Finance & Management Committee - Regular Meeting

Good morning and welcome to the finance and management committee meeting of Tuesday 03/24/2025 or sorry 2026. The time is now 09:31AM, and this meeting may come to order. Before taking roll, I will provide instructions on how to submit speaker cards for items on this agenda. If you're here with us in chamber, would like to submit a speaker card, please fill one out and turn one into myself or a clerk representative no later than ten minutes after the start of this meeting. This meeting came to order at 09:31AM, and this and speaker cards will no longer be accepted, after 09:41AM. We'll now proceed with taking role. Council members Brown? Oh. Sorry. One moment.

Present. Unger? Here. Wong? Present. And chair Ramachandran? Present. Thank you. We have four members present. Before we begin, chair, do you have any announcements at this time?

Yes. We are changing the order of the items that will be heard. We will be starting with item number seven, the q two report, moving to item four, the citywide staffing report, then item five, the informational report on the salary survey for job classes under 25 an hour. Then item three, which is amendment to the salary ordinance. And then finally, item six which is six which is the p first portfolio.

And I believe there is a change to item three and I will pass it to staff to explain it.

Thank you chair Omachandran, Brad Johnson director of finance. For item three, we will be removing the listed item one of parking administrator and delaying that to a future, discussion of the civil service and salary ordinance. So staff expect during that item to pull that particular element of it, but wanting to continue to move forward with the policing administrator, the assistant director of human services positions.

Thank you. You. So just to reiterate, we will be hearing the other two salary class ifications, not that part one that's listed here. Of course, folks can still make public comment if they choose, but that's not gonna be voted on today, and that's all.

Okay thank you just noting the changes made to the order of the agenda to hear item seven four five three and then six. Now proceeding with item number one approval of the draft minutes from the committee meeting held on 03/10/2026 and there are no speakers on this

item. I'll entertain a motion.

Move approval. Second. Thank you. We have a motion made by council member Brown, seconded by council member Unger to accept the draft minutes from the committee meeting held on 03/10/2026. On roll. Council members Brown. Aye. Unger. Aye. Wong. Aye. And chair Ramachandran. Aye. Thank Item number four passes with four ayes to accept the draft minutes from 03/10/2026. Reading in item two, determination of scheduled outstanding committee items and we have no speakers on this item.

Thank you. Is anything from staff? Okay. I will move the item.

Thank you. Thank you. We have a motion made by chair Ramachandran seconded by council member Brown to accept the determination of scheduled outstanding committee items as is. On roll council members Brown. Aye. Unger. Aye.

Wong. Aye. And chair Ramachandran.

Aye. Thank you. Item number two passes with four ayes to accept the determination of scheduled outstanding committee items. Reading in item number seven, receive an informational report on fiscal year two thousand twenty five to twenty six second quarter revenues and expenditures results and year end estimates for the general purpose fund and select funds. And we have two speakers that signed up to speak.

Thank you. To staff, I have presentation.

Thank you. And K Top, we do have a presentation. We'll get it started. Staff could come to the podium please. So I'll give you guys a little bit of background on this report.

This is our second quarter revenue and expenditure report. As you are all aware, the city provides, quarterly revenue and expenditure reports throughout the course of the fiscal year to provide updates on our revenues and expenditures. If you can click over to report background, please, Jose. The context of this report is it will is in alignment with our consolidated fiscal policy and will inform you on the status of our general purpose fund along with some other significant funds over and we do this over the course of the year. The upshot of this report is the general purpose fund's budget is holding steady.

While we're a little bit under on revenues and expenditures, the budget is in alignment within 1% of what we expected. Our expectation is that we will be able to end this fiscal year in roughly the same financial position we started with, which if I can recall you all back to the Q4 report, after a lot of movement last fiscal year, we did end up in a positive position over the end of the Q4. And so I believe we will be able to maintain that position with plus or minus 1% through the end of this fiscal year. I'm a hand it over to Jose Segura to go over our revenue results.

Thank you, director Johnson. Through the chair, my name is Jose Segura, principal budget and management analyst in the revenue bureau. Through the 2026, we project that general purpose fund revenues will come in below the adjusted budget by about $59,900,000 or 7.1%. However, that comparison includes a planned use of fund balance to cover prior year carry forwards. If we set aside those one time uses of fund balance and focus only on the actual revenues, the shortfall is projected at just under 1% below budget.

The shortfall is concentrated in a few major categories, which are property tax, sales tax and utility consumption tax. These are three of the city's largest revenue sources, so even small percentage changes can have a noticeable impact on the overall budget. This slide completes the GPF revenue by category table with the overall total shown here. Excluding the anticipated one time use of fund balance, revenues are projected to end the year about $7,400,000 or 0.94 percent below budget. And I'll go into each of the key drivers in more detail starting with property tax.

Property tax revenue is projected at $312,300,000 which is about $10,000,000 or 3.1% below budget. Historically, property tax revenue has grown around 6% annually over the past twenty years. Coming into this fiscal year, the city had already anticipated that property tax growth would slow compared to recent trends. The five year financial forecast in the budget assumed growth of about 3% for fiscal year twenty five, twenty six, assuming proportionally fewer property sales and corresponding reassessments. However, actual growth came in significantly lower than expected with assessed taxable values increasing by less than 1% this year in the city.

This was largely due to Prop eight reductions, which temporarily allow for lower assessed values when the market conditions decline. Commercial properties were affected the most. Utility consumption tax revenue is projected at $70,300,000 which is about $5,400,000 or 7.1% below While the budget projected continued growth in utility rates through this fiscal year, rates have instead stabilized at a relatively high level following several years of increases. Over the past decade, the revenue grew significantly largely because the utility rates, especially electricity rates have been rising quickly. This year, however, rates have started to stabilize.

According to the California Public Utility Commission twenty twenty five Q4 report, the sharp increases in utility rates we signed prior years have leveled off. As a result, revenue growth has also slowed. In fact, year to date collections for utility consumption tax is slightly below last year's level through the Q2. And the year end estimate now aligns with last year's totals. Sales tax revenues projected at $81,200,000 which is about $3,000,000 or $3.6 below budget.

This includes an estimated $21,800,000 in Measure A revenue, which took effect in October 2025 and will be in effect for three quarters of this fiscal year. The most recent detailed data available through Q1 shows that different sales tax categories were on average about 4.5% lower than at the same time last year in terms of gross receipts, with the biggest declines projected in general consumer goods and fuel and service stations. And I will now hand it off to the budget team who will present the expenditures.

Daniel Mariano, budget management analyst. For general purpose fund expenditures, they are currently projected to end the year 4,910,000 over the adjusted budget. And over these next two slides, that number will be broken down by department. A majority of departments are projected to end FY twenty twenty six under budget with most of them having spent 50% or less of their adjusted budget through the second quarter as shown on the right side of the slide. HR at the bottom and a handful of other departments as you can see on the next slide, are projected to overspend unfortunately.

Now the primary reason for this projected overspending is due to the adjustment related to one time bonuses that were paid out to employees earlier this year along with additional possible carry forwards. Now however, without these adjustments, all departments in the general purpose fund would have projected to come in under budget. So if we're strictly looking

at them on an operational basis, departments are still under spending with their budget. I'll pass it back to director Johnson to finish off the rest of the presentation.

Absolutely. I wanna highlight before Daniel moves off of that slide that your two largest departments in the general purpose fund, police and fire, are both projected to be under budget. That's not something we traditionally see. So I wanna call that out. That's not a small feat of achievement.

And as Daniel mentioned, the key driver of overspending is the fact that we did issue one time bonuses entirely out of the general purpose fund and we did not budget those departments to have bonuses from the general purpose fund. So you'll see in some departments like public works or human resources which are mostly not general purpose fund funded. They have this bonus expense but no budget for it. They're coming out of the general purpose fund and out of their budget but we have the resources to cover that from last year's fund balance. So that's kind of an artifact of this presentation as Daniel mentioned.

Aside from that, everyone would be under budget. Moving on to our fund balance and this is the takeaway slide. If you guys can recall back to last fiscal year, we ended just above, just below $17,000,000 to the positive in your general purpose fund. We're expecting to close out this year roughly 20 to the positive, roughly a $3,000,000 bettering. It's halfway through the fiscal year. Dollars 3,000,000 on $900,000,000 is a very, very small margin. It's less than half a percent of that margin. So effectively, your biggest takeaway on your general purpose fund is we are exactly where we thought we would be. Your budget is holding pat. Again, you're a little low on your departmental expenditures, a little low on revenues, both are coming in but that's lining out and ending you about $3,000,000 to the positive.

We are maintaining compliance with our reserve policies. As you know, we ended last year with an intact emergency reserve. We remain intact for that. We do not have any money in our rainy day fund, but we didn't have any last year. That has not changed. And we're in compliance with our OMERS reserve policy as well. You have some other key funds that are notable here. We have some positive projected balances across a number of fund sets and we'll be addressing them as we come into our budget cycle and we'll find our projections. This affordable housing number is probably the one mostly of concern to us. I do think that we will cure this over the course of a couple of years, as we continue to generate revenue in the source.

I'm not super overly concerned but I do want to point this out to you in terms of its balances. And again, we're projected to be positive in your internal service funds. Moving forward, the city does continue to face some key pressures. I want to know that we have continued increases in our CalPERS and healthcare and insurance costs. Federal government remains a source of uncertainty for us both in terms of what they fund directly and the actions they take and how those affect the economy.

