City Council - meeting_joint_special

Thank you.

Hello, this is the Spanish interpreter, Isidra. I have not been placed in the interpretation channel.

Good afternoon, Maria. We would like you to give. Good morning everyone and welcome to the special council meeting of Monday, June 1st. Before I call roll and give speaker card instructions, we will have one of the translators give instructions for those wishing to listen in Spanish. Go ahead.

Buenos dias. La reunión de hoy de la ciudad de Oakland va a tener interpretación simultánea en español. Para acceder al canal de interpretación, you can look for the globe icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen and click there and then choose the language, Spanish or Spanish. If you are on a mobile phone or tablet, Busquen los tres puntitos que suelen estar en la parte superior o inferior derecha de su pantalla de Zoom. Hagan clic allí y de nuevo otro clic en el servicio de interpretación y otro clic para escoger el idioma Spanish o Español. Una vez estén en el canal de Español, les sugerimos que bajen el audio del canal principal para escuchar toda la reunión en Español. Muchas gracias. Back to you.

Thank you so much. I will go ahead and give speaker card instructions. If you would like to speak on any agenda item, please fill out a speaker's card before the item is called for discussion or two hours after the start of the meeting. This meeting was called to order at 9, 10 a.m., so your last opportunity to turn in a speaker's card will be at 11, 10 or before the item is called, whichever comes first. If you're looking to turn in an online speaker card, that time has passed as they were due 24 hours before the start of this meeting. On roll, Council Member Brown.

Present.

Council Member Fife. Present. Council Member Gallo.

Present.

Council Member Houston.

Excuse.

Council Member Ramachandran. Present. Council Member Unger. Excuse. Council Member Wong. Present. And Chair Jenkins. Present. Showing six members present at this time. Do you have any announcements before we begin?

No announcements.

Going to item three, modifications to the agenda. No modifications. Going to item four, receive an information report on the fiscal year 26 through 27, mayor's proposed mid-cycle budget. You have 21 speakers on this item.

Good morning, everyone. We are going to kick off this meeting with a presentation. I will introduce the mayor in a second, but Ketop, could we bring up the first PowerPoint? Thank you. My name is Brad Johnson, I'm your Director of Finance. Today's agenda will have some framing remarks by Mayor Lee. I will then provide some context and background regarding our fiscal situation, and I'll hand it over to our acting city administrator to talk more about the budget and its major service impacts. And without further ado, I would like to welcome Mayor Lee to the podium to provide you some opening remarks.

Well, good morning, members of Oakland City Council, members of the public. I am very proud to present my very first budget as mayor of Oakland. I have always said and believe that a budget is a moral document that reflects the values and priorities of those who rely on our government services, city government, to help make life better for everyone. And as a former member of the House of Representatives Appropriations and Budget Committee, that was the framework upon which I viewed federal budgets, now our city budget. And let me just commend our finance team. I wanna thank Bradley, our department heads, for assembling a fiscally sound budget that is balanced, built only on revenue that we can reliably project, and that delivers our core services to our residents. Now let me be clear, it does not include parcel tax revenue because Measure E has not been approved by voters. The amount of one-time money used for ongoing services has fallen dramatically in this budget and this budget does not include any layoffs of our city staff. Residents rightfully want better and more efficient services and we need staff to deliver core services to Oaklanders. At a time when many local governments are laying off staff, this budget recognizes that Oakland's workforce is essential to maintaining public safety, responding to homelessness, keeping neighborhoods clean, and delivering the services that our residents rely on every day. These budget line items are foundational for economic development and for creating jobs here in our city. But the foundational issues must be addressed. Public safety will continue to be my top priority and is heading, quite frankly, in the right direction. This is a result of coordinated community-wide strategies, and this budget is built to protect the momentum. Now, we certainly are not taking a victory lap, but the trajectory is going in the right direction. Through this mid-cycle budget, we are making some minor adjustments to increase impact and effectiveness of every city dollar on providing the essential services that Oakland residents deserve. Here's what the budget does in summary for Oakland residents. Public safety, we're addressing and investing in violence prevention and emergency response. And I've asked the acting city administrator to create a dedicated HR team focused on one thing, and that's hiring more police, firefighters, and violence prevention workers faster. We can't keep the city safe if we can't fill these jobs, so we have to move at a faster and more efficient pace. Regarding clean streets, we're restoring illegal dumping cleanup, bringing back street sweeping, and putting more enforcement staff on the ground. People want and deserve clean neighborhoods. This budget moves in that direction. We're expanding the mayor's summer jobs program for our youth. More Oakland youth need more summer opportunities. Senior centers get an extra day per week. Libraries get their staff and their books back. and we're adding peer navigators at the main library and the MLK branch. Real people helping patrons connect to services and keeping those spaces safe and welcoming. We're also restoring animal services staffing. Now we have to confront the challenges as leaders in this city. We must confront them head on. Federal and state money is drying up. Now over the last two years, Oakland has absorbed At least, mind you, this is at least 24 million in lost or delayed federal funding. And we're facing a $5 million state gap in homelessness funding, meaning 190 shelter beds go offline this summer and mental health wellness centers will close. That's real harm to real people who are most vulnerable. Now, costs keep growing faster than our revenue. Think of it like a household. Everyone's working hard, picking up extra shifts, but rent and gas keep going up faster than paychecks. Every month, you're forced to cut something, and that's Oakland's reality. This budget is balanced and reduces the structural deficit, but it doesn't solve the underlying problems. Our equipment is failing. Our fire engines and trucks are past their useful lives and are at risk of breaking down. If they fail, we end up closing fire houses. This means slower 911 response levels. And in a disaster, it could be catastrophic. Our dumping crews are hampered by broken down equipment that can't get the job done. This is unacceptable. And I hear every day from residents and small business owners who are frustrated They're not asking for miracles. They want trash picked up, 911 answered quickly, and streets they can walk safely on. And so we do have to earn their trust back. So I'm not satisfied with what this budget alone can deliver, but it is balanced, and it does begin to reduce the structural deficit. But you shouldn't be satisfied either. You have the Measure East spending plan before you. If residents in Oakland approve Measure E, those funds will go directly to some of the issues that I just mentioned, replacing failing fire equipment, So no fire hives, excuse me, fire houses closed. And 911, we need to increase our response time with 911. Sustaining the crime prevention programs that are actually working. Getting people off of the streets and into shelter, housing, and mental health services. Fixing the dumping crews machines and equipment. and cleaning up our parks and streets and more. But this budget is a solid step forward, but getting Oakland where it needs to be requires more local resources and continued fiscal discipline. We owe it to every single resident who shows up, pays taxes, and believes that this city can do better. Oakland's strength comes from the people who love this city and refuse to give up on it. So let's build a safer, cleaner, and stronger Oakland together. And I want to ask Bradley now, Bradley Johnson, our finance director, to come over and lay out the details of the budget. Thank you again, members of the council. Thank you, Mayor Lee.

