Double the number of police to 1,200 with strict accountability and greater efficiency. Loosen rules on OPD pursuit and increase the use of drones and cameras.

Pay for more cops and fix our structural deficit by cutting noncore/nonessential expenditures and negotiating permanent compensation concessions from city employees under the threat of layoffs of nonpublic safety staff and bankruptcy filing.

Cut unmonitored anti-violence programs and use half the savings to fund after-school tutoring.

Conform to Governor Newsom’s edict to humanely move the unhoused off public spaces even if they don’t want to be moved. Create tent cities on Port of Oakland and State vacant lots away from residential neighborhoods. Provide porta potties and portable showers.

Amend the charter to prohibit parcel tax ballot measures that allow the use of dedicated-purpose parcel taxes, such as for libraries and parks, from being used for other purposes upon declaration of a "fiscal emergency." The Council legally stole library and parks/rec parcel taxes with the July 2024 approved budget to help cover the general fund deficit.

End the annual budget drama by amending the charter to create a guardrail similar to the Congressional Budget Office preventing our Mayors and Council from “checkbook budgeting” that ignores the fiscal projections prepared by  the City’s Budget Department staff and reviewed by the Citizens’ Budget Advisory Commission.

Putting a 10-year Firefighters union president on the council, where he will be voting on budget priorities, is a conflict of interest.

My opponent, the Firefighters' president Zac Unger, played a key role in electing Mayor Thao. He has publicly stated his opposition to her recall. I’m one of the recall organizers.

As Firefighters president, Zac also supports attempted defunder Caroll Fife for D3 City Council.

At the recent Wellstone Club forum, Zac expressed his support of the budget approved this past July that relies on the Coliseum sale proceeds and diverted library and parks parcel taxes.

Oakland must be laser-focused on delivering essential, fundamental, core city services to residents and businesses.

For decades, City Hall has allowed its attention to wander from the role of local government to regional and national issues beyond its scope and means. The City of Oakland cannot significantly reduce poverty, economic inequality, homelessness, systemic racism, or climate change, problems whose size and complexity demand the big bucks and organizational power of federal and state government. Until we can keep our streets paved, our parks clean, and our police force fully staffed, we shouldn’t try to save the world.

In short, we need to get back to basics. Our elected officials have allowed the fundamental services of a city government—police, fire, libraries, parks, recreation centers, street maintenance, and trash pickup—to deteriorate to a shocking extent, to levels far below those of other cities. As residents pay more and more for less and less, City Hall has repeatedly raised both wages and benefits for its employees. The current median compensation, including benefits, for a single full-time Oakland employee is $207,000. The median household income for an entire Oakland family is $93,000.

These are wages that rival those in private industry, plus benefits that exceed those of the private sector. Thus, we are breaking the norm that government jobs don’t pay as well as private sector jobs but provide much better benefits, job security, and shorter workdays.

City Council even continued to raise city compensation after its own budget staff and the Budget Advisory Commission unequivocally projected massive deficits in early 2023. Deficits caused by a combination of increases in compensation and a precipitous fall in the notoriously unstable real estate transfer taxes collected on the sale of real estate were predictably caused by high mortgage interest rates and high commercial rental vacancies. Reductions and slowing of business tax and property tax collections from the very high downtown office and retail vacancies caused by work from home and increased property crime. Our City Budget staff warned that work from home could be permanent, but our Mayors and Council members thought otherwise and papered over the underlying “structural deficit” with the leftover Federal and State COVID emergency money.

Faced with a fiscal disaster, the City Council and the Mayor just kicked the can down the road a year by selling off our half interest in the Coliseum. That’s like pulling money out of your IRA to pay your utility bill.

This can’t continue.

My Goals

A fiscally sound and sustainable budget that provides for:

  • Public safety. Public safety. Public safety.
  • City-wide trash and graffiti cleanup
  • The end of encampments
  • Responsive and accessible constituent services.