We have to consider that we need to move into compliance with restoring our ballot measure MOEs. We have negative funds. We have a ballot measure on this June's ballot. And we have significant deferred costs for equipment, facilities, and technology. We have opportunities from last year to continue to build on revenue collection performance.

One of the things that was not underperforming this year was your business tax and we continue to do well in terms of trying to drive in that resource. We need to continue to focus on other resources within the general purpose fund where we can continue to drive revenue improvement. We had a positive beginning position. We did have a successful access to bond market and we have been pretty good at maintaining spending discipline as shown by if you remove out that sort of contribution of the one time bonuses, every department in the general purpose fund coming in under budget. With that, I will pause and note again these key takeaways but take any questions that you might have.

Director Johnson and the entire finance team. I think this is a great indication that we're on our way to continue to be on stable footing, less half a percentage point plus or minus on our general purpose fund is seems very good news. And, you know, a big thanks to our revenue division in particular for working very hard to collect previously uncollected business taxes and to try to get as much revenues as possible. And I have just two questions. One about what are the realities that's kind of outside the city of Oakland's control, which is primarily property taxes. Are other cities experiencing this as well in the region?

Yes, absolutely. So what Jose mentioned in terms of Prop eight reductions is a factor that you're seeing throughout Alameda County and the Bay Area in general. As we all know, the office market has been one of the places where it's been harder hit come pandemic. Under California law, a taxpayer has the ability if they feel like they're paying above market value to ask the assessor, who's an elected official, to reassess their property tax down. The assessor does key work and makes that determination based on what they see the market at.

Whenever possible, we do try to provide input whenever we can to mitigate that if it's going to be an impact to the city. But that is something we're seeing across the county and across our region. So it is not an Oakland specific factor. We do have the biggest downtown in Alameda County. So in terms of commercial properties, we tend to be affected a little bit more compared to our other compatriot cities in the county.

But you would see a similar factor happening in San Francisco and Santa Clara County with San Jose. That's not an unusual trend. The nice thing about Prop eight reassessments is should the market take off again, instead of growing 2% per year to get back to where they were, the assessor can reset them all in one go to that prior value. So should the market come back, we can, this can be a faster increase back to where we were too. So it falls faster based on the market but it can come back faster. So we're continuing to watch and monitor for that.

Thank you. I think that's great news. And can you differentiate again how we're doing on the residential assessments versus commercial? It's clear that commercial property values are down in the region but how are we doing on the residential property?

Your residential market continues to be, I wouldn't say great guns strong but robust, stable. We continue to get our 2% growth rates out of our normal residential properties. Your property market is fairly stable. The only thing that I would be concerned about on the residential market side is, and it's less to do with your property tax, more to do with your RETT, right? Interest rates remain fairly high compared to our recent trends.

That high interest rate does discourage a lot of people from getting into the market. And so when we have a better market going, you get more property turnover which means you get more reassessments to market rate value which tends to drive your property tax number a little bit higher than it would normally. But what you're seeing right now is a healthy continuing real estate market on the residential sector side. And hopefully as we get some development projects built, we'll continue to see growth in that space.

Clarifying that the estimate at the end of that fiscal year, we're anticipating to have a surplus of $20,000,000 Is that

That's right. So your bank account at the end of last year, if you think the difference between your paycheck, your expense bills and what's in your bank account. What you're seeing is your banking account growing from just under $17,000,000 to just over $20,000,000 That's what we're projecting. So that's again a very, very small marginal increase on your general purpose fund. Let's say $800,000,000 right? That's, but marginal increase is good to go. That's what we want to see, less than half a percent. Again, meaning that based on all the things we're seeing right now, we are trending almost exactly where we were given we're half a year into the fiscal year. So this is very positive. There are lots of things that are unexpected and could happen.

I should note when we did this report, at the time we were doing this data, we were not in a war in The Middle East. That wasn't true at that time. There are things that can occur. But in terms of our internal management of both our revenues and expenditures, we're exactly where we thought we would be.

Great. Thank you. Councilmember Wong.

Thank you. Through the chair. Sorry. Can you just explain because I'm seeing in table one a lot of numbers in the red and where the year end estimate is $784,000,000 for revenues and $849,000,000 for expenditures. How is it that we're not ending in the year in the deficit? Just

Absolutely. Yeah. So a key unbudgeted expense are the one time bonuses for civilian employees. So while we agreed to that in labor agreements, we did not budget for that. It came after your budget.

Those expenses come entirely out of your general purpose fund regardless of where the department is funded normally. So you'll find a department that has no general purpose fund with potentially a general purpose fund expense, if that makes sense. And so they could actually be over budget in some space. But that we all planned to cover that expenditure out of the unrealized resources at the end of or the excess resources from the Kaiser sale, Kaiser billing sale from last year. So we have those resources in there, again, unbudgeted.

We have the expense unbudgeted, which is why I want to call you to that fund balance table at the end which shows that slight increase. We're doing a little bit. We're getting very, very marginal improvement on last year. If you do a budget to actuals comparison though, which is the standard way of you doing this report, you'll find these unbudgeted expenditures coming up. But again, the performance of our departments as if we had not had that bonus is such that everyone would be under budget and that under budgeting compared to our slightly lower revenue connection would actually be a slight positive number, a slight improvement about $3,000,000

Okay. Gotcha. So it's these were unbudgeted but we would see in the actuals is essentially what

you're Exactly.

Okay.

Okay. Unbudgeted but anticipated. Anticipated This is not different than our trend. We expected this, but it is not formally budgeted. So we have to show you budget actual comparison to your formally adopted and adjusted budgets.

Okay. Okay. Gotcha.

And I was just curious, there were a couple of expenditures that were over budget. They were the non department and port as well as the human services department. What was driving those?

Sure.

Yeah.

So on the non departmental port side, that's primarily, again, some of our sort of resources that were that are driven from the last fiscal coming forward along with non departmental receives the recoveries from expenditures and other funds related to federal grants. We are not doing, as you might imagine, we have some cantankerous issues with the federal government regarding our grant expenditures. One of the things that gets recovered for non departmental is actually the administrative side of those grants. And so you see that as actually an offset in your nonapartmental space. And if we're not getting those offsets because we're not getting some of those grants in or we have issues in terms of the draws on them, it's going to show as a problem expenditure space.

We are working to rectify that. And again, don't expect it to be a problem at the end of the fiscal year.

Okay. And the human services department?

That's primarily human services is mostly non general purpose fund funded, has a lot of staff. The vast majority of if you look at I'm going pick a program set, for example. If I look at our homelessness services unit within human services, a lot of that is in Measure Q. A lot of that is in Measure W or vacancy tax. Some of it is in federal and state grants like HAP and CDBG and HOPWA and whatnot.

And so what you're seeing is those sources are not actually paying for the one time bonuses, the general purpose fund is. And the Human Services Department was again not delivered a general purpose fund budget for those. But we are charging them out of there because that's actually where the resource sat at the end of last fiscal year per what we saw. So you'll see that a better example on that, again, if you look at human resources or planning and building. The fact that those are over budget planning and building is almost not almost entirely not in the general purpose fund. But again, has an expenditure now. And so that's what you're seeing in terms of that dynamic.

Okay. Gotcha. Helpful.

Thank you. Before I move to council member Brown, just one other positive I'd like to highlight and ask about is for the first time I feel like since I've been on council, OPD seems to be under budget. What is this a result of?

That's absolutely so I want to commend former Chief Mitchell and current Chief Beer for their active work in aggressively managing the overtime to deploy it primarily, I would say exclusively when necessary. I will note that they are doing a very, very active job of trying to manage that both on the PD and I should mention on the fire side as well. I do have to caveat, we have both PD and fire could be required to respond to a major event and we haven't had a really significant major event this fiscal year yet. So should something come up potentially due to the federal level, potentially due to something else that occurs, There might, this might be a trend that changes. But again, sort of good news on no major events thus far.

But again, we're at war in The Middle East. It's really, really warm outside right now which while lovely for our weather is not super good for our fire season. Things could occur. We have to continue to monitor that. But in sort of normal spaces, both chiefs are doing a very, very active job of managing their overtime budget and maintaining expenses within it.

I will say some credit is perhaps also due to this body for ensuring that the budgets that were adopted for PD and FHIR are reasonable and are something that actually sort of aligns with the resource spending pool that they're going to have out through the year. We do have from many, many years ago an audit finding saying that one of the things that council needs to do is provide a reasonable budget for police and fire that they actually can live within. And that is something that we adopted in our biennial budget of last year. So it's both good management, good budgeting practice, and hopefully it's something that we can continue through the end of this fiscal year.

Thank you. Councilmember Brown.

Excellent. Thank you so much. Through the chair to our finance director, know, thank you to you and the team for such a comprehensive report. My question has to do with slide number 14. It's my understanding that from the last time we had this report presented to us it appears that fund eighteen seventy the negative balance continues to grow and I know you spoke very quickly about this item but I wanted to ask more specifically what is the plan to bring this fund into a positive balance?

And I guess I'm also curious I guess what is contributing to the negative fund balance? And then also is this also a fund that actually the dollars come from the general fund? I was trying to recall the exact methodology of like how we fund this. And then I guess my last question is is are there is there staff that are paid out of this fund?