I'm gonna provide you a little bit of context as to how we got here, and then I will hand it over to our acting city administrator to go through some more details regarding this budget. For years, our city has had a structural deficit. As the mayor mentioned, our revenues have not grown as fast as our expenditures, primarily driven by rising personnel costs like Medicare, medical benefits, and pension contributions. While revenues continue to grow, again, our expenses grow faster. And this data up on the screen, which came from a report not developed by your finance staff, but by SPUR, shows that detail. In the past years, prior to sort of the end of the 20 teens, the city had numerous operating deficits. Toward the end of that time span, a strong economy, fiscally prudent policies brought us back above the line. COVID took its toll, but then the presence of the ARPA funds helped the city make strides toward a structurally balanced budget. However, we need to return back to those practices. In many of our years, the city did not comply with its own policies regarding paying down its liabilities, establishing reserves, ensuring that one-time resources were only used to support one-time activities. As a consequence of this, the city took many actions to balance its budget. You can see, going back to the 28 financial crisis, many of these found on expenditure reductions impacting services to residents, from the layoff of 80 police officers, to using one-time ARPA funds, to using our rainy day fund, to freezing, to increasing parking rates, et cetera. The city also had many efforts that increased our revenue side again to deal with these imbalances, including measures O, Y, AA, Q, et cetera. We are in a fiscal landscape that is moving quickly with the circumstances changing gradually. As we began developing this budget, we were not in a war in the Middle East. There are many things coming out of DC and happening with the broader economy that are not knowable. We don't know the impact of AI in terms of both what it will do to our workforce in the local Bay Area context, what the boom in AI will do to our local economy, what a potential pullback of AI might do in the AI investment might do to our economy. We don't know what the long-term impacts of higher gas prices or long-term tariff policies may be. And again, monetary policy at the federal level is also varying. But this budget is balanced, and it does sustain investments in our core key local services, maintaining them under our control. Oakland is not just facing a structural deficit financially. It's also facing a deficit of services. It's facing a deficit of deferred maintenance, seen in the poor quality of our infrastructure, our public facilities, and it's facing a deficit related to our equipment and technological systems, which are many times old, outdated, and inefficient and unhelpful for providing services. As it relates to that service deficit, the city has often not been able to in recent years make the matching funds required for our locally adopted ballot measures. Measures Q and N, measures C and D which support the library, et cetera. Again, these measures often had valid, validly adopted provisions by which the council could waive these requirements through its findings. But nonetheless, our roadmap to fiscal health, which I'll discuss next, mandates that we look at coming back into compliance with these matching requirements. And again, that's an expensive proposition. This budget builds on past progress. It sustains the fiscally disciplined practices that resulted from our balancing actions during fiscal 2024-25, including expenditure controls and improved revenue collections. It builds on the current year budget where we successfully issued a bond including front-loading both biennials years worth of affordable housing money to the tune of $180 million to ensure that we continued our work to reducing homelessness and providing affordable housing. Our current year projections show our spending and revenue in the General Purpose Fund are balanced, that we have a small but healthy fund balance, and that we have recovered from prior actions. Our roadmap to fiscal health is our long-term window to ensuring that the city continues to build on its fiscally sustainable practices, and this budget is just a component part of that. As the mayor mentioned earlier, it is balanced. It dramatically reduces our structural deficit. And those are the first two key things that you're seeing in that roadmap to health. Again, fiscal health executive team, regular progress, and a structurally balanced budget. We are working on long-term plans regarding pension and other benefit costs on implementing fiscal policies, which will come back to you. We provided a report to you on voter-mandated staffing levels that was delivered to finance and management this February. And we are working on plans on investments in infrastructure, fleet, and equipment and technology. I'm gonna turn it over to Acting City Minister Betsy Lake to talk more about the details of what is in this balanced and more structurally balanced budget proposal.

Thank you, Bradley. All right, so for our budget overview, we have a total of 2.27 billion across all funds. The important one for us to be thinking about is our general purpose fund. And you'll see from this chart we have an expenditure amount of $812.9 million. This is actually about $44 million less than we anticipated in our initial two-year budget. But as you can see from the chart, it is more than we had in this current fiscal year. Next slide. So, what does this budget do for our Various services, we have our core emergency services and community safety operations, and this is generally a budget of preservation and restoration. So we're preserving all the sworn staffing. We're maintaining all the fire engines and stations. We are establishing a constitutional policing administrator, and that is to continue the good work of our OPD under our NSA. and it maintains violence prevention and ceasefire related staffing and coordination. For homelessness and neighborhood cleanliness, we are maintaining our homelessness outreach efforts. I think people have seen that the The point in time count had a 20% reduction of homelessness in the city of Oakland. We are restoring our illegal dumping cleanup. A lot of focus on that and time to move to implementation. We are restoring environmental enforcement. for quality of life. We are continuing special activities permitting enforcement. We are extending the senior center open hours. I think the mayor mentioned that in her remarks. She also mentioned that we're restoring the mayor's summer jobs program and just in time. We are maintaining staffing at our rec centers, libraries, housing, and rental assistant program. And we are restoring branch staffing and funding at our libraries, as well as restoring funding at our Oakland Animal Services. The budget also includes capital investments. It increases our Measure U capital improvement budget. It allocates Measure U funding towards street paving, invests in our complete street projects, and maintains existing KK funded investments. It funds facility improvement projects and supports our safety and security projects. So where are we now in our mid-cycle process? The budget was submitted by the mayor May 15th. We are in the first of the special council budget meetings. There are two more, one on June 12th and one on June 17th. And by June 30th, this council is tasked with adopting a budget. So what can all of you do? Please stay engaged, be engaged, volunteer on a commission or a board like our budget advisory commission. Make sure you tune in to our finance and management committee meetings and stay engaged with your council members as we go through this mid-cycle budget, thank you.

Thank you so much, any more? All right, thank you. So I wanna get to the public speakers unless somebody from council has something to say, but if the housing staff can come up, I think it's very important to clarify the affordable housing bonds and where we are. I know there's been some emails that have gone out. If Director Weinstein is here. If not, Betsy. Oh, I was pretty athletic. Can you clarify where we are with affordable housing bonds?

Yes, absolutely. Emily Weinstein, Director of Housing and Community Development. So as part of the biennial budget, in the first year, the budget included $100 million of Measure U. The second year included $80 million of Measure U. That tranche of funding, that's the second tranche, was all sold this past year, and therefore all of that money has been awarded to projects. So we have no more funding at this point. As part of our budget proposal, we proposed to include the third tranche in this year's mid-cycle budget. That is not included in the budget that's before you. So unless additional funding is added, we would not be able to award any more funding to projects until probably late 2027 or early 2028.

Okay, so it's a good thing that we got the money out the door to help people as soon as possible, correct?

That is a great thing, and then we'll be waiting to do that again for another couple years.

Okay, thank you. Council Member Houston.

Yes, through the Chair, I heard restore, restore, restore animal services, restore, I heard nothing about restoring my seniors back to regular hours. because I'd heard everything about restore, restore, but none of my seniors. And also restructure environmental enforcement, and that's through the Chair to Betsy, how are we restructuring the enforcement for the EEOs, because that was supposed to be done prior.

Thank you, I'm gonna ask Director Garland to come to speak to that.

Good morning. Liam Garland, Public Works Director. What the proposed budget does is it unfreezes an environmental officer position. And so we'd move from seven authorized positions to eight, which would help us with the essentially the implementation of the new citation amounts and making sure that we are citing folks who are illegally dumping in our streets and sidewalks.

Okay, one more question through the chair. Me and my council member, Rowena Brown, are working on it because the enforcement officers, they were supposed to be trained for and hazardous and contaminated so we can prosecute. And let me share this one more time. instead of just finding that goes straight to the city attorney, we need to prosecute and collect the data so we can send it to the district attorney's office for full prosecution to the full extent of the law, right? So where is that at, where they're training, not only for, hold on a second, not only training them to collect the data, to actually protect them from the issues and the conditions that are out there, because the things that are being dumped on our streets, waste management won't even allow to come to the dump. So I wanna find out how is that training, because that was supposed to be done 12 months ago, when I first got in office, that was one of my main ones, so I'm really stern about that.

Councilmember Houston, thank you for your focus on this. And I believe you and your council colleagues did allocate dollars for that training of our environmental enforcement officers. We've been trying to rebuild or restaff that unit. We've got a couple vacancies in it now. We'll have another if this proposed budget is approved. And we're saving that training for when we've got those EEOs all on staff. So it's important to us. We wish we could have done it faster. And we think there is a route with these hires over the next several months that we will get that training conducted and we'll head the direction you're sharing.

Okay, and it wasn't towards you, Mr. Garland. You're doing a great job. I'm just saying that when I first got in office, I had three major things as my seniors, homelessness, illegal dumping when it comes to the crime against our community that the mayor knows about. She wants to say something too, I think.

No, no, thank you, Council Member Houston.

I just wanted to respond to the senior centers because they are extremely important to our seniors, to our communities, to all of us. Currently, senior centers are open three days a week. I wanna restore them to five days a week. This budget restores them to four days a week. Thank you.

Okay, and one more. So the four days a week is good, but can we do it from nine to five because now they're, they close at one.

Yeah, right now this budget is only adding the additional day. I'd like to see how we could extend those hours, but we have to, you know, and when you look at the budget, the council has the chance to scrub it. I would say I'd like to do that, but I'd like to get them to five days also, given the current hours. I think, and I would have to talk to them about Would they prefer five days with the current hours or the current hours, you know, and expanded hours for four days?

We're working on that. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Garland.

Thank you. Council Member, oh.

And then through the chair, I was just going to let Councilmember Houston know that we do have a strike force right now with OPD, OPW, and the mayor's office and the city administrator's office to pursue illegal dumping prosecutions with the DA. So that is underway.