Public Safety

  • Enough talk. It is not enough to say, “Public safety is my highest priority.” Every elected official and candidate, even those who attempted to defund OPD, repeats that phrase like a magic spell. Empty campaign rhetoric gets residents killed and businesses robbed. The victims of property crime are often women and the elderly. Most car thefts are of older cars in lower-income neighborhoods. Teslas are hard to steal. Elected officials have to back up their words by changing the Oakland budget priorities to increase police staffing technology and changing OPD policies.
  • Increase the number of uniformed officers initially to 800, working toward an ultimate goal of 1200 officers. Police can’t do their job effectively if they’re always playing whack-a-mole, racing from one urgent crime to another. Without more officers, it is impossible to reduce 911 response times, build relationships between police and residents, and reduce dangerous and expensive overtime. Oakland desperately needs more officers.
  • Maintain our high standards of police accountability while reducing duplicative paperwork from duplicative oversight. Between the Federal Overseer, Police Commission, Internal Affairs, Office of the Inspector General, not to mention the Mayor, City Council, and Police Chief, we have made it too difficult for police to do actual police work. We need to streamline police accountability.
  • Tightly manage police and fire overtime. The community deserves to know exactly where its money is going and whether it is being spent well. We must simultaneously respect those officers working long hours to overcome OPD’s staffing crisis while guaranteeing overtime and disability claims are not being abused.
  • Greatly improve OPD retention and hiring. Make OPD a great place to work. End the attempt to civilianize Internal Affairs. Address persistent officer complaints about city leadership, discipline, and unmanageable policies. Losing experienced officers leaves the city staffed with rookies, which is dangerous for us and for officers. Do a better job recruiting officers from Oakland with mentoring programs in middle and high schools and coordinating with local junior colleges.
  • Adopt the equivalent of SF’s Measure E. This forward-thinking measure allows SFPD to hold community meetings before the Police Commission can change policing policies, reduces recordkeeping and reporting requirements for police officers, sets new policies for police use-of-force reporting and vehicle pursuits, authorizes the Police Department to use drones and install public surveillance cameras without further approval, and authorizes the Police Department to use other new surveillance technology. Let OPD do what we hire them to do.
  • Ensure 911 is properly staffed and upgraded for cell phone compatibility. When you call 911, someone should answer. Oakland residents deserve a 911 system that works and that we can count on in an emergency. Oakland is the only remaining large California city without full cell phone compatibility, so cell calls often route first to CHP Vallejo and then back down to Oakland.
  • Prioritize policing over unmonitored non-profit anti-violence grants.. The council majority has consistently refused to make policing, OPD staffing, and police technology a spending priority. Instead, they spend money on unaccountable and probably ineffective “anti-violence” programs that are often political pork given to favored non-profits who return the favor with “get out the vote” support at election time and packing city council meetings. The only proven effective anti-violence program is Ceasefire. It requires adequate police staffing.
  • Petition the federal judge overseeing OPD and the NSA to replace the current federal monitor and quickly end oversight. The current federal monitor has turned this temporary engagement into a permanent job. Federal guidelines for police department “consent decrees” forbid overseers from having more than one engagement at a time and require detailed justification for any oversight exceeding five years. (We have a “negotiated settlement agreement.”) Ours has been going on twenty. Ours has been double dipping big time with his Maricopa County, AZ, PD monitoring gig. It’s time for federal oversight to end. There’s an adage about how when the whole class fails a test the first time, it's the students’ fault. But when they fail the second time, there's something wrong with the teacher.
  • Stop neglecting quality of life crime. Enforce traffic laws without racial profiling. Ticket graffiti artists. Go after illegal dumpers. Stop allowing Oakland to be a destination for lawlessness.

Encampments and Blight

  • Humanely move our unhoused residents out of parks, streets, and sidewalks ending encampments in Oakland. In accordance with Governor Newsom’s July 2024 directive and the recent Grants Pass Supreme Court ruling, move unhoused residents to temporary housing if available. Eliminate policies that require consent to receive services. Protect belongings. Treat the unhoused with dignity. And demand and enforce that temporary housing must be taken if available.
  • Use all available Federal, State, and County funds to provide temporary housing only. Oakland cannot solve the unhoused crisis. There is simply no way a poor city like Oakland can afford the $4.5 billion needed to house all homeless residents permanently. Instead of spending vast sums on a small number of permanent units, direct funding to a larger quantity of temporary housing and issue only the minimum parcel tax-backed bonds for affordable housing required by the state.
  • End illegal dumping and the blight it causes by providing free trash disposal citywide. Provide dumpsters throughout the city that can be used at no cost. Advertise and support more free bulky waste pickups. Make illegal dumping a fool’s gambit by making free dumping available and convenient.