I will answer all of those questions. I'll take the middle one first. So the origin of the resource for 1870. 1870 is a city's is a city fund that is set up from 25% of the former redevelopment money that came back to all taxing entities following the dissolution of redevelopment. So when we dissolved the redevelopment agencies, when the state did that back in, I think, January 2012, resources were given back to the taxing entities of which the city was won.

The city has elected to put 25% of that resource aside in an affordable housing trust fund. The city also originally used this as the fund for receiving its affordable housing and jobs housing impact fees. That was the original source that was happening here. In over the course of the last sort of three years, there are two major developments. One, the council as a policy to balance last year's budget adopted a policy by which we could divert resources out of that on a temporary basis because it is general fund money to help balance the general purpose fund.

And so that did drive your negative going into last year. And so we brought it down. So it came in a little bit under in terms of fund balance last year. And that's the majority of what we're continuing to see this year. And a second practice that we moved is we created designated funds for 1870 in their 1871 and 1872 for your affordable housing and jobs housing impact fees. And so we did a reconciliation by which we removed the fund balance attributed to those two and move them to their own separate funding sources. And so the upside of all that is this fund ended up a little bit negative. The other two funds are actually positive. And so net together, they're all positive. This fund is so this is an active practice where we have to manage this.

The biggest thing you'll see here is our expected year in expenditure projections are almost $34,000,000 compared to a revenue number of about 14. This is mostly carry forward expenditure for existing projects. So actually most of what you spend out on this is preexisting projects. This 34,000,000 may not actually all be spent this year because it takes a while to actually do these projects on a cash basis. We actually have a balance in this fund that's positive.

But if we spent if we spent everything we're authorized to spend, we were able to complete every single one of those projects this year, we would go negative. And so that's what we're saying with this negative $5,000,000 If you look at that 14,000,000 as your beginning balance, there's actually a positive balance in to start it. That's the dynamic. So I don't actually expect to project, to spend everything out of this fund in the current year. But for conservativeness sake, we do forecast it that way.

And we can resolve this sort of what we would call the negative appropriation balance with careful budgeting over the course of the mid cycle. One action you could take is you could reduce any reliance the general purpose fund has and move back to the 25% allocation. The other thing that we're likely to see is we do have vacancies in this fund. This does form a lot of our affordable housing staff. And so we're going to see some natural resolution of this with vacancy savings.

The other thing we'll be working with housing to do is see if any of the projects that are funded out of 1870 or more properly moved to 1871 or 1872 where we have positive balances. We can shift where the project project funding source is if it's eligible for affordable housing and job impact fees and sort of equalize across the funds to make sure that they're all on a positive position. So again, I don't think this is a major concern in the long run. It's not cash negative to start and it probably will not be cash negative at the end of this year. And we're actively trying to manage it.

Any other comments? Okay. We can move to public comment. Actually I'm sorry I have one more question and that's the positive balance on measure q. So the estimated positive balance about 14,000,000. Is this primarily due to hiring and not being able hire for budgeted positions?

That's absolutely. It's primarily driven by salary savings from prior from both the prior year and in forecast in the current fiscal year. That's exactly what you're saying.

Okay. Thank you. Move to public comment.

Calling in the names that signed up to speak on item number seven David Boatwright and Kevin Daly.

David Boatwright district four. I have a lot of confidence in our finance director. He is so knowledgeable, it's unbelievable. But there's something in this report that really confused me, and it was on Page eight, first paragraph on that page. And it says that because of the underages on revenues and the overages on expenses, approximately $64,840,000 operating deficit will occur. I know you all don't answer questions, but it's in your report, so it ought to be something that somebody can address. Thank you.

Alright. Kevin Dally also from district four. I want to call out one part that I think is interesting, attachment a, page eight. The parking fines and penalties have come in 6.1 above budget so they are collecting more fines and penalties than was budgeted. And this is with the current parking and mobility team as it's set up at present.

There'll be increased enforcement in April, expanding to Sunday enforcement, and that's also noted in this attachment. So I think we'll see more increases. And I'm looking forward to more parking enforcement including Sundays. I also want to thank again the bond sales have been wonderful. Street paving has done fantastic job. It meant my ride into city council today. One small one more small street is nice and smooth and no longer bumpy and I'm looking forward to more being done. Thanks. Thanks for the bond sales.

Thank you for your comments, Cher.

That concludes all speakers on this item.

Thank you. Is there any comments from the finance department

at all? I

will just clarify for the for the record that we are expecting slightly better in the general purpose fund at the end of this fiscal year than we ended last year and that should be the key takeaway from everyone on this body.

Okay. Thank you. Is there a motion to receive and file this report?

So moved.

Second. Thank you. We have a motion made by council member Brown, seconded by council member Wong. To receive and file this informational report in committee on role council members Brown? Aye. Unger? Aye. I'm sorry. Wong. Aye. And chair Ramachanjan.

Aye.

Thank you. Item number seven passes with four ayes to receive and file this informational report in committee. Now reading in item number four. Receive an informational report on citywide staffing from the city administrator regarding citywide vacancy rates and status of as of 02/01/2026, budgeted vacancy rates for fiscal year 02/2526, the vacancy rates for regional local public entities, recruitment outreach and community engagement, and the the analysis of the city workforce and recruitment conditions. And we have three speakers that signed up.

Thank you. Please go ahead.

I have a presentation. Hello everyone. My name is Elaine Reyes. I'm a supervising personnel operations analyst in the recruitment operations division of the human resources management department. I'm here today to present an overview of the citywide staffing report as of 02/01/2026.

Just to give you a little background, over the past several HRM has prepared a report assessing vacancy data for city positions analyzing several key staffing factors including recruitment improvements, retention trends, and employee tenure. Today's presentation will highlight key data points and observations from the report and will also include information as set forth by Assembly Bill 2,561 which is a California state law requiring agencies to publicly report on job vacancies, recruitment, and retention efforts annually. Before reviewing the data, I clarify how vacancies were defined for the purposes of this report. For this report, vacancies are defined as non encumbered and unfrozen. Non encumbered positions are available to be filled and are not being held vacant for any other purpose.

Encumbered positions on the other hand are tied to funding for overtime, temporary staffing, under filled positions or acting assignments. Frozen positions are roles that exist in the budget but are not currently available to be filled. Positions may be frozen due to budget constraints, strategy, strategic or operational realignments, or pending decisions about the future of the role. Because these positions are not available for recruitment or hiring, they are generally excluded from the vacancy counts. As of 02/01/2026, the city had 4,264.17 full time equivalent positions.

This includes full time and permanent part time positions with some positions funded at less than one FTE. Of those positions, 839.75 positions were vacant which calculates to 19.69% as our vacancy rate. Something to note about the positions that were included here, we did identify a few that don't fit the general description that we normally include. We identified some positions that were authorized and frozen as well as some filled unauthorized and unfrozen positions. There were also a couple of encumbered positions that were authorized but frozen.

We included these, exceptions to provide an accurate a more accurate snapshot of the city staffing levels. Now with that context, let's take a look at how this compares to historical data. This chart here shows the historical vacancy rates since 2020. Overall, the vacancy rates increased significantly after 2021 and have remained consistently high since then, generally hovering between 1820%. This suggests the city has been operating with a structurally higher vacancy level for the last several years.

For your reference, last year HRM reported a vacancy rate of 17.94%. So although vacancy levels have increased, the city's authorized positions have also gone up. The vacancy information was analyzed in several ways, one of which was by department. This chart here highlights the top five departments with the highest vacancy rate percentages. Looking at percentages helps to show the relative staffing impact within each department.

As shown here, you can see that West has the highest vacancy rate at 55% followed by HRM with 45, police commission at 39%, and DVP at 37. Public ethics also made the top five. However, if you take a look at the data, it looks like they only have four vacant positions out of their relatively small total FTE of 12, which results in a higher percentage of 33%. For And that reason, should also look at the data by the total number of vacant positions. And we look at this data this way, the total number of vacancies shows where the largest staffing gaps exist across the city.

The departments with the highest number of vacancies were fire, Department of Transportation, police, public works, and human services. Next, we can take a look at how the data was broken out by union. This shows the vacancy rate broken down by each of the six unions that the city has a memorandum of understanding with, otherwise known as an MOU. You can see here that local twenty one holds the highest percentage at 24.62. Local twenty one also has the highest number with about 350 vacancies.

Now within each MOU for each union, there are multiple bargaining units. And this table here shows the top nine bargaining units with the highest vacancy percentages. These were identified as being subject to additional reporting as required by assembly bill two five six one because 20% or more of their positions in their bargaining unit are unfilled. The assembly bill requires agencies to provide detailed information such as number of vacancies, which you saw on the previous slide, the number of applicants for those vacancies, the average number of days it takes to complete the hiring process from when it's posted, and opportunities for improvement. We looked at data collected five years back, so from 02/01/2021 through 02/01/2026, with the bargaining units identified that had at least one active vacancy.

This table shows the number of applications received and the time to hire, which considers the total average number of days from the hiring process took, breaking it down into two Job posting to eligible list and then referral to hire. Only recruitments with complete data for both stages were included to ensure accurate time to hire reporting. As mentioned, the hiring timeline was measured in two stages. HRM is responsible for activities during stage one from when announcement is open to when an eligible list is established. Whereas hiring departments are responsible for activities during stage two from when a candidate is referred up until a hire is made.