So it's clear through the chair. So it's clear we need to have them trained so they can collect the data to show hazardous, contaminated, so when it's documented and it goes to the district attorney's office, the district attorney can actually prosecute and not throw it out because I've seen it happen many times where the data's not collected properly so it's just thrown out and these people are able to keep committing this crime against our community.

So what I might suggest as part of the budget process, maybe a policy directive to staff might be appropriate so you could get in exactly what you want, Mayor.

Yeah, no, I just wanted to comment on that, Council Member Houston. In order to increase penalties from a misdemeanor to a felony, we need to be able to ensure that these environmental specialists can identify the pollutants as being toxic.

Thank you. Council Member Gajal.

Yes, thank you, and thank you for the information And for some of us we've been through this process for many many years many times And it comes down. It's not about what we say is what we do I Can sit here and write all kinds of budgets give you all kinds of reasons, but the reality is that I want to mr. Brad I need to be very clear in terms of the funding that's available that the citizens provided this city and that we need to take a second look. One for me, the issues that are a priority in my neighborhood, having grown up in East Oakland, certainly is public safety and a clean city. So for me to have a clean city, I need to invest in the vehicles and the staffing to get the streets clean, like we used to have. I used to have people at Lake Merritt, cleaning Lake Merritt. I used to have people assigned to our parks, cleaning our parks. But the reality, what I'm asking for, where is the money? As an example, the $36 million that we're collecting as a franchise fee from the taxpayer as an extra fee to support us with the environment, with the cleaning of the city, cleaning of our parks. And I don't see that happening because when I have five of my employees in my city, I'm not making more policies. I don't need more policies and more laws. I have plenty of those. I have to be able to enforce them. So what I'm asking for, where is that money that the franchise fee is collecting for me as a taxpayer on my garbage bill, where is that money going? Is it in being invested to make sure that I have the vehicles, the trucks? Because go to Coliseum Way, how many trucks are sitting there? They could be on the street. If it's not 50, it's more than that. Because I drive your city trucks every weekend, and my five employees drive city vehicles. So we see it hands-on, what is happening in our local neighborhood. Then the other one that I'm asking for is the way I'm collecting that extra fee with waste management. Where is that money going to? And secondly, And secondly, when it comes to public safety, I see now that I'm gonna go hire someone to, another administrator to oversee constitutional policing. What do I have the police chief there for? What do I have all his lieutenants and captains there for? I don't need more administrators. Because if you look at what is the staffing level at the mayor's office right now? I've never seen that many employees at the city council or at the mayor's office working. So we need, for me, is I need, we need people on the neighborhood doing what the taxpayer is being paid the police chief to do, the fire department. Because the reality is, what is the number of officers, they don't even live in Oakland. They just come here and then they go home. And I worked eight years, 10 years in San Jose, and I remember doing that. Ran to San Jose, ran back, come to all the special things. Well, I'm not there. So for me, I need to have some very clear numbers. City administrator, you've been here for many, many years. All right, and I have never seen Oakland the way it is today. And I cannot sit here and make excuses for it, and I'm not gonna ask the voters for more money when I can't prove what I did with the money I have. So the other one that I have for the mayor and the city, when are we gonna return back to work? monday through friday because i'm paying your salaries to be here in oakland providing a service for my business community for my libraries and all that other services that i'm asking when are we returning back to work five days a week and secondly you know i think that you know we talk about human trafficking violating women violating young women and here we're making excuses Because I remember removing them from District 5 when the chief was here, and I needed the FBI to come help me do that, and other federal agencies from the sheriff to the fire department to be able to help us with the public safety, and not just sit here talking about it and making more excuses that we need more money, we don't have this, we don't have that, and that goes for Department of Transportation. So anyway, so for me, I want to be very clear on the numbers that I have. with the budget and where is that money going to? And secondly, within each department, I wanna know how many attorneys do I need? Do I need 35 city attorneys? Or do I need 35 people helping me clean the streets? Do I need six employees at the city council level? Or do I need them in the streets doing the cleaning? so we don't sit here talking about it. And so that's what, with all due respect, having been through this process before, I want to stay balanced, but at the same time, I want to demonstrate to my neighbors that the money they're investing is going directly back into the neighborhood and not sitting here at City Hall making more policies and more laws and more rules and... And so at the end of the day, for me, it's not about what we say, it's what we do. And so I'm asking my council people that we need to make some serious decisions within our council as well, including all the administration, what we're doing, because I'll leave you at this. I have people doing illegal dumping, but I never see them out there picking up trash. But they're telling me how to do it and when to do it. And so we need to be very clear on the investment of the dollars that I have to support my children and my families. And anyways, with all due respect, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Gallo, and I parsed a few things from there. One, the franchise fee, right, and where is that going? Is it going directly back into illegal dumping? And there's also always the opportunity, right, there's always opportunity for a policy directive to say, hey, I want all of this funding going towards illegal dumping or cleaning the streets. um second i heard constitutional policing officer third i heard mayor staffing fourth i heard city attorney fifth i heard return to work does that does that some ice that does that get where you're going yes yes be very clear where's the cannabis money that we used to get millions of dollars where's that going i mean i could smoke weed

to go back into the neighborhood. Anyways, thank you.

Thank you. Okay, Bradley, to what you can get from that. Thank you, Council President. I will try to answer a couple of those questions, and if I have any of my colleagues behind me who should chime in, please do. Regarding your waste management franchise, the largest allocation of that is to your fund, the 1720, which is your comprehensive cleanup fund. That fund supports illegal dumping, operations, environmental enforcement, and street sweeping. And so when you look at the Waste Management Franchise, the vast majority of it comes back into that fund, and again, it funds the operations, which include the staffing and the equipment and any related services for clean city activities, again, dumping, environmental enforcement, and street sweeping.

To get to, I believe, Council Member Gallo's point, if we're collecting a franchise fee at $35 million, is that, is $35 million going into that? Is that correct, Council Member Gallo?

I can get you, and I can get you the specific details and breakdown of how that is broken down, absolutely. Yes, another question around, right at the end there, I'll do revenue allocation first. On your cannabis resources, Your cannabis business tax is a type of business tax. It accrues to your general purpose fund, and your general purpose fund is primarily about three-quarters of it is public safety spending. So the largest users of that amount would be proportionately your police and fire departments for their public safety 911 responses function. So it primarily goes to police and fire. Again, your cannabis tax is a business license tax, and so it's a general fund revenue source.

to the constitutional policing administrator.

Chief James Beard, the Oakland Police Department.

So just I know customer guy.

Oh, thanks for asking the question. But the council, the constitutional policing advisor is not an additional supervisor to the chief of police. It's actually a position that's very described into the submission as someone that's helping with policy, the best practices in policing to ensure that the police department is working with all city departments and they've actually kind of helped the communication piece, and it's a huge help with actually coordinating other city departments so we can respond more holistically as a city, and they also help with the communication with the mayor's office.

Thank you. Mayor's office.

Thank you, yes, let me just comment on a couple of things, Council Member Gallo. One is with regard to the constitutional policing. You know we've been under the negotiated settlement agreement for 23 years. And that, for a lot of reasons, we have not been able to exit it, which of course costs the city quite a bit of money. And so in order to be able to complete the tasks, the 51 tasks which we have completed, year we did completed the three toughest ones we had to have a strategy from the city and with the police department working with the monitor to be able to move forward based on the court's requirements to exit the NSA that required a constitutional policing staff person to help us develop the strategy which has not happened in the past and so the city could be coordinated So hopefully in September, if we continue to move forward and not revert backwards, we'll be able to exit the oversight of the police department. We need to make sure that we don't revert back, and the judge has been very clear that we have to move forward and not see any backsliding, because we're not the police department of 23 years ago, but we have to make sure that the structural changes that have been made remain and so that's an important position to have so that we can move forward and make sure and we've seen progress this year. I hope you believe that and we're almost completed with this process if in fact we continue on the track that we're on. Secondly with regard to human trafficking and that's A priority of mine, it's horrendous, it's immoral, it's wrong, and I want to thank Council Member Wong. We established in the last year's budget a $750,000 budget item to establish the task force. She works with the DA and prosecutions, arrests, and finding the services that these young girls need and coordinating with the city and with Council Member Wong is working, but we have to do a lot more. But this is the first time we've had a strategy, a public safety strategy, which addressed the human trafficking. And we need to do more, but we've at least begun that. And whether you believe it or not, it's something that the work is taking place. But we have a lot more to do. And finally, just with regard to my staff, we have a very expert efficient staff that's helping this city reduce and break down these silos in this city. They're delivering core services. They're augmenting a lot of what the city administration is engaged in and also bringing in millions of dollars in public and private partnerships. There's no way we could have had our event, for example, celebrating Elisa Leo had it not been for my staff. There's no way we could have been designated as the only watch party city for the NFL during the Super Bowl if it weren't for my staff. So we do a heck of a lot to help this city move forward, and I'm very proud of the work that they do.

