Councilmember Defends
Wrecking Oakland's Finances

The national recession has made life harder for everyone. Oakland officials, however, turned a budget challenge into a crisis far worse than it had to be.

Last July this website observed about councilmember Jean Quan, who has been chair of the finance committee for several years, "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." (City Hall Budgeting Takes Oakland Down, July 29, 2009)

When the daily press reported Oakland's disastrous fall in its reserve fund, councilmember Quan said, "It's not like the money was stolen." ("Oakland's Missing Millions," Phil Matier and Andrew Ross, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 24, 2008)

Less than four months into the 2008-09 fiscal year, the council had to make emergency budget cuts. The pain included unpaid forced furlough days every month for City employees who repair park facilities, respond to blight complaints, and perform a host of other basic services – but councilmember Quan made sure that Chabot Observatory, which she has converted into a tool of her political campaigns, kept its full $595,000 subsidy, no belt tightening required. (Memo from Sarah Schlenk to Pat Kergnighan, Oct. 9, 2008, Attachment B)

For many months ORPN activists have called attention to the Edgerly-Quan raid on the reserve fund. Two days ago Quan posted her reply on a neighborhood email list:

"My record of challenging Edgerly's budget assumptions are [sic] pretty well documented in my newsletters and on the record. ... But all California cities are facing complex decisions and big cuts right now. Proportionately we are much more balanced than many of the other big cities, but that doesn't mean it won't be tough." (Post to MSIC email list, Feb. 19, 2010)

• Notice how Quan evades the issue of the reserve fund, substituting a claim that she "challenged budget assumptions" (without saying when).

• Residents of district four know that the notion of "documentation" in a Quan newsletter is laughable. The councilmember and her staff leave misstatements in it for weeks at a time. For example, six months after the Problem Solving Officer (PSO) for beat 24Y was withdrawn to other duties, Quan's newsletter continued to list his name. In fact, the Allendale neighborhood has no PSO, and Quan did not even list the officer tasked with serving 24Y if he has spare time over and above his own assigned PSO beat.

• Quan continues to paint over the City's fiscal mess, claiming that Oakland is more balanced than other California cities. A moment's thought shows that "more balanced" means nothing, and in any case, it has nothing to do with solving Oakland's problem.

What else should we expect from the former school board president who ignored auditors' warnings of imminent collapse? Quan was unwilling or unable to read a budget summary that signaled a huge problem, so big it pushed the Oakland Unified School District into a $100 million bankruptcy.

What else should we expect from someone who, campaigning in 2006 for a $148 million bond issue to build a palace library downtown, insisted the cost per square foot was half what simple division said it was? Fortunately, voters rejected her Measure N.

The City budget crisis is solvable. It requires leaders who will give basic services real priority, who will cut the enormous number of paper pushers and deputy executives added to the payroll in the last decade, who will see to it that social program managers receiving City grants face the same music as the rest of us, and who will stop the flow of tens of millions of dollars into "redevelopment."

Instead, councilmember Quan promotes City spending to buy land for a new ballpark, urging residents, "Sign the Petition to Major League Baseball." (Quan newsletter, Feb. 20, 2010)

If you want to clean the house of government in Oakland, you need to issue an order telling officials like Quan to vacate the premises. Then you need people willing to put on gloves and clean up the muck.