Here's the visual representation of the data from the previous slide broken down into the stages. For classifications represented by Local twenty one, the departmental hiring phase averaged four weeks longer than HRM's recruitment phase. For classifications represented by SEIU, the timelines for both stages were nearly identical. HRM has implemented several strategies to reduce time to hire such as improved coordination with departments to streamline hiring processes, including creating an operations team to enhance departmental support. We're also looking at strengthening recruitment planning and leveraging digital tools to reduce administrative delays.

Now we're going to take a look at each vacancy status. On 02/04/2026, HRM reviewed the vacancy status of all eight fifty one positions. Each vacant position was categorized into a status as shown here including how it compares to last year's report. Some notable observations. Of the total vacancies, 426 do not have a requisition submitted by the department a department.

This represents 50% of all vacancies compared to 59% last year. Without a requisition, no action can be taken to fill these positions. Additionally, of these four twenty six vacancies, a 116 or 14% of the total vacancies have an eligible list available. This means HRM previously established an eligible list with qualified candidates available to be interviewed. However, the department has not yet submitted a requisition to begin their hiring process.

Throughout this process, HRM also identified a few instances where eligible lists were not utilized before expiration. To support proactive workforce planning, we implemented distributing a monthly report to departments to encourage timely use or extension of active eligible eligible lists. 23% of vacancies are currently in progress to be filled. Departments are in either the interview process or have identified a candidate. This is an increase from 19% last year.

HRM is currently assigned to work to fill 20% of the total vacancies, 5% are pending HR analyst assignments, that's a jump from 10 to 40. We're also actively working on 11% of the vacancies compared to 6% last year, that's an increase from 49 vacancies to 92 vacancies. And in addition, compared to last year, there's been a significant increase in vacancies resulting from class specification and title changes. That number, nearly tripled from last year from 11 to 40. Since the last staffing report in 2025, we've strengthened our classification and recruitment capacity through training and expanded responsibilities amongst the team.

Another way we sliced the data was to look at sworn versus non sworn physicians as compared to last year's report. Non sworn decreased from 23.5 to 22.11% whereas there was a large increase in sworn from 5.15 to 13.55%. Looking at separations for the past ten years, FY 2425 total separations increased by 45.6. And then looking at that, you may think there should be more of a pressure on recruitment and the need to outpace separations with hiring. However, if you look at the reasons for the separations, there was a 55.8% in retirements.

Retirements are more predictable than resignations and can result in a loss of institutional knowledge, technical expertise, and supervisory capacity. This increases the need for supporting internal advancement and enhancing workplace engagement with the hope that it will result in long term retention. Police recorded the highest number of separations representing 30% of the city's total separations. Fire followed at 13% with public works close behind with 12%. When looking at this data, police employees are leaving well before retirement eligibility suggesting retention and engagement challenge Police may benefit from targeted retention efforts.

In contrast, fire and public work separations were largely retirement based and more predictable. These departments would benefit from succession planning and knowledge transfer initiatives. Employee tenure has been slowly increasing with a point 9% increase from 2023 I'm sorry, '23 to '24 to 2425. So far, we've seen an increase of 14.5 for this fiscal year. As far as data collected from our regional comparator jurisdictions, this information has been collected since May 2022.

The city is most in line with Hayward and Richmond in terms of our vacancy rate. In summary, HRM is committed to not only strengthening hiring but also retention. We're looking to continue to partner with departments to streamline hiring processes and reduce time to fill and support departments in attracting and retaining talent while adapting to evolving workforce needs. In partnership with the Department of Race and Equity, we are embedding equitable practices in recruitment and employment. And additionally, I do want to point out that recruitment classification does not is not alone in this effort.

Our HRM's organizational development and training division also shares a strong commitment to strengthening retention through employee development, career growth and support for supervisors and managers and also equipping leaders with the tools engagement in a high performing workforce. That's all I have for today. Any questions?

Thank you. I appreciate the presentation and some of the slightly positive numbers that you made in comparison to last year. But to be frank, I think that it's shameful that we have 840 vacancies. But when someone goes to the city of Oakland job websites, as of this morning, there's 40. And of those 40, only 20 are full time positions.

A year ago, after this annual report came out, I talked to residents about this, and the number one person this is the way that the city is perceived with the public, that we are not trying to hire, that departments or HR have their own reasons why they don't want to hire or they only hire their friends. This is the the very real perception of how we are treated. I appreciate that there's some minor improvements, but these numbers are the worst in four years. And other cities we cannot keep talking about the pandemic has hindered progress because other cities have caught up. It's understandable in 2020, in 2021, even 2022 if our numbers were down, but it is 2026.

And we have a 20% vacancy rate for key public service delivery roles. I don't back in 2023, June, my first budget cycle, we had found money and passed the addition of two tree services workers, essential positions to keep our communities free from trees falling on the ground, fire safety, a whole bunch of other things. It's 2026 and they're not hired. There are so many positions, frontline service delivery positions, street sweepers, sign painters, engineers, things that affect everyday public life that Oakland residents want to have as jobs, and they're not even on the website. So I know that there's some modest increases being made, but how can the HR department have 35 vacancies if we're trying to increase the speed of getting these things out there?

And there's only so much you can blame departments. I know that there's some numbers of requisitions that haven't been submitted, but what what about all the ones that have been submitted? I think this is frankly disgraceful, and I would I don't even have concrete questions because this is this was shocking to me to see the numbers increase from last year that it's been the highest since the pandemic, and I don't know what to do. But the public see the public of those Oakland residents who wanna work for the city see us us as an ivory tower that doesn't wanna give jobs to Oakland residents. And I think that perception can only be changed when there is proactive hiring, proactive outreach to the community, telling Oakland residents the city has 800 jobs available to you and you should apply.

Colleagues, council member Wong.

Hi. I completely agree with the chair. I I will just to start off on a good note, I will say this this report is very thorough so thank you for putting it together but I think it just really it's concerning and I think the thing that really sticks out to me is what is going on with the HR department itself because the vacancy rate is really shocking and it seems like filling that HR department would ensure benefits across the city to fill all these vacancies and it was noteworthy that for many of the vacancies that there was no requisition. And so that's a department issue but for HR, I assume that you all need to fill your own requisition so why hasn't that been done? I don't see on the website any posting for the HR analysts that are needed to fill so many of these other positions and so that is just one that I read that and I'm just deeply concerned.

Through the chair, Amber Lytle, human resources manager. So a couple points I wanna address. First with the vacancies within HRM, those were added in January. We did just close the senior analyst posting two weeks ago, the assistant analyst posting last week. So we are in the process of filling those positions. But some of those positions are newly added to the budget, so we haven't had the opportunity to fill them. We are actively working on it, but that contributes to our vacancy rate, in additional positions that were added this year. Regarding our postings, one announcement can cover multiple jobs. So just because that if, you know, you only see 20 at a time, that could fill sixty, eighty jobs. So it is a little bit deceptive when you look at it that way.

It doesn't indicate how many jobs per posting.

How long does it take once a budget once a position has been budgeted to get it up on the website?

It all depends on the department's participation but once they've submitted a requisition our time to hire is less than three months. We've significantly decreased that time frame and one of the things that Elaine had pointed out our time the HRM's time versus the department time, the department time should be down to about sixty days and they are far exceeding our timeline so that's where we really need to partner with our department to submit those requisitions and then once they get those names to act upon that.

Okay. What about the HR analyst positions since that's one that you don't need to, there is no dependency on the departments. That's just an HR thing. How long has that taken to post after it was budgeted for?

So when they were added in January, the postings went live in February. Part of the process though we do have to get budget approval so even though they are added into our budget we still have to submit the requisition and it goes through a level of approval. So it starts at the department head then it goes to budget to approve and then it goes to equal access. So there's a few steps along the way. It's not just submit a requisition, it's approved the next day. And some of them budget takes a little bit of time to make sure yes it's in the budget but can we actually fill it. So that contributes to the timeline as well.

Okay. Thank you. Councilman Bunker.

Did you wanna answer that question first?

I'm sorry.

Did you wanna answer that question before did you have more to add?

I well, I just have some actually a different comment to make, but you go ahead, council member.

If if still on go ahead.

Oh. Good morning. Mary Howe, HR director. I think I just want to make sure that we are focusing on the right number members of the finance and management committee. So I think that we had a similar situation last year where we reported a very stark high number of vacancies because that's an actual count of positions that exist within the city.

But I think what we did this year in the report was to highlight for you that 51% of those positions or 404 31 of them actually have no activity. We we are not able to act on that because they're either no requisition or they're on hold for by the department for various reasons. We have a 197 that are in active recruitment process but because they still are not encumbered, they have they report vacancy. So they're in somewhere during the interview process or backgrounds or other hiring processes. And so the the last four items in the chart that miss Reyes showed you totals roughly 25 percent of those 851 classifications I mean, excuse me, positions that require some sort of action.

So I think I just wanna make sure that the members of this committee are focusing on the right sort of breakdown statistics rather than the big number because that big number exists because they are not encumbered but they're but half of them, there is no activity and we're not able to act without a requisition. Thank you.