Thank you.

Thank you, ma'am. Yes. Can you turn this mic on? Can you turn? One second. We need to turn your mic on. Let's turn your mic on. One second. It's green. Yeah, we got you.

All right. So look. We've been at this for a number of years, Chief Peer. You understand that, all right? The federal monitor mayor that we've had has been costing us millions of dollars. But you know what? Five other cities in the U.S. fired him. He should have been fired a long time ago. But we keep making excuses, why with this, why with that. And the judge, because I met with the U.S. Marshal in San Francisco to get rid of the monitor. And he said, well, it's up to the judge. But the reality is we keep just talking and investing and giving money. Police chief, you're hired to manage the department. Why do I need someone to tell me what constitutionally I need to do? Because that's all just a political, social excuses that we're making. Mayor, and we've been through this many times where, oh, you got one more item to do. Oh, no, you got two more issues to do. The next year it comes back, well, no, you got five. So the bottom line is, you know, we need to really move forward and get people on the streets. There is no excuse. Mayor, you want to go by her area? There's 16 girls that are underage out there prostituting every day, every night. Police chief, you see them. And we need to be able to address that. And we're just sitting here doing more talking politically as opposed to dealing with, we can smile and laugh at it, but then I'm at the other end complaining about how I'm treating young ladies. And we're allowing that to happen in this city. Do you see that in Alameda, Mayor? Do you see that in San Leandro? nope so it's not about what we say it's what we do and the dollars that you have from that we're investing in we need to make it clear it's about safety and it's about cleanliness and i'll leave you with one example from years being here when robert bob was the city manager every administrator because i manage parks but he said no well I'm going to put you where the neighbors are at Lake Mary. I don't want you sitting in City Hall talking, and I'm going to give you a pickup truck because every day you got to have a truckload of stuff you picked up to show an example to the other workers that that's your task. But, you know, I don't want to sit here with my suit and tie. I don't wear my suit and ties no more because I'm out there cleaning the streets every day. So I think that that's what we need to be able to communicate, that if you're an administrator, no, I want you on the street so you can see what's really happening. Police chief, you drive down, you see 15 girls every day, right? Oh, that's, is that a norm? Is that an excuse? But yet, you know, I can sit here complaining about how we treat ladies. Anyway, so I hope that we take more of a proactive, include the fire department. They're sitting right across where the girls are going. So we're all into public safety, and we need to protect Oakland. And for those of us that don't live in Oakland, need to make sure we contribute and respect, because we're paying your salary. Thank you.

Councilmember Gallo, for the first time in the history of the life of the NSA, Chief Warshaw and the monitoring team actually placed the Oakland Police Department in full compliance. That's never happened before. Also at the same time, the plaintiff's attorneys had a joint statement with the city saying that they're confident with us going forward. But for us to keep going forward, it's not about getting out of the NSA. If the judge deems that we're out of court oversight, the NSA is never going to go away. Chief Warshaw and his team, if we're out of court oversight, they'll go away. But we need the constitutional advisor to ensure that we continue to uphold to the standards that the NSA is, and it's the best policing practices in the country. With regards to the human trafficking, yes, it's an issue. I live in Oakland, you know that, and I've taken my kids to St. Anthony's throughout their lives growing up, and it has been for generations human trafficking is a problem. It's a problem in major cities. Oakland's highly affected by it, for sure. San Francisco, LA have the same type of issues and problems, and what happened during the pandemic just really exasperated it, right? And then you had certain tools that were taken away from law enforcement where they pretty much legalized certain activities that went alongside with prostitution. There is a current shift. With the mayor's leadership, partnership with other law enforcement agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigations on board, we have long-term investigations. We're starting to be able to hold people accountable again, which is what needed to be done. But that is a long road ahead, and there's always going to be people out there to exploit our young children. But with the DA and the federal government, we're actually charging people on a federal level that we haven't done in years. So it's going to be a long road ahead, and I agree with you. It's going to take the whole city as one team to address it. And again, we're not gonna arrest our way out of it. That's just one piece, but it is also the education outreach But ultimately, it's holding the people accountable that come from other communities in our city to exploit our children and then leaving. They need to be held accountable. They need to go to jail. There needs to be stay-away orders. And if you're here to pick up a child, an underage person, then you need to actually be held to the fullest extent of the law. I'm lockstep with you on that, and we're seeing a lot of progress that we haven't seen in quite some time. I think there's the legislative change is going to help us with that as well.

Thank you. Council Member Gallo, I respectfully beg to differ with you in terms of political talking. We're doing the work, Council Member Gallo. This is a challenged city. We're doing the work. We put the money in just on human trafficking, which is a moral disgrace. And we have a strategy and we're working. Before last year, It was piecemeal. Now there's a full public safety strategy on human trafficking. And secondly, let me just say that we have many, many people on our staff who are out working every weekend helping to keep the town clean. And so people are doing the work. Yeah, people talk, but I want you to be assured that I see, and I'm doing the work. People are doing the work. We're just not talking. I wouldn't be here if it were about just talking because I believe we have to have action in this city and we have to do what we say we're gonna do and we have to be accountable. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. And then we'll get to some other council members, but Bradley and the Hopper, are we... Council Member Gallo's point, are we still counting the monitor's fees in the budget going forward, and how does that, if not, how does that offset with the Constitutional Policing Administrator?

We have, for purposes of being conservative and responsible, continue to include the payments in the monitor. Should we be able to exit the NSA and exit the monitor's contract more rapidly, those resources would become available to this body for other purposes.

Thank you. Council Member Wong? Or Brown and Wong?

Excellent, thank you so much. So first off, just wanna really start by thanking the finance team and of course the mayor's team as well. And I personally found the online portal to be very user friendly in outlining all of the shifts and changes that will be taking place across various departments. So I just have a handful of questions. So I'm gonna start first with I guess the statement that was made around the senior centers. The language online says restores full-time operating hours four days a week for the senior centers as well as reopens the West Oakland Senior Center. So I wanted to just get some clarification, because I know I heard hours 9 a.m. to 1, I mean, yeah, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and so I just wanted to get some clarity around how we are defining full-time operating hours four days a week. So that's the first question that I have. And then the second question outlined in the budget, it says some of the reductions. So myself and the council budget team last year, we had set aside $2 million of reserves for federal and state grant loss. However, in this budget, the $2 million was reallocated, and so I wanted some specifics around how that funding was reallocated. So whoever can answer that question. And then also in the prior budget, we set aside, I believe it was about $2 million to help support ITD with advancing various initiatives uh innovation and technology within the department however in this budget it does eliminate various roles within itd and so i'm curious about potential service impacts to technology that we may be trying to move forward i think we're all aware that we need to focus all of our energies on improving technology within the city of oakland so um was curious about that and then lastly The budget also outlines the transfer of various positions in Oak Dot to finance also in this budget, and so wanted some clarity around that as well. Thank you.

Thank you. Through the Council President, Council Member Brown, please, if I forget one of those questions, let me know. I'm gonna have our Information Technology Director come up to speak to his positions. Taking the last one first regarding transition of positions from finance to, from DOT to finance, this budget does include a reorganization of the city's parking functions to remove, to take the collection functions to finance, leaving the enforcement and operations functions within DOT. So things related to the parking mobility assistance center, PMAC, parking meter collections, and the back-end collection processes will move to the Revenue Bureau within Finance for enhanced collection practices, whereas on-street enforcement and vehicle enforcement will remain purviews of the Department of Transportation. Regarding your question regarding the reallocation of the $2 million in contingency funds for federal grants, as the mayor mentioned earlier, we've seen numerous withdrawals on the federal level in terms of grant funding. This particular allocation was used to support the ongoing resources needed for our Urban Search and Rescue and Urban Area Security Initiative program. Those are USAR and UASI, if you want the acronyms. Those fundings heavily operate within our fire department to ensure that we have the ability to respond as a part of, I think it's Task Force 9, if I remember correctly, Urban Search and Rescue program, and the Urban Area Security Initiative is heavily tied into our EOC, Emergency Operations Center funding. Those funding sources were more in jeopardy as they are through the Department of Homeland Security, which is a more vulnerable funding source for the city of Oakland, given policies at the national level than many others. I wanna be clear, we may see further cutbacks in federal funding. This is not, in my mind, is not over, but those were sustained at their current level in that particular way. I'm gonna have our IT director come up and speak to the IT questions, and I'll get back to you.

