Len Raphael, a long-time Temescal resident and Oakland CPA, says he’s running for District One City Council because there was no moderate candidate, independent of all special interests, running against Zac Unger, president of the Oakland Fire Fighters union. According to Raphael, Unger played a key role in the shift of control of the City Council over the past ten years, working with other city unions to provide money, endorsements, and volunteers to elect and re-elect wannabe police defunders such as CM Fife, CM Bas, and Sheng Thao.

Candidate Raphael says, “Unger nurtured an unholy alliance between the city unions and politicians under which the Council approved compensation increases in closed sessions. Many of the union contracts had “me too” clauses that automatically gave equal raises to the other unions. And Oakland is unusual in that even managers are unionized. This quid for pro has caused our budget to spiral out of control.” 

Raphael, “Tim Gardner’s Oakland Report captures the situation.  Oakland’s compensation costs are larger than, and have grown faster than, nine comparably sized California cities, both in absolute amount and per capita. Gardner found that total compensation grew annually at almost twice the inflation rate for over a decade. Much of that growth was in benefits.”

“Take Zac Unger as an example. In 2011, Unger’s benefits were slightly over $50,000. In 2023, Unger’s benefits cost us $123,000. That 2.5 times larger than his 2011 benefits.”

“In exchange, the council members and our current Mayor were given free rein to attempt to defund the police and levy new parcel taxes in costly, failed attempts to fix homelessness and curb violence. Parcel taxes that could have gone to hiring more police, overhauling our 911 system, repaving, maintaining our parks, improving our animal shelter services, extending the hours of senior and rec centers, and other core services that other cities provide automatically. According to Gardner we saw a “62% increase in social service and administrative spending since 2020 (3 times the rate of inflation).”

“As a result, the city is teetering on bankruptcy because of a +150 million structural (persistent) deficit that can’t be fixed by simply laying off a few managers,  hunting for delinquent business taxes, or even cutting all of the unmonitored and never audited grants to non-profits for anti-violence and other worthy goals.”

“Now, Unger is asking voters to trust him to remove his firefighter hat and replace it with a council member hat. Trust him to change his entire15-year mindset from that of a union president who got his people some of the highest total compensation in California and brought them from trailing Oakland police compensation to exceeding police compensation.”

“At the Wellstone Club endorsement forum a couple of months ago, we were each asked whether we would have voted to approve Mayor Thao’s budget, which was predicated on selling our half of the Coliseum.

Three of the eight council members emphatically voted no to that budget.

Unger said he would have voted yes. I said no.

The city workers need strong unions to protect them from capricious managers and elected officials and negotiate fair compensation.  But we shouldn’t put even a retired union leader on the council to decide overall budget priorities for our financially struggling city government.”