Thank you all for being here and and I understand how difficult this is. You know, I've worked for the city for almost thirty years and HR and hiring has been the choke point and the bottleneck and and the department with the most difficulty for

as long

as I remember. And so I think that, you know, we're all trying to be as gentle as possible with everyone. You know, I saw a lot in the report blaming some of the delays on the departments and that may be the case. I think we need to get a lot better at really calling out where the choke points are and let's cut through the niceties. And I would hope that in future reports, you really highlight where those bottlenecks are because I still can't entirely tell where the bottlenecks are.

If it's the departments, then let's figure out how to make the departments better. If it's HR, if it's budget, if it's finance, like I still can't tell where the bottlenecks are and that is what I've been trying to cut through for for years. I mean do you could you could you rank the three bottlenecks for me or the top three?

I think if I had to off the top of my head I think it really falls when the names are referred to the department, how long it takes the department to fill. So I can give you an example. There was a position that was available. The department requested to use acting pay to fill the position and exempt position and why don't you just fill it? You have the names. Well, it's gonna take us like three weeks before we can assemble an interview panel. We told you in advance we're we're working on this process. We told you we're gonna establish the eligibleness. Why aren't you ready? So what we've done within HRM is we've created a departmental personnel support team and the team is really focused on how can we enhance these processes for the department how can we better support the department.

So we can do the blame game but we really need to step back and say what resources can we provide to the department so that we can help them fill these positions.

I'd like to see when we come back in future reports how that's working. Like specifically, need to stop sort of lamenting the fact that it's a problem and actually getting at the nub of it. One specific thing I noticed is that I think over the period you assessed, which was five years, there were eighty seven incidents instances where people died on an active list. And so my understanding is that is a time when we had an open position, we had a person on a list who was qualified and ready to take the job and that list expired before we could fill it, why have we had 87 lists die?

The departments didn't submit requisitions. So it could be there's multiple instances but let's say that one department has a vacancy, they submit the requisition and we create the eligible list but a different department also has a position that same classification. If they don't submit the requisition they're not gonna use the eligible list. So one department might initiate the recruitment process and there's a list available but the other departments aren't submitting the requisitions to utilize them. You also have to remember we have restricted list and open list so that's a combination of the effect too. We might have only used the restricted and never touched the open, different instances.

This seems to me like the lowest hanging fruit. These are situations where we have somebody who wants the job, we have the job that's open, let's put those two together and make a beautiful marriage.

And we do have our principal analysts. They meet with our departments either monthly or biweekly depending on the size of the department and their needs. But we go through and say here's your PC report, here's your available positions, when are you gonna submit the requisition? Please submit the requisition. So we do actively work with the departments but we can't submit it on their behalf. They have to prioritize what they wanna hire for and submit those requisitions so we can support them.

What do you all need to make this better? Because I think you can sense from everyone on this committee that this is something we're all really concerned about. What what do you need to fix this problem?

The department heads need to authorize the submission of the requisitions and then the departmental spots would submit those so that we can start that recruitment process.

You feel like the department heads know what they need to do?

Not necessarily. I don't know if all of the department heads are communicating with their single points of contact regularly.

To the city administrator, how can we help the department heads get to understand what they need to do?

Through the chair to council member Unger. I think one of the things that we're, you know, talking about here, there is a lot of emphasis placed on the human resources department and I think they've owned the areas in which they've needed to improve. The the other reality is your human resources department has also taken onus and responsibility of making sure that they're centralizing the spot duties to make sure that there is some centralization in how we process a lot of this information. And with that being said, we also have to factor in the fact that your department heads are also having to manage to a budget until they're trying to strategically hire within a time frame to make sure they're staying within the budget. So I'm not going to be one that'll speak out both sides of my mouth to elevate how well we're doing fiscally.

But on the flip side, we're aggressively pushing hiring because that's our our highest cost. So we got to have an honest conversation here about what are we doing with respect to how and when we hire and prioritize that hiring. But the human resources department is doing a very good job as quickly as possible to centralize a lot of duties. I think we all can attest to the fact that there have been some issues even how we move forward administratively, you know, in my office, in this body, and trying to make sure we're cleaning a lot of that up. With that being said, though, to answer your question more directly, I will actually, you know, take some time and spend that time with with, you know, director Howe to make sure we articulate what that process is and make it clear.

Because we do have quite a few new directors as well that may not be fully aware how the process works, so that they're trying to figure this thing out. And some folks may be, you know, director Lester, he's new to this thing and he probably didn't realize there was a list that was available with respect to certain positions that he may want to hire, but may not be fully aware of that. So I think it's really important for us to have this honest conversation. I think some of the questions that you all have asked are very spot on and very fair questions, and we certainly want to make sure we bring that information back. But I also want to acknowledge the reality that the human resources department is doing a lot of work to address a lot of the issues.

Some of those new positions that Ms. Lytle mentioned, Now feeding into the human resources department to move these processes along a lot faster than we have, it's going to bear a lot of fruit. But, I just appreciate the fact that they realize this is a choke point and an issue, but we're happy to bring something back to you all so that you fully you all are fully aware on how the improvements are working. And if it's not working, we'll pivot, adjust, and and and, you know, make the requisite changes that we need to.

Thank you for that. And I appreciate how hard you all are working and I apologize for my frustration. I think that, you know, every email I get from a constituent or from somebody in the city, I could send the same answer which is we can't do that because we don't have the staff. And, you know, I could from everything from policing to potholes to anything, like that could be my response. And we are just trying to figure out how to crack this nut. So thank you for working with us on that.

Thank you. Before moving to council member Brown, I I just don't think it's fair to blame department heads because in the past, back early twenty twenty four, I did a deep dive on some of these non sworn positions and other civilian roles. And when you changed your policies on asking departments for a list of top five positions to rank order where you can submit many, departments didn't know. The SPOCs didn't know. I I was engaging with with these people, and there was miscommunication.

So it's not just departments not sending you the requirements one way. It's also communication back the other, which seems to be broken, and I would love to see changes when it comes to that. But also, yes, there are, for various reasons, miscommunication, two sides not talking to each other in the same city, there's 400 requisitions not submitted. What about the other 400? There's so much that can be due outside of that, so I do hope to see that as well.

And thank you chair Ramachandra for your comments. And so of the 851, 431 have no activities, one ninety seven are in some active recruitment process including interviews and backgrounds. And so that leaves us a net of $2.02 23 that we are focusing our efforts on. And I do and I've and I believe that for the past couple times we've been here, we've addressed your concerns with the top five. That no longer exists.

I don't know where the top five came from. My staff and I've been here two years. My staff has said that they understand through the folklore, the oral tradition that once upon a time maybe there was some mutterings of the five top five. But now we actually sit down, we meet regularly with our departments and we ask them, just give us your list in rank order of what your priorities are. If filling pot if the employees if you need employees to fill potholes, tell us. You know, what is it that you need? We do not limit them to anything. So I do wanna dispel that myth. I don't know I I I do wanna respectfully dispel that myth because that does not exist.

Well, we have different versions of the truth which is fine. We're not going to debate that right here. But it is very clear in conversations that I have had with department heads, with staff, with Spock's that that was certainly not the case two years ago. But we can move on.

Thank you. And so, yes, I think as the department actually does the work, I think that we respectfully disagree with that myth. But yes, let's move on.

Alright, Councilman Brown.

Alright. Well thank you so much to my colleagues and the HR department for this comprehensive report. I'm personally focused, you know I recognize everyone is extremely frustrated and I think in this moment I'm really focused in on how we can innovate as a city and how technology comes into play here in this conversation even if we don't focus on the amount of open positions that have not received the requisition and even if we focus on the ones that have. I am curious the report states on page 18 there's a category under technology and process. And I guess I am curious with the I guess with the vacant positions that HR has, is there a specific position that is focused in on actually meeting Oaklanders like where they are and this is outside of kind of what was listed in the report where it states all of the various community engagement activities that the departments went to job fairs, etc.

But also recognizing lot of people look for jobs online. And so if for example all the job classifications aren't listed on the website and I think occasionally I'll see on the city of Oakland maybe like the LinkedIn. Sometimes on social media I'll see one offs where it's like oh we're hiring for you know a director position or something like that. But I guess I'm more interested in like what is our actual like I think I would love in this report to see something that's like hey what is our social media plan, right? Because there are so many ways that community members and especially folks who are kind of like up and coming, maybe just graduating college.

There's different ways that we should be engaging with them and it may not necessarily be you know at a random career fair that you may see the day of and honestly you can't make it. And so I guess I'm interested in like what one, have we hired someone in a role that actually manages hiring in the HR department for technology? Like do we have that?

Not specifically, no.

And so I guess like through the chair to the administration maybe potentially that could be something that we consider for the future so that we can just really put a plan in place to make sure that we are engaging with Oaklanders so that there isn't perception that we aren't trying, right? I know that the second that you know I posted an open position within my office you know I received 54 shares within thirty minutes, right? Like it was very quick and so I imagine that that same type of engagement, we would get that same type of engagement even if we break it down where it's like you know Oakland Fire Department hiring, the following positions, right? Maybe that's what we're posting about week one, week two, HR, so on and so forth. And so I think that there are some tools at our disposal to actually help get the word out and actually do some maybe more innovative recruitment to help support departments in filling these positions and then we can further you know eliminate this misconception that we aren't hiring.