Um,

Thanks. Through the Chair to Council Member Brown for the question on ITD. The budget as is does provide ongoing maintenance, ongoing support, so there isn't a direct reduction in our existing services. There's not funding there for really new initiatives, but overall I do think that the department is, the budget provides a very healthy baseline for the department. That said, there is a frozen position in the budget that we'll have to absorb. This is an information system specialist three, which is really a senior level, a journey level class. And those were cybersecurity and infrastructure positions. So we had two vacancies that we were trying to fill for really high level cybersecurity and infrastructure roles. And one of those is proposed to be frozen. That will have a direct impact on our ability to grow and maintain and continue to mature our cybersecurity operations. So I do wanna be transparent about that.

Thank you.

And to Council Member Brown's question on the senior centers, I'm just making sure that we're, I've just reconfirmed it. It is a four-day, full-day operation, so it's roughly nine to five. There's a little bit of a flexibility around the closing hour time on that, if that makes sense. I think it may end up being like 4.30ish in terms of closing hour, but it's effectively a nine to five operation, four days a week is what we have funded.

Okay, you're complete. Council Member Wong.

Thanks. I do want to talk about the issue of homelessness since in the budget, if Measure E doesn't pass, 190 shelter beds are slated to close, correct? Can someone who's been following the county's Measure W spending and just in general the approach to homelessness approach the podium? Because I've been finding it very challenging to um see that like the county i don't think has been transparent enough it's not clear to me whether um like the funding for measure w seems to be coming out very slowly i know that with federal cuts if someone can speak more to that whether We anticipate them to actually be expanding their interim capacity since one of the presentations I saw is they were only anticipated to bring on 300 shelter beds online over two years. Is that correct? Because I know they're also increasing the funding to you know, for the current shelter beds. But I just in spite of the pit count in my district, at least the homelessness is not getting better. It's gotten way worse, actually. I have a park in my district that I swear to God is going to become the people's park of Oakland the same way that we saw in Oakland unless we have an intervention and we don't have enough we really don't have enough open shelter beds and so I would love to hear from someone who has been following closely what is happening at the county and whether we need to look at more of our at our own budget to ensure that we're not gonna move backwards especially with this anticipated closure

Hello, through the Chair, Emily Weinstein, Director of Housing Community Development. I can't speak specifically to our transitional bed strategy that falls into the Community Homelessness Services unit, but I can speak a little bit to Measure W and then how would that impact our homeless strategy. So Measure W is rolling out in different kind of tranches. My understanding right now is that most of this next wave of money is going to be going to existing shelter beds to increase county funded shelter beds and increasing the daily bed rate. What that does is it may not increase the number of beds, but with increased funding for the services, it allows more services for those beds, and so people ideally will be cycling through those shelters more quickly into the permanent housing. So it's all about the flow of people from interim to permanent, which is why that balance is really important. There will be some money, my understanding from Measure W, that goes towards capital, and that will include both transitional and maybe another tranche of permanent, but they are looking at kind of mimicking a little bit of the way we've done R2H2, which is our local version of Homekey. So the potential to transition hotels or motels or existing facilities as quickly as possible, although it depends. into transitional facilities is something that will be coming with Measure W support either later this year, like probably in the fall is my understanding. And so what we'd need to do is have actually matching funding or some amount of money in our coffers to attach to expand the number of transitional beds.

have the county put any i i have not been able to see anything around like a unit like their projected units or how many beds or any how many spots they anticipate to bring online and so i have not seen that and so it's totally unclear to me if we're actually going to make inroads and reducing homelessness at this rate with your own anti-displacement policy highlights how many people are falling into homelessness every year and it just i i am getting increasingly frustrated i'll just say that and from your perspective is there a need to identify some like is there more room to push the county uh especially given you know hr1 cuts and all of that or do we need to look at our own funds i'm just trying to understand the dynamics between the county and the city as it relates to homelessness specifically

I mean, I would say all of the above. Definitely, we're continuing to work with the county. The county will be rolling out the next sort of version of the Home Together Plan. And Measure W funding is supposed to align with their Home Together Plan. So it's the funding source to help support the strategies in their Home Together Plan. We influence. Oh, and Cupid is here. So we work with the county to inform both the Home Together plan as well as Measure W spending, and we are working with the mayor's support to push on the county to make sure that Oakland gets its a fair share of Measure W, but we need to have, yeah, more funding towards prevention, which hasn't rolled out yet across the county. We need to have more funding towards transitional and shelter services, and we need to have also the permanent housing so that the whole flow and system can function.

Thanks very much, just a couple of things. We established the new Office of Homelessness Solutions, and we have our director here who will speak to this in specifics, but let me just mention a couple of things. The county, I'm a member of the Alameda County Mayor's Association, and we fought for 80% of the Measure W funding as a county. Our formula here in Oakland for Measure W money is this. We're about 22% of the county, about fifty eight percent of the unsheltered population in the county reside on the streets in oakland and over seventy percent uh... are black and so there's a racial inequity issue also and so the formula that we have developed we have raised with the county so that this week have projected that it's approximately sixty four percent based on the formula and based on equity with the other cities in the county that oakland should be in line for approximately 64%. That's our formula, and so we're in the process now of negotiating what that overall would be. Also, we have HAP funding at the state level, and we're at risk now of losing HAP funding. We look at maybe a $5 million gap in homelessness funding from the state, which is, again, why it's so important that we raise new revenue if, in fact, We don't pass Measure E, we're at risk of losing about 190 shelter beds, and so we're right there at the brink of being able to move forward or backwards. But it has been slow with the county, but the county, and we have a very good, we have good allies with the county who are helping us. The RFP process has to be adhered to. The criteria in the RFP has to be such that it's fair for all cities. And so it's been a slow process, but remember, we're just now gearing up with that. And so I just want you to know it is a priority. And even though the homelessness, the point in time count had us reducing homelessness by 20%, we need more resources because we need more interim shelter, we need more supportive shelter, and we need more permanent housing. for people and that's what we have to do is build more permanent housing. But we have to have the shelters and the interim and the supportive until we can get to making sure that we have the permanent housing. But it is a funding problem.

Cupid, you wanna come respond to that?

Yeah, can we restate the question?

i so in general since this budget if measure e doesn't pass actually takes 190 shelter beds online i was just commenting in general in spite of the pit count showing a reduction visually i don't see that in my district if anything i've had a couple of incidents at lincoln elementary actually wilma chan park looks like it's going to become the new people's park And what I know is that in spite of what people think, it's not that we don't have enough, it's not that people don't want to come indoors. A subset, sure, but actually we have very few open interim beds right now, and that's where we have to place people when we close down an encampment. And so I am trying to, I found it incredibly challenging to follow the county. The Measure W money seems to be coming out very slowly. And the other thing is they haven't put out any, as far as I can tell, um any numbers around this is the projected number of units they expect to put online this is how this is how much they expect to decrease by my own modeling they're not going to actually make as much progress as we'd like but i'm just making my own assumptions based off of you know the 40 to 50 000 for the um what is it per per year for an interim bed some of the you know the standard models that are out there per cost but i haven't seen it and so it then becomes very difficult as a policymaker in the city of oakland where we have the biggest challenge with with homelessness to say do we need to identify more funding here at the city or do we have room to fight for money at the county and how to what is our strategy around homelessness

Sure yes yes and so to the mayor's point previously in the point in time count it showed that reduction was in the city of oakland but to the mayor's other point is that a majority of the unhoused and unsheltered population is still within the city of oakland so that's going to be that 58 to 54 and of that of the total in-house population that happen to be African American, 75% is going to be in the city of Oakland. So when we're looking at how we're going to advocate with the county, there have been a lot of conversations and we have had that similar conversation where not only how much is it going to cost, per person per bed, but also what are the areas that you're going to be focused on? One of the things that we have is our homelessness strategic action plan that actually puts numbers to what we're advocating for. But to the mayor's other point, one of the things that we're pushing for is a very clear association between city of Oakland's needs and the available resources. So that is an ongoing conversation. I will say that in the city of Oakland, we do have our numbers in the homelessness strategic action plan and the costs associated with how much we believe it is going to be to respond to the needs right now. So we do have very clear data and that data is supported by a report and that report breaks down how much it costs for long term and interim sheltering to make that dent that we're looking for.

