blame police spending. For example, in her July 4, 2009 newsletter she claimed, "The City's current fiscal reality means that the only way to address the unprecedented budget deficit is to cut public safety [police and fire] costs, which now account for two-thirds of the available General Purpose Fund revenues." (emphasis added)

Yes, the main duty of a municipal government is police and fire safety. Quan's statistic displays her tunnel vision. Oakland has 2,600 public school teachers. They are in the school district. Oakland has fewer than 800 police. They are in the City government. The first job of the school district is to educate children. The first job of a City government is to ensure public safety.

The least qualified person to blame police obligations for the budget crunch is councilmember Quan. As chair of the council's finance committee in Spring 2008, she and now-disgraced city administrator Deborah Edgerly drew down the City's reserve fund from $70 million to $10 million in order to continue funding political pork, even though everyone already knew the economy was in a downward spiral.

Contrary to the claim that there is only one way to fix the budget – at the expense of public safety – Quan and the rest of the city council did not tackle big issues that can address the financial crisis without impairing basic services:

• The council did not demand that private agencies receiving City grants take a hit equal to that imposed on City workers. The city council shovels hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to Youth UpRising, which welcomes gutter rappers as "career counselors" for youth. In particular, the council gives the agency a $300,000 blank check every year with no performance or program requirements whatsoever. We get no disclosure, let alone scrutiny, of management expenses at the agency.

• The council did not use the crisis to do something about the hundreds of millions of dollars in redevelopment districts. The council has handed dollars to favored developers for decades with no noticeable improvement in the City's economic situation.

• The council did not demand a shake-up in the managerial ranks of the City, where, for example, the library director surrounded herself with an increasing number of deputies while cutting the number of working librarians.

For years City Hall has run down basic services. It prefers to distribute goodies to favored developers, operators of private social programs, and other assorted parasites. Then councilmembers blame the State and wail about hard economic times. Yes, times are tough. With shameless gall, though, councilmembers continue their degradation of our city.