So I love to have someone kind of speak to that.

Yeah, so we can absolutely work to partner with PIOs to get things out you know a little bit better but I do want to say our numbers of applicants are not hurting. We get lots of people that are applying to the jobs. It's after the process, you know, where does somebody wanna ultimately work. But we do get high numbers. So we are advertising as the jobs come available. We've implemented a few different things. So one of the things I'm happy to report, we actually have two of our staff members. They're at a career fair right now. We have we've been doing various events. One of our senior analysts, Terry Stanley did a great presentation last week at the library.

I think we had 300 people attend where he talked about how to apply for a job. Where are the pitfalls that we're seeing in the application process? So you know if people aren't filling out their application correctly and they're falling off, how can we help the public? So we are actively working on recruiting for our jobs. We've also implemented a few different things that help us internally. So we got new software in our applicant tracking system. So additional modules that will help us to hire faster. So we just implemented that. We're going through an implementation process with neo gov or government jobs is what the public sees and so that is supposed to be fully implemented and ready to go by June 5. So our team is working on that.

So we have a lot of things that are happening on the back end. We are a very small team and so we are trying to not only fill our own positions but to help fill positions citywide.

Absolutely and that makes sense and I hope that you know the open positions that you all have in HR those would be a priority to fill. And then also at the same time I know that a lot of times the community feedback that we receive is that it takes so long to actually get hired with the city and so I hope that I guess to the administration supporting the department that we could help to really like set a very strong goal of like you know by the time someone applies to the time we actually fill the position like what is that timeframe that we are actually striving for so that you know if there was 30 applicants that applied for that one position then those 29 who don't get the job can move on to maybe something else that's posted as well so that we aren't in general losing all 29, right? And then potentially that would help to fill some of the vacancies.

And through the chair, we have several council members that are actually working to fill their own positions. So I've been able to work with several of you one on one and I think you've seen some of the processes. Once somebody's selected and and onboarded, there's still the payroll paperwork that has to be filled out. There's still the, you know, I nine process and the person has to come in. So there's those other pieces that once it transfers from the department back to HR, back to payroll, so there's those things that we're working very closely with the payroll manager to make sure that we're helping to streamline those processes so we can get people on boarded as quickly as possible.

And just a comment, you're absolutely right Amber. It's been a delight working really closely with both you and Anjali with onboarding and so I'm really grateful for your support. Thank you.

Thank you and I did want to second my colleagues comments on using social media and just I think we have to meet you know 20 year olds and 30 year olds the next generation of public servants that's where they're at. I just really want to understand this whole requisition issue because I am it's a little jaw dropping in terms of the vacancies that don't have a requisition submitted. Can you walk us through exactly what that looks like and why so many department heads have not submitted it? Is that something that if we really focus on hiring up more HR analysts that the HR department could then support department heads in submitting it? Is it a highly technical or convoluted process?

I'll start off and I'll hand it to Director Johnson. Part of those additional positions that were added to our budget were to help with submission of the requisitions. One of the key things though is we don't want to just submit requisitions for every position that there is. So the department has to decide where are their priorities. You know if we submit it for the office assistant but they really needed to do the street sweeper first, we want to make sure that they're prioritizing where their needs are.

So we don't want to just submit every requisition without the department actually letting us know what are the priorities Especially for their if you know you want to hire the supervisor before you fill the position that they will be supervising. You can't hire the incumbents and then have no supervisor. So it really is a strategic process on how the requisitions are submitted. But the actual process of submitting a requisition is very easy. It takes a couple minutes, but it really is the whole thought process behind submitting the requisition.

But I'll turn

it over to

Director Johnson. Thank you for the I would

like to

pass to city administrator Johnson. And just a friendly reminder, we have forty five minutes to finish three items, one that has significant public comment. Thank you.

Thank you to the chair. Now the council member Wong, I know you have probably have a couple more questions that you'll want to ask, but but I wanna be mindful of the other items that we have. If it if it is helpful, happy to sit down and walk you through this what the process actually is, which is very consistent amongst municipalities, you know, just across the country. So happy to make and carve out that time, but but I just wanna be cognizant of the other items that we have coming up which

are Okay.

Yeah. That's fair. I'll just finish with this comment which is like there are positions like EWD's code enforcement position that have been highlighted as a priority, discussed it with the department head, they agree it's a top priority. Other departments even say this position is needed and then I look on the website and it's still not listed and so this is the kind of stuff that I just really need feel like we need to dig into. Okay. That's it. Thank you. Public speakers.

Calling in the names that sign up to speak on item number four in no particular order you can come up to the podium Seth Olier, David Boatwright, and Kevin Dali.

David Boatwright, District 4. After this bloodbath that y'all have carried on here, I think it's obvious that there's been a lack of communication both by the council, human resources and all the departments. There's no reason why there should be so many unrequisitioned positions. Now my comments. Unexplained in this report shows four frozen positions that were filled and 69 unauthorized positions that were filled.

Except in departments where there is a clear need for hiring, for example, OPD, nineeleven, street repairs, street paving, safety related infrastructure and where significant revenue generation has been proven, departments where significant non general purpose fund bond spending is available and jobs where future experience loss can be predicted due to retirements and replacement hiring is difficult. The city should not be budgeting for new positions that do not meet these criteria. We still have a budget problem. Why are we hiring 800 people if we've got a budget problem? Positions where solid factual results driven reasons cannot be proven are jobs this city cannot afford to fill.

Pure statistics should not be the only justification for hiring. I'm not going to finish the rest of this, but basically we ought to look back at what happened since 2019 when we started hiring like crazy through the pandemic and this city has grown in size so much. We need to look at what happened then and and reconsider those jobs. There's just too many.

Seth Bowler, president of Oakland Firefighters. I just wanna say thank you for the report. Thought that's incredibly informative and for the entire council's work to try and staff up Oakland. Just speaking for the OFD and Oakland firefighters perspective, staffing levels from my membership is approaching an all time low. Council member Unger can attest to this.

There were some times where we're down in the high three hundreds or approaching 400 members at this point. And as far as we're aware of, we're the only department that has a minimum staffing agreement that guarantees that there must be this many fire engines and trucks on the city every day with this many people. So we have a set number of seats that we have to fill contractually every day that is set in order to guarantee safety levels for Oaklanders and for Oakland firefighters. That's a 141 per day. There are three shifts.

That's 423 butts that need to be in seats every day, and we're under 420 members total right now. We're at four eighteen is my recollection. So that doesn't account for any day off, any sick days, any vacation, any anything. My membership is at the breaking point. And we're at the point now where people are having to choose between their families and their oath. And they're going through divorces. They're going through and contemplating suicide. We're we are in extremis. The the time is now actually, time has passed to do something. So I'm calling on this board and this body to do something, please, to help my membership in Oakland.

We need to do a lateral firefighter class. We need to do a lateral firefighter paramedic class immediately. A 17% vacancy rate is just abysmal and it's unsafe and Oaklanders deserve better. You know, the the last thing I wanna say is just what I'm hearing from HR is that they're ready to work and they need requisitions, they're ready to hire. So let's do it. We're at 418 people plus or minus, and we're authorized for 500. I'd love 2026 to be the year that we hit that number. Thank you.

Kevin Dally. I've also heard when I attend the Bicyclists and Pedestrian Advisory Commissions, often Oak Dot mentions problems with hiring. And I think from various departments I've heard versions of the top five rule. If you give HR too many positions to fill at once, Some of the of the important positions will be dropped. I'm hoping the city administrator can work with all of the departments who are having trouble hiring and with HR and figure out how we can move forward and improve hiring. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Chair, that concludes all speakers on this item.

Thank you. I will entertain a motion to forward this to the April 14 city council meeting as a public hearing.

Move approval. Second. Thank you. We have a motion made by council member Brown, seconded by council member Wong to approve the recommendations of staff and to receive and forward this item to the April 14 special city council agenda at 03:30PM as a public hearing. On role council members Brown. Aye. Unger. Aye. Wong. Aye.

And chair Ramachandran. Aye. Thank you. Item number four passes with four ayes to be forwarded to the April 14 special city council agenda at 03:30PM as a public hearing. Reading in item five, receive an informational report on the results of the salary survey for these for city job classifications earning less than $25 per hour and we have one speaker that signed up to speak.

Thank you. In the interest of time, myself and coauthor council member Brown would like to postpone this item to be heard at the next finance committee meeting on April 21. But we are open to taking public comment and we'll have to vote on it being postponed as well. Calling in the

name that signed up to speak on item number five, Kevin Dally, who has just left the chamber. Mister Dally, would you still like to speak on item okay. Sure. That concludes all names.

Thank you. I will make a motion to postpone this to the next FMC committee on, April 21.

Second. Thank you. That was a motion made by chair Ramachandran, seconded by council member Wong to continue this item to the April 21 finance and management committee agenda on roll. Council members Brown? Aye. Unger?

Aye. Wong? Aye. And chair Ramachandran?

Aye. Thank you. Item number five passes with four ayes to be forwarded to the April 21 finance and management committee agenda. Reading in item number three, reading all pieces of legislation noting that portion one was withdrawn. Adopt the following pieces of legislation, a resolution recommending to the civil service board the exemption of the classification of parking administrator from the operation of civil service noting that one was withdrawn.