Yeah, and just one more point, one thing, again, with regard to my staff, you know, we're working on outside investments from philanthropy and the business community, because that's been a big part of what we do. Councilmember Guile in my office has tried to identify public and private resources, and we do have some resources online Hopefully we'll be able to make some announcements with regard to that much later in the fall probably. But just know that we're not just waiting on the county and we're not just waiting on the state. We're looking at philanthropy and also private sector investments to address homelessness.

Thank you. Just one more question, and this is actually unrelated to homelessness. This is directed to Bradley Finance. This is just around the administrative citations. I have found through my own work in the human trafficking and passing that ordinance that across the board we have challenges related to enforcing administrative citations, not just human trafficking um citations and so i've seen that in other cities they have you know either it's technological uh investments or they have the processes in place like we're not enforcing as i understand it drunk driving citations we're not enforcing sideshow citations um there's just a whole series of ordinances where we have administrative fines or civil penalties on the books we don't actually enforce them and We see it with the legal dumping. So I think it's part of a systemic issue. And I'm trying to understand, do we need an investment in some technology? What would make a difference? And I know that right now the process is the departments are the ones that submit the invoices. I don't know if that's what is actually the right thing to do versus centralizing it within your department, frankly.

So to the Council President and Council Member Wong, One of the things that has happened since the Great Recession, I would say, is in an effort to preserve services, successive budgets have eliminated most of the administrative capacity of most departments. That is the first place that many of our departments have looked at over the last 20 years in terms of reducing costs and expenditures in order to balance. And it is those administrative staff that provide you the capacity to do things like administrative enforcement of citations. I know OPD is particularly heavily hit in terms of its fiscal unit, in terms of being able to do that. Regardless of whether or not it was rebuilt centrally or rebuilt within the OPD, it requires significant new additional resources to have a team dedicated toward focusing on administrative citations. Again, we used to have within many of our departments this administrative capacity, but when it often, and you see it in OPD, I think you'll see it in many of our department spaces, when push comes to shove, the decisions have been over time to preserve the on the street ability for those departments to perform direct services as opposed to often that administrative capacity. And so that's part of that sort of technical hole we're dealing with. And I mentioned that technical deficit, you brought that up as well. We do have outdated technology and systems. We haven't invested in them. And the ones we do have aren't integrated. They don't talk to each other well. And so that is another challenge that we have to move forward with as well. And so all of that would require significant new resources and needs to be part of our roadmap in terms of bringing things back to a level of capacity to be able to do that enforcement action.

Council Member Houston.

Yeah, so through the chair, and this is to my council member Wang. The county's willing to work, they're ready to go with Measure W. We have friends there, and the mayor was correct about the percentages. This message is, this question is to Mr. Cubitt and Mrs. Lake. About the 77th that's in District Six, that safe parking space, they're waiting on us to bring that operational so they can do what they have to do. Where are we at with that?

Yes, so after our analysis, I think all we need to do is meet with the county because one of the things that we looked at was the infrastructure, for those who might not be familiar, 71st was the demobilized safe parking space. We also are looking at prioritizing it. We're going for an ERF-5 application, I think, The critical deliverable here is where's the funding going to come from? So we're more than willing. We're happy to have that conversation with the county. And so we can get to that this week. One of the other things is that we just want to be sure that the county is aware of our methodology. They agree with it, but we can engage in that conversation.

Okay, thank you, because I spoke to them. You know, we got friends at the county. The county is willing to work with us. They love the city of Oakland, and they're willing to roll on that. So I just want to make sure, because I'll sit down. I have the meeting with them. They ready to go with that. They just need it operational again, and then they can use the Measure W monies for that. I already spoke to them. Perfect.

Thank you for giving us some options in terms of locations and we're working very closely with the county and what I want to mention also is that we have this alliance now between the governor's office my office Caltrans and the county and we meet periodically every couple of months and to develop our plan with regard to all of the partners who have a responsibility to not only keep the city clean, but also to move forward with our housing assistance and our strategic plan on homelessness. And so that alliance is there, and we're working together to try to move forward to do this.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Fife.

I think about 12 hours ago, we said we'd hear from the public. That's what I'm really interested in doing. I do have questions, but I'll wait till the public speakers are complete.

I have questions as well, but I'll wait as well. All right, let's get to the public.

As I call your name, please approach the podium in any order. Please state your name for the record before you begin. If you're on Zoom, please raise your hand so I can easily identify you. You will have a minute and 30 seconds to address the council and you can approach the podium in any order as was standard practice. We'll take the speakers in the room first and then move on to the Zoom speakers immediately after. Ms. Asada Olabala, Alex Rugala, Jeff Levin, Carla Guerrera, Liam Donovan, Kevin Daly, Matt Schreiber, Tano Trachenberg, Tim Dunn, Millie Cleveland, Chie Azuma, Ali Kashani, Jack Woodruff, Colin Pipe, Treva Haddon, Noel Pondonchuk. Chase Fowler. Elliot Goodrich. David Amaro. Paul Shorter. Darren Lowndes. Mari Kane Simon. Cody Meshberger. Kelsey Caldwell. Also, if you have time seated to you, please let me know before you begin. Also, the person must be present in the room or on Zoom to get the time. And if you do seize your time, you are giving up your time to speak. Thank you.

Good morning, Treva Hatton, Local 21 member and member of the bargaining team. last week the city proposed changes to local 21's contract that would deny the city's essential workers any cost of living adjustment increase our contributions for health care and retirement benefits and deny us the right to telework this is unacceptable the city waited until the very last day to give us these proposals which effectively reduce our pay While cost of living soars, this bad faith bargaining shows that the city does not respect its workers or the services we provide to residents. We are the ones who keep the city running. Local 21 members have been highlighting simple actions that the administration can take to save the city millions of dollars, such as making common sense changes to OPOA's contract that have long been recommended by the city auditor and civilianizing desk jobs in OPD. A reduction in pay for my position in safety and training with the City of Oakland Public Works and Oakland Department of Transportation would have a direct impact on my ability to continue providing high quality service to Oakland residents. My role supports the safety, compliance, and training needs of employees responsible for maintaining Oakland's infrastructure, streets, facilities, parks, and public spaces. When compensation fails to keep pace with the demands of the position or decreases, it creates financial strain that can affect employee retention, morale, and the city's ability to attract and retain experienced staff. Local 21, we're angry, we're disappointed, and we're mobilizing to fight for a fair contract.

Morning, my name is Chase Fowler. My name is Chase Fowler. I'm a proud member of IPT Local 21. I'm here today to comment on the proposed budget. I and many others have stood up here on multiple occasions to speak to the importance of civilization. Despite the administration's and council's claims that they are seriously pursuing civilization, this budget seriously undercuts that claim. It freezes three positions within CPRA that are crucial to moving civilization forward. As Treva mentioned, civilianization is a common sense effort that will help put officers on the street and save the city money. And if this council is serious about moving forward with civilianization, we need to remove those, restore those positions in the budget. In last year's budget, Council provided a policy directive that directed the administration to form a task force and produce a timeline and plan for civilization by June 30th of this year. And we have not heard anything about who is on that task force, if they've even met. Show that you're serious about civilization and restore those positions within CPRA. The Mayor, Finance Director Johnson, CM Gaya spoke to rising costs within Oakland. If we want our city workers to actually live in Oakland, we need to be able to pay them to live here, right? The budget includes no cost of living adjustments at a time when inflation is higher than ever. And in addition to that, it also forces additional healthcare costs and.