A Fiscally Sound and Sustainable Budget

  • Require a balanced budget without structural deficits. Implement charter-backed guardrails to ensure that our City finances don’t keep staggering from one fiscal crisis to another. Place a measure on the ballot that requires the City Auditor to certify that the adopted budget is sustainably balanced using the five-year revenue and expense projections prepared by the City Budget Bureau and accepted by the Citizens Budget Advisory Commission. Also require the City Budget Office to prepare ten-year projections for the City Auditor to evaluate legislation and budgets. Like the Congressional Budget Office, adding the City Auditor as a non-partisan referee to the process of passing a budget to eliminate the accounting gimmicks and fake revenue projections that have plagued the budget process and put the City on a path to financial ruin.
  • Negotiate permanent concessions. A structurally balanced budget requires concessions from the unions, possibly a reduction in benefits rather than pay. The longer we fail to address the serious financial issues, the more layoffs and concessions will be required down the road. Bring the parties to the table and negotiate concessions, understanding that Chapter 9 bankruptcy is the likely alternative. Bankruptcy benefits no one: city staff, residents, or businesses.
  • Fully Reopen City Hall. All city employees must work at least four days a week in their downtown offices. Currently, each department sets its work-from-home policy separately. Some allow full remote work. But Oakland City Hall is not efficiently set up for work-from-home resulting in inferior public service.
  • Prioritize core city services with police and fire at the top of the list. Then parks, trash cleanup, paving, senior and rec centers, Head Start, and libraries. Eliminate non-core services and ineffective programs and departments.
  • Don’t cut the subsidies for public festivals and art. When run properly and policed as needed, they greatly improve the quality of life.
  • Guarantee funding for the City Auditor's Office. Especially in tough financial times, the Auditor becomes one of the most important offices in the city. Guarantee the City Auditor has the funding, staff, and resources to perform fraud and effectiveness audits on all city contracts above a certain dollar amount on a random basis. Currently, most are not audited.
  • Cut all anti-violence programs except Ceasefire. Only Ceasefire has demonstrated its effectiveness. Many of the crimes here are perpetrated by people coming to Oakland who are not even touched by any of our anti-violence programs. Evaluate eliminating the Department of Violence Prevention if it cannot show that it significantly reduces violence. Use half these savings to fund more after-school rec centers and tutoring.  If people want to keep anti-violence programs whose effectiveness can't be measured (most anti-violence programs can’t be evaluated because it’s difficult to get participants to say they had intended to hurt someone), set up an independent citizen’s committee and a lottery system for grants. Random audit the non-profit grant recipients for fraud.
  • Eliminate the Economic Development Department, which has never developed anything. Economic development results from a cleaner and safer city. City Hall has neither the funds nor the expertise for “industrial policy.” Make the city clean and safe, and employers will come.
  • Scale back MACRO. Do not increase the MACRO police civilian alternative budget until an effective and limited pilot has been demonstrated. Limit MACRO to East Oakland with 24x7 service. Evaluate why the cost per incident is so high.
  • Flatten top-heavy departments with excessive management costs. Every organization has waste. Layoffs are often the only way to force government departments to make hard staffing decisions. Start at the top.
  • Require the City Administrator to re-engineer all departments to improve their work culture and productivity. A prime example is the building department. Other cities process permits much faster than Oakland.
  • Evaluate our retirement system. California’s pension system is broken. Oakland’s dire financial straits make it the perfect place to discuss how to fix it. Consider higher employee contributions to retirement plans or even switching to 401k-type plans for new employees. Review our retirement health care benefits.
  • Transparently disclose the details of city finances and operations so that our many savvy residents can analyze and suggest ways to improve operations. Elected officials have promised transparency for years but failed to deliver.
  • End parcel tax bait and switch. Amend the City Charter as needed to prevent the use of parcel tax money for anything other than for the titled purposes. Remove all small print exceptions that allow money to be diverted to the general fund so the generosity of voters and taxpayers can no longer be abused.
  • Once the house is in order, craft a “wide net” tax increase for the ballot. Only after all of the above changes have been made and every department scrutinized for inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, craft a package of tax increases for the ballot, including an unpleasantly large parcel tax that would be borne by renters, owners, and businesses alike with generous exemptions for low-income residents and small and start-up businesses.

Responsive and Accessible Constituent Services

  • My office will be your office. With a city government as dysfunctional as ours, Council Members must help residents and businesses navigate the city bureaucracy. I will hold regular weekly hours physically in the district.
  • I will prioritize constituent services over passing new legislation. Restoring the focus on core services means less of my time will be spent drafting new programs and save-the-world efforts. That means more time working with the community to help you get needed services.
  • I will hire great staff and support them. I will give my constituents people they can work with, who return calls and emails, and who follow up to make the city work for each of District 1’s residents and businesses.
  • My office will advocate on your behalf. We will keep track of your asks. We will push where we can push. We will make sure that if something isn’t getting done in District 1, we’ll know why and you’ll know why. We’ll also know who is responsible and who needs to hear about it. You will no longer face the city bureaucracy alone.