And two, a resolution recommending to the civil service board the exemption of the classification of constitutional policing administrator for the operation of civil service. And three, a resolution recommending to the civil service board the exemption of the classification of assistant director human services for the operation of civil service and four, an ordinance amending the salary schedule of ordinance number one two one eight seven c m s at sorry. To a, add the full time classification of parking administrator and b, the full time classification of constitutional policing administrator and c, add the full time classification of assistant director human services and d, amend this the salary of the full time classification of neighborhood law corpse attorney, and we have a number of speakers on this item.

Monica Davis, deputy city administrator. I did wanna clarify the administration's request on amending the full component of this agenda item. So for item three, withdrawing part one as the clerk mentioned, but also in part four, updating the title of the ordinance to strike part a, that says add the full time classification of parking administrator. And in the body of the ordinance to remove section two, the following classification is added in ordinance number one two one eight seven CMS in the unit UK 275026 pay grade table to read as follows, classification, title, class number, steps, salary, parking administration details, and then also updating the related attachment a to remove the parking administrator on page 118.

Thank you.

Thank you. Colleagues, any questions? Councilor Unger.

Just so I'm clear, that removes all of the references to parking?

Yes. I probably should have said that up front. Yes. We're removing the parking administrator component of this agenda item.

Great. Thank you.

Okay. We can move to public comment. Oh, sorry. Council I

did have just just one very quick thing. I I just wanna highlight the salary increase for the neighborhood law court attorneys here. I think that this is an an incredibly skilled group of folks who are working at a level sort of way below they could of the money that they could make in the private sector and I just appreciate their work and say this is well deserved.

Fully agreed on the neighborhood law court position. Very well deserved increase. Calling this okay. Public comment.

Calling in the names that signed up to speak on item number three in no particular order. You can come up to the podium. State your name for the record. If you are ceding time to anyone, please be sure to be here in chamber to acknowledge that you are ceding time to that person. Kevin Dally, Keith Schulhertz, Benikas C.

Ross, Michael Ford, I see people have seated time to you. Douglas Mount and Tammy Byrd, Kirby Olsen, I see people have seated time to you. Philip Sweet, Ben Matloff, Lakisha Montalvo, Sharnell Smith, Sarah Fine, Colin Heath, and Lehmanica Lee. Please state your name for the record before beginning your comment.

Good morning, Sarah I have time ceded to me by Colin Pithee and Lamee Cheney.

Thank you. You will have an adjusted time of four minutes. You can begin.

Okay. Sarah Fine, Department of

Transportation and Local twenty one member. I'm here to present a letter on behalf of nearly 1,000 members citywide vehemently opposing the creation of the parking administrator classification, opposing the transition of a protected civil service position to at will employment, opposing the finance department's takeover of the parking division and denouncing the administration's misuse of general purpose funds to facilitate the takeover. Despite historically low parking staffing levels due to budget cuts and delays in hiring, the city has seen increased parking revenues. Just as we are concerned about how revenues are collected, we pay attention to how they're spent. We oppose the creation of this position because it wastes taxpayer money.

The parking administrator would up level the existing manager but have less staff reporting to them, fewer responsibilities and would do less work. Why is the administration suddenly excited to give someone less work for more pay? How will the administration pay for this person who does less work for more pay? With the general purpose fund of course, the same GPF that was twelve months ago so strapped for cash that this administration felt it necessary to send layoff notices to more than 60 union members. The same GPF that was so tapped out every city worker except sworn police was told there was not enough for a guaranteed cost of living increase this year.

We accepted maybe money in our contracts for this administration to turn around and throw GPF at a brand new corner office. This is waste and we oppose it. And speaking of corner offices, the staff report fails to mention that this report, this role would be among the 30 highest paid positions in the entire city of Oakland. Whoever selected for this role will make more than the assistant director of planning and building, the assistant director of Oak Dot, the assistant director of public works, but also the director of public ethics commission, and the director of race and equity. If our budget is a statement of values, this statement clearly says we got it all wrong.

Finally, we stand for protecting civil service because it is a bulwark against cronyism and nepotism, against corruption and compromise ethics from the federal government to local government. Civil service means you must be hired through a competitive merit based qualifications based system. It means you cannot be fired because you refuse to do someone's bidding. And it means you don't get the corner office just because your friend has the other one. We oppose the administration's proposal to replace an existing civil service protected role with a new role exempt from civil service and at greater cost, and so should you. Join us in rejecting the administration's meritless proposal to add a wasteful exempt executive position to our top heavy tree.

Hi, I'm Keith Scherholtz. I'm with Oak Dot. I've worked for the city for twenty six years this year. For the last eight years with Oak Dot, I'm basically coming to reiterate a very simple simple question. Why are you paying more money for less work?

More money for less work. That makes no sense. And after listening to the reports today and having my jaw hit the floor many times, I'm starting to see a pattern of nuttiness here. Please, please say no to the insanity and start the process back to responsibility. Also wanna point out that if you're concerned about revenue, please come and talk to the staff about increasing revenue and ideas for that.

We have plenty of ideas. All of the people here who work for Oak Dot have ideas about increasing revenue. And I would love to sit down with city council staff and go over ideas that we have, we've batted around for years to increase finance and revenue. Thank you so much.

Morning. For the record, Kirby Olson, I have two people ceding their time to me. They are their names are Philip Sweet and Ben Matlaw.

Great.

So for the record, my name is Kirby Olson. I'm here today speaking as a local twenty one union member and concerned Oakland resident. Thank you to the administration for removing the parking administrator from today's item. But I just wanna generally speak against that position and urge the committee members to reject the creation of the parking administrator position whenever it comes back to you. Creation of the parking administrator position would all but ensure that the finance department's hostile takeover of Oak Dot's parking division will happen.

That proposal was presented to the public works and transportation committee twice where both times it faced deep skepticism from committee members and an overwhelming display of opposition from staff, the Local twenty one and SEIU unions, business improvement districts, transportation advocates, and the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission. The reorganization proposal has not been vetted by the full council and is not currently scheduled to be vetted. Until such time as that proposal has been heard and approved by your colleagues on the full council, it is immature and irresponsible to approve the creation of this new position. We know that as soon as this position is created, finance will use add deletes and other financial trickery to fill it. Council members, the city administrator has told you that he has full authority to execute the reorg and you are helpless to stop it.

And yet, what he hasn't told you is that you have in your power the ability to reject the creation of this position, which is in fact the linchpin of the entire reorganization. He also didn't tell you that creation of this new position will cost $550,000 fully loaded per year from the general fund and be completely redundant to the award winning parking division manager that you are already employing at the DOT and who will continue to be employed regardless of the reorg. The stated rationale for this reorganization is that finance can better handle collections and citation payment plans. Collections account for less than one and a half percent of total parking revenues and finance has not stated what they would do to improve them. By their own admission, they have not identified any new revenues from the reorg nor any salary savings.

The rationale is so flimsy and so baseless that we have no choice but to assume that the real reason for the entire proposal is so that they can hand this very well paying appointed position to one of their friends. That level of nepotism is sadly not surprising given the track record of the people pushing pushing this proposal, but we need to do better as a city. This isn't 2008 and we don't need to go back to those dark days. We already have an award winning division manager in Michael Ford who can lead the parking division once again as soon as the administration drops this terrible proposal. Committee members, I ask you not to sit back and let this corruption unfold.

Assert the authority that the people of this great city have given you. Show us that you are not a rubber stamp for this administration. Reject this redundant and costly position until such time as the full council has heard the parking reorg and given an opinion one way or the other. Thank you.

Good morning, Michael Ford and I have two people seating me to me, Doug Mount and Tammy Bird. So thank you. Again, Michael Ford, local twenty one member, resident of District 2. And for for ten years, I had the honor of leading the city's parking and mobility division within the Department of Transportation. And I'd like to just share a little bit about, just get personal for a minute and reflect on what it's been like since October 3 when I was told on my birthday that the city was taking away my division and that I was instructed not to question it.

And I wanna thank council members Unger and Brown for bringing the resolution or the the request of the city administration to bring an information report to the Public Works and Transportation Committee. It's been very very important. I am so proud of the employees in the Department of Transportation, Parking and Mobility Division from SEIU and Local twenty one who have stuck together. We've cried together. We've organized together.

We've come into this chamber multiple times to express our concern about this parking takeover. And I feel that the the actions today by the city administration to withdraw this item gives us more room. As we've repeatedly said, we're not being confrontational. We're trying to be constructive. We just want the best thing for the city of Oakland.

We which also means the best thing for our staff. In 2016, members in this room went to council and asked to be part of the new department of transportation. Parking enforcement asked to be reorged from the police department to the new Department of Transportation. Now they're asking to stay in the Department of Transportation. You've heard several times that this parking reorg would involve the creation of a new parking administration position.

The administration has also said repeatedly that the customer service center, our parking and mobility assistance center deserves a dedicated supervisor. I couldn't agree more because I've been holding that role for three and a half years while it's been frozen. So, in effect, I have been doing two jobs for three and a half years, and I'm not complaining, but this reorg would create two new positions, one of which would be getting 20% more than me. That's $45,000 a year more for doing 60% of what I've been doing for the last four or five years. That's unconscionable.