Hello, City Council. My name is Colin Peaty. I'm a proud Local 21 member. I want to tell you about my coworker who recently left to the city of San Ramon because he's underpaid here. He left to receive a higher salary. He commutes from Pittsburgh. He's electing for a worse commute to get more money in what is already a very not great commute. i want i want you all to focus on paying us enough to actually live in the city that we work in and to pay us enough that competes with other cities you know we're continually losing people to this churn and we can't provide city services because people are doing multiple people's jobs You know, and then also to speaking to OPD, you know, we're looking at our budget like, oh, we're paying 200 for groceries, like 200 for transportation and $3,000 for artisanal candles. Like, what are we doing with OPD's like overtime budget? You know, it's 55 million is what they spent, which is more than our paving budget. So we really need to look at the elephant in the room when it comes to our budget. Thank you.

Hello, good morning council members. My name is Noelle, I'm a proud IFPTE Local 21 member and a member of our bargaining team. I'm here today to talk about Oakland's budget and fair compensation for Oakland workers. But really this is more about, it's about more than city employees, it's about Oakland residents. Every day, as city employees, we show up to provide the essential services and infrastructure that Oaklanders rely on. Many of us are already stretched thin, we're covering vacancies, we're taking on additional responsibilities, and we're working through burnout to keep this city running. If we want responsive, effective public services, we need to be able to retain experienced staff, and we need to be able to support workers who deliver them. When the city invests in its workforce, it invests in Oakland. Many of you have described yourselves as labor-friendly leaders, and labor organizations have worked really hard to help elect many of the people sitting around in this room. We're asking you to demonstrate that commitment by standing with the workers who keep this city functioning every single day. I'm asking council to direct the city's bargaining team back to the table with a serious commitment to retaining workers and reaching a fair agreement. Oakland can't afford to keep losing experienced staff. A strong contract is an investment in the workforce that keeps the city running and the residents who depend on our services every day. Thank you for your time.

Good morning, Elliot Goodrich, Local 21. So let's talk about the structural deficit that Director Johnson referenced. We keep coming to council with solutions for fixing structural overspending in OPD, reducing overtime, fixing the OPOA contract, and reducing and civilianizing desk jobs. And yet, there's a reduction in three CIPRA positions in this budget that Chase referred to, and I would encourage everybody to read the equity consideration descriptions for freezing these positions on the budget page. And yet, last year, OPD overtime spending was the equivalent of, to Councilmember Gallo's point, 300 public works staff that could be cleaning up the streets. I believe that you all are running from these structural problems. These are dark times and what we're seeing across the country is that the only ethic that will get us through this is by putting workers first. The ethic is facing these structural problems head on and using the windfalls to invest in the city's workforce. Mayor Lee, Council Member Wong, Council Member Ramachandran, I stood in a photo with you before I knocked doors for Measure E on Saturday. Will you stand in actual solidarity with us now, with your workforce? To the other council members who have received support, endorsement from the city's unions, will you stand in solidarity with us? Your actions are what matter now, thank you.

Hello, my name is Cody Meschger. I'm an engineer with the Construction Management Division in DOT. I'm a proud Local 21 member. As of late last week, the city administration's bargaining team has requested that Oakland City workers not only receive no cost of living adjustment, as well as reduced health care, pension, and other benefits. They have rejected our telework proposal, which is a no-cost proposal. At the very least, they should be able to accept something that's no cost. We were asked to work for less and with less. The administration has offered these takeaways to most bargaining units and people are so upset, all I've heard is whispers of the S-word, strike. This is not a threat. The strike does not benefit anyone, especially the citizens of Oakland. Citizens I have spoken to want their city workers to be fairly compensated and respected, just as they want to be well taken care of and respected. Local 21 positions are 25% vacant. Please respect your city workers, support our work. The mayor has put across a balanced budget with no cuts or takeaways. There's no reason to show this disrespect to workers as we make the city run. It makes it harder to hire and harder to retain workers. We request that you show your support and investment in the city workers. Thank you.

If your name was called, come forward. There's people behind you all who would like to speak as well. Please come forward. Approach the podium please, thank you.

Good morning, council members. My name is David Amaral, and I'm the director of research for AllHome, a regional nonprofit focused on disrupting the cycles of poverty and homelessness in the Bay Area. For several years, AllHome has worked closely with city staff in the Housing and Community Development Department and the new Office of Homelessness Solutions. Our analysis is part of what guides the investment priorities and the new Homelessness Strategic Action Plan, a plan which emphasizes the need to continue expanding affordable housing in the city. The 2026 point-in-time count results indicated a 20% reduction in Oakland, so we're moving in the right direction. In large part because of the affordable housing made possible by Measure U, essential housing that does not get built without a funding source like Measure U. But homelessness remains the most pressing humanitarian crisis we face, and so now is not the time to pull back. It's the time to double down. We urge the Council to allocate the third tranche of funding for Measure U to HCD's budget so we can continue making progress on this most vital issue. Thank you.

Good morning, Council. My name is Jack Woodruff. I'm representing Rooted, an affordable housing program of the Oakland Fund. We recently closed on an educator housing acquisition, our first, and the nation's first of its kind. I think we know that the issues showing up on Oakland streets that you're all talking about today are downstream from what we're doing for our kids in our schools. I don't just want to offer support and urging for including affordable housing funds in the next Measure U tranche. I want to offer a little data. I wouldn't speak against the other priorities for Measure U funds. They're high priorities. I think what's unique about housing in this time is that there's a unique market opportunity for affordable housing organizations in Oakland that we have not seen in decades and are unlikely to see for decades to come. According to CoStar, a real estate data broker, the cost per unit for multifamily housing in Oakland is now $100,000. That is down from $400,000 just pre-pandemic and into the first year of the pandemic. This is not going to last. Vacancy is trending downward. It is now at 7% from its crest at nine. Rents are starting to pick up. This is an opportunity right now for Oakland to own Oakland. Your affordable housing dollar goes much, much further at this moment, and I urge you not to miss the moment. Thank you.

Good morning. Thank you for your time today. My name is Paul Schroeder. I work on behalf of the Unity Council. I'm voicing my concerns regarding the current state of the budget. I understand that this council and city has many competing priorities and problems it needs to address, especially now with the funding landscape and the state and federal governments. However, as Mayor Lee pointed out, our budget is a moral document and reflects our values and priorities for this city. It currently includes $0 for the construction and preservation of affordable housing units, which is crazy. For a $2.7 billion budget, $0. Our city and our HCD department work tirelessly to build and maintain affordable housing units in the city, and we are working tirelessly to build new units in Oakland as nonprofit organizations and private citizens. My question to you all is, are you committed to affordable housing still? The current answer is no. Please listen and heed the advice of your Housing and Community Development Office and ensure that at least $50 million of that third tranche is in the city budget. needed for upcoming account and r2h2 funding programs it's crucial to ensure that the city leverages funds for upcoming opportunities for the new state hcd funds for 2027. every dollar we spend this year can be used for additional funds allocating zero dollars affordable housing is not only a missed opportunity but digs deeper a deeper hole for us to dig ourselves

Good morning. My name is Ali Khashoggi. I want to remind the council that Oakland secured $140 million in home key funds in the last four years, which created 600 housing units, permanent supportive housing units. We have participated and acquired hotels and created 220 of those units. The mayor's own strategic plan for addressing homelessness projects 3,650 housing units needed in the next five years to do a 50% reduction. So it's really imperative that you consider doing the third tranche of the bonds, at least $50 million towards producing more permanent supportive housing. Proposition 1, that created about a billion dollars for housing and homelessness, The Homekey program still has unused funds. So in Oakland, we have an opportunity to apply and get those monies. And your money is leveraged three to four times. Whatever dollar you put in, we leverage it with the state funds three to four times to create housing. That money is available right now on a first-come, first-served basis. And if we don't allocate funds, Oakland will lose the opportunity to create more affordable housing in the next two years. Thank you.