I just can't, I can't understand why you would do it. So, the last thing I would like to say in support of the position that you're hearing from staff and that is don't fix it if it ain't broken. Is that if the city were very serious about wanting to ensure that we're maximizing revenue, the proposal should be to staff the frontline.

Not

not add expensive managers. So that's that's my recommendation. Let's staff our frontline. Let's keep our capacity to delivering essential services like automated speed enforcement and the future red light camera programs. And let's let's get back to business. And so I just wanna thank you.

I do wanna take one minute and I just wanna say thanks for the withdrawal. Can you please put Michael back in DOT and keep

Sorry. To the member of the public, if you're sitting time, you're not allowed to use your time anymore. Sorry.

Thank you. My name is Chanel Smith. I've been employed with the city for over thirty seven years. I wanna tell thank you all for taking a moment of pausing this decision and listen to what we have to say. What we're telling you is that we don't need reorg. We need restaffing. For years for years, we've been understaffed. And the park and mobility division, they used to have 14 people there. Now they have two. We don't need new org. We need restaffing. We don't need reorg. We need these restaffing. And meter collections, they used to have 10 people. Now they have two.

They don't need reorg. They need restaffing. And this is how this happened. In parking enforcement, our stats went down from 50 parking enforcement officer to about 20. So if I'm not out there patrolling the streets, again, those citizens who won't pay won't pay.

So there's no need for a meter collector to come by because there's no one paying the meters. If I'm not out there issuing citations, there's no one to go to the PMAC to pay a parking citation ticket. So the system is sabotaged from the bottom, from when we're out there, And like I said before, this is the city from Embarcadero to Grand Avenue. There's about 10 sections where 10 different officers should be out there. Since the pandemic, it's been like two. So that's where our breakdown is. In parking control, we don't need reorg. We need restaffing. In the DOT, we don't need reorg. We need restaffing.

And if any of you have taken a moment to look at this, where is OPD? Where is OPD saying that, oh, no. We're gonna welcome this group. We're gonna encourage this group. We're gonna do more with this group than they're doing in DOT. We have not seen that. We have not seen them say, come welcome aboard. What we have seen is d o the police department lay off officers and send them over to d o t. This is the strongest unit we have going in the city. D o t can bring money to the revenue.

We're asking you to not reorg us, restore us, restore our growth, and let us continue to produce for the city. Let us continue to produce for the residents of Oakland because they see us. They're watching what you do in this process. We don't need re org. We just need to be restored, and we need someone like Michael Ford who's been leading and guiding our group, not only for the expertise that he brings to our group, but the boots on the ground that he brings to our group. Like he said, he's been doing the job in PMAC. He's been doing the job in BEU. He's hanging signs. He's not only been the boss, he's been a coworker. He's encouraging us to do more and to do better, and we're thriving under this leadership.

We're It's easy to have someone give you directions, but it's great

Kevin Dally. I'm also thanks to the city administrator for pulling the parking administrator from today's agenda. I'm looking forward to having the item permanently removed. I appreciate council member Under Kim Brown for sponsoring the informational report from the city administrator. It's come to come to public works and transportation over and over again without really getting a sufficient explanation for why we need to do the reorg.

Before we establish new positions, let's decide whether the council is supportive of reorg. The council does have the right to specify bureaus and divisions within a department. This has been done before. Many years ago, the council decided to trust the city administrator to follow good faith reorganization and allow the city administrator to organize departments without council requirements. But the council can come back and require bureaus and divisions again if need be.

I'm also looking forward as Michael Ford said, let's get the parking mobility team back to issuing tickets, bringing up the new speed camera program, bringing back red light cameras, and one of my favorite new things having the AC Transit bus cameras automatically ticket people parked in bike lanes. That's a potential revenue source. AC Transit is probably gonna be willing to go along with this, and it is now legal under state law. Sacramento's already doing it. Thanks. Let let's get rid of this position. Thank you.

Benekas Cross, Local twenty one member. I work in the Department of Transportation in the Parking and Mobility Assistance Center. So I just again wanna speak to the fact that the problems that we're facing is because we're severely understaffed. Like we have four people right now and the ability to I'm just impressed with what we've been able to do with our current staff level. If we had more people, we wouldn't have the constraints and the criticisms that have been leveled against us wouldn't be.

We need more people. And I find it very ironic that the criticisms that have been leveled against us when we were part of the revenue department, the same criticisms were leveled against us. These are the complaints that have always been historically discussed about my group. And it really frustrates me that now all of a sudden finance is saying, oh, we have the solution, we can solve everything, but the problems in my staffing level started when we were part of the revenue bureau. The ad deletes, the number of positions that are on my team shrank, began when we were part of revenue.

And so I don't understand how all of a sudden now that can be the solution. There's they have the solution to fix our problems. What we really need is staffing. That's the the the fundamental thing we need is staffing. And under Michael Ford's leadership, what we have been able to accomplish, again, with our staffing, I am very impressed with what my team has done and what I and I don't think that this reorg is what we need.

It's it's equivalent to asking for a heart surgery to to remove splinters. It's not what we need. We need staffing. And again, under Michael Ford's leadership, we have done great things and I and I believe we will continue to do great things and we will continue to innovate and continue to push things forward positive manner. I don't think that this rigor is what we need. What we need is more people. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments, share. That concludes all speakers on this item.

Alright. I will entertain a motion to forward this to the next council meeting on consent, April 14.

So moved. Second.

Thank you. We have a motion made by council members Unger and council member Brown to sorry. Give me one moment. Sorry. To approve the recommendations of staff as amended to forward this to the April 14 special city council agenda with the following amendments.

Sorry. For item three withdrawing part one in part four updating the title of the ordinance to strike part a that says at the full time classification of parking administrator and in the body of the ordinance to remove section two, the following classifications. In added in ordinance number 12187 CMS in the unit K 27 sorry. Two seven five zero two six pay grade. Table to read as follow classifications title class number step salary parking administration details and updating the related attachment a to remove the parking administrator on page one eighteen. On roll council member Brown. Aye. Unger. Aye. Wong. Aye. And chair Ramachandran.

Aye.

Thank you. Item number three passes with four ayes. To forward this item as amended to the April sorry. April 14 special city council agenda at 03:30PM on consent. Reading in item number six now.

Receive an informational report on the Oakland's police and fire retirement system investment portfolio as of 12/31/2025 and actual valuation report as of 07/01/2025 and we have no that signed up to speak.

Good morning, committee chair and members of the committee. My name is Tayer Jenkins. I am the investment operations manager for the city of Oakland and the police and fire retirement system known as PFERS. We'll keep our presentation short. Just the purpose of this report is to provide you an update on PFERS investments as well as actuary.

You guys should all have the package that was passed out earlier. To assist me in presenting this information, I have the PEEFERS investment consultant, David Sandwich of Makita Investments, as well as the PEEFERS actuary, Graham Schmidt of Chiron. Just a reminder, PEEPRS is a closed system. At this at that after after 1976, everyone was transferred to CalPERS. PEEPRS currently has a membership about 577 individuals as of December 31, and we have an investment portfolio of about 500,000,000.

Based on the most recent evaluation report, the plan was fully funded. And just a quick note that the funds are the 500,000,000 is specifically dedicated towards PFERS and is funded by a dedicated funding source, the PTO fund. With that said, I will pass it over to David Sandwich of to discuss a little bit more on the investment. Thank you.

As usual, I will be short and to the point. You've had a long meeting today and at least you'll hit a good another good point here, which portfolio continues to perform well. As of December 31, it had over $500,000,000 in assets. As through the February, it was up to $512,000,000 The assumed rate of return on this portfolio is 5% for a fiscal year period. Through the February, that fiscal year return was 10%. So we've more than doubled the portfolio's return expectation. We've also derisked this portfolio. About 60% of the assets are in fixed income, and everything continues to perform as expected for the most part. If there are any questions, I'll turn it over to Graham Schmidt, the actuary.

Thanks. Piggybacking on David's good news. From an actuarial perspective, things are really good. Plan achieved full funding a year ahead of schedule. So it's supposed to be funded by June 30 year. If you looked at the market value of assets as of last year, 06/30/2025, the plan had already achieved that full funding target. No contributions are expected to be required for the fiscal year that begins July 1. So good news report. Happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Colleagues, any questions? Any public speakers? Okay. We can make a motion to receive and file.

So moved. Second.

Thank you. We have a motion made by council members Brown, seconded by council member Unger to receive and file this informational report in committee. On rule, council members Brown? Aye. Unger? Aye. Wong? Aye. And chair Ramachandran?

Aye.

Thank you. Item number six passes with four ayes to receive and file this informational report in committee. Now moving on to open forum. Calling in the names that signed up to speak, David Boatwright and Kevin Dally.

Couple of newspaper articles from, this one from 05/08/2019, San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Mateer. Though cranes are rising across the skyline and Oakland's revenues are growing at a steady rate due to the strong real estate market, the city's expenses continue to rise faster revenues. Everybody was warned in 2019. In August 2020, another article, the Oakland City Council unanimously agreed July to form a task force that will work on a plan to re reconstruct public safety in Oakland with the goal of reducing the police department budget by 50% over the next two years. Mission accomplished.

Thank you for your comments, mister Boatwright. Last call for mister Dalley. Chair, all names have been called.

Alright. Great. Oh, we don't need to vote.

This meeting's adjourned. Thank you, everyone.