My name is Millie Cleveland. I'm here with the Coalition for Police Accountability. I have to object to the budget as it currently stands. Chief Beer is correct, the NSA doesn't go away, but those tasks are to become standardized within the operations of the police department. when the what the judge is saying is if the monitor goes away the responsibility is transferred to the inspector general but what this budget is doing is allocating 450 000 dollars for a full-time constitutional administrator when that work should go to the community independent inspector general, which is not fully funded. So while it's correct Council Member Wong is concerned about losing shelter beds, you are duplicating the work of the inspector general into a position in the city administrator's office with no guarantee for transparency, only accountable to the mayor, only accountable to the city manager. This is not a reflection of the values of the city that voted for an independent police commission that needs to be funded. if the monitor is not being funded that

Good morning. I'm Mary Kane Simon. I'm a member of your Oakland Library Commission. I just want to congratulate you, Mayor Lee, and thank you for restoring the funding, the full measure of funding to the libraries. And I just want to add, the libraries are more than just books and librarians. They are hardworking, multitasking employees who do so much for our community. And just to give you a few examples from what I've seen in the last year, children going into the library, a safe, happy, clean, perfectly free, open space where they can play and they can learn and be safe and find knowledge that the librarians help bring to them in a way that they can understand. Put a value, put a price tag on that. Students can find a clean, safe, practical place to go and learn how to fix their bikes. Madam Mayor, did you know you can go to an Oakland Public Library and learn bicycle mechanics? They do that for people. Put a price tag on that. One accident saved, you know, the whole budget is justified there. Adults, in the past year, I saw a skilled trades job fair. If just one or two people came out of that with a skilled trade career that can support and sustain a family, put a value on that. Adults get language support. It is a place where you can go to find knowledge and information on how to fix your house. Some people can't use the internet. They don't know how to access the services. You can go to an Oakland Public Library.

Thank you, ma'am. Your time is up.

And get help. Thank you.

Good morning. Chia Zuma district six resident and chair of the library commission. I'm here today to express my appreciation for the mayor's proposed mid year budget adjustment, especially as it relates to restoring the library's full allocation of the general fund. This is the first time since 2013 that the library has been fully funded with the 14 and a half million dollar in general funds that was committed to us in Measure C. And just briefly, this will enable us to hire more library staff to deliver services to the public. We have more money now for library materials, and we also have are now able to pay for a new safety pilot for the main and the MLK library locations. And most importantly, this saves us from reaching into our scant reserves and we've been making do with the limited funding that we've had. So again, thank you to our council members for your continuing support for the libraries. I assure you, dollar for dollar, money spent on libraries is one of the most cost-effective ways in which to support the wellbeing and safety of our neighborhood and our communities. Thank you.

Kevin Daly, first. No, City Council is not actually my senior center. It just seems like it. I'm concerned about parking policy. I really thank the city administrator and the mayor for keeping parking policy with Oak Dot, including enforcement. It'll make the streets safer from traffic collisions. I want to make sure that parking enforcement dispatch positions are restored and expanded. Before COVID, if I saw a car on a sidewalk or blocking curb cut, I could call a phone number within an hour. There was usually a ticket placed on the car. The ADA consent decree requires that the city prevent blocking of sidewalks. So not only do I want to restore the two positions that have been frozen for ages, but bring back or bring evening and weekend enforcement as well. I'm also looking forward to working with the fire department to choose new fire trucks that can maximize emergency response as well as traffic safety. There's some amazing new tech out there that I think will be really interesting to use. Hoping we have money for that and let's sell more major new bonds. Thanks.

Good morning, City Council. My name is Matt Schreiber, and I'm representing Eden Housing, a local nonprofit housing developer. I'm here today to urge you all to release the third tranche of Measure U monies for affordable housing development. As Director Weinstein mentioned, the city has committed nearly $200 million in Measure U funds over the past two years, including $63 million last year. The city's prior approach has created large, meaningful awards for many projects, including Eden's partnership with the Black Cultural Zone at Liberation Park, and our ask today is to keep that momentum going. If adopted as proposed without any allocation for affordable housing, Many pipeline projects, including our partnership with Williams Chapel to bring 67 units of affordable housing for seniors in District 2 that includes a set-aside for previously homeless residents, will be further delayed and forced to forego any county or state funding opportunities until a local award is attained. Local funding from cities is a prerequisite for 100% affordable housing projects to receive county and state awards, and without a Measure U funding allocation from the city, we cannot move these important developments forward. Just to put a finer point on it, Eden and Williams Chapel have already been forced to return $1.5 million to the regional center of the East Bay, and we were ineligible for Measure W funding at the county since our project had no local funding commitment. these consequences are real these delays are real and oakland needs to provide more affordable housing in this current budget cycle i urge council to consider this allocation and thank you for your time

Good morning, Chairperson Jenkins and city council members. My name is Darren Lowndes, Executive Director of HCEB. I urge you to continue to fund emergency and interim beds. Due to city budget cuts in the current fiscal year, interim and emergency shelter programs have already been closed, and further closures will exacerbate the problem. And the data is clear. Reductions in funding shelters, interim housing, and permanent supportive housing lead to spikes in the number of unhoused living in encampments throughout the community in subsequent years. Any recent reductions in unsheltered homelessness will be reversed in the next couple of years without necessary program capacity. And any further cuts to emergency and interim housing programs will have a devastating effect on our neighbors currently unsheltered and living on the streets. In addition, the city must find ways to fund permanent supportive housing. Permanent supportive housing creates exits from the emergency and shelter system, as well as allowing people with extremely low incomes and disabilities become leaseholding tenants directly from the streets. City investment will allow Oakland to continue to leverage state capital, such as the Homekey program as mentioned earlier, while it is still available, adding critical, deeply affordable permanent supportive housing. Please commit $50 million in funds in this budget from the third tranche of Measure U towards permanent supportive housing, and please fund emergency and interim shelter beds. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Moving to the Zoom speaker, starting with Asada Olaballa. Please unmute yourself and begin your comments. Ms. Asada, I see you're unmuted, but we cannot hear you. I will come back to you. Going to Karla Guerra. Please unmute yourself and begin your comments.

Thank you. Good morning, City Council. My name is Karla Guerra. I am the policy and advocacy senior manager at the Unity Council, a local affordable housing developer. We want to raise our concern regarding the mid-cycle proposed budget and its housing investment policies. We urge you to ensure that at least $50 million in Measure U is allocated in the City's budget to support new construction, the acquisition, conversion, and rehab of affordable housing programs. This budget currently includes $0 for the construction or preservation of affordable housing units, again, zero dollars. This is not a reflection of the values of this city. Allocating funding now will allow HCD to launch a 30 million NOFA this fall, positioning projects to compete for 2027 tax credits and state funding opportunities. We cannot afford to lose momentum. We urge you to prioritize at least 50 million in Measure U funding for housing. Please listen to your HCD department housing developers, advocates, and Oakland residents. Thank you for your time.

Alex Regala, you are next.

Good morning. My name is Alex Regala, and I'm a senior policy manager with Midpen Housing. Midpen is a nonprofit developer, manager, and provider of affordable housing and on-site resident services throughout Northern California. And in the city of Oakland, we have 469 homes across five different properties, along with 88 more units in the pipeline. These 88 units are part of our 1707 Wood Street project in West Oakland, which will create deeply affordable rental homes and homeownership opportunities in partnership with Habitat for Humanity. The project has received immense support from the community and city staff as we prepare to submit for entitlements in the coming months. However, the project is in need of local funds in order to compete for state and federal resources in 2027 and move towards construction. We've been closely tracking efforts at the state level to reform the affordable housing system to be more streamlined and efficient. And in this new financing system, local funds will play a critical leveraging role in setting up projects to compete successfully statewide. Similarly, as has been mentioned, we also know that Measure U funds will allow projects to be eligible for county Measure W funds for permanent supportive housing. So therefore, to advance projects like Wood Street and the city's affordable housing pipeline, we urge the council to allocate a minimum of $50 million to measure youth funding to new construction programs. Thank you.

Thank you, Trang. Ms. Olabala again, please unmute yourself and begin your comments. Can you hear me? Yes.

Thank you. Good morning. I have some concerns about the following issues. It's stated that no new initiatives will be a part of the budget. but you're implementing a pilot ambulance program and you're establishing a constitutional police administration position. The limited funding for homelessness, services lost of homeless programs, state homeless funding cut in half next year, After July 31st, 2026, two programs at risk of closing. You can't speak to Measure W without specific numbers because a lot of the advocacy around Measure W was to prevent homelessness. The spending of that money would be around that initiative. The statement that you make in the presentation that the budget will improve race and equity, that's not true. Oakland Police Administration building safety issues not being addressed. You have issues of over 30 police cars that you bought that you have been unable to pay for. You are using Measure U money that could be used for homelessness and for affordable housing, as well as KK funds from the Lincoln Rec Center. You also have over 5,000 waiting lists in the Oakland Housing Authority identified.

Moving to the next speaker, Tano Trachtenberg. Please unmute yourself and begin your comments.

Good morning, Council. My name is Tano Trachtenberg, and I'm the Senior Policy Manager at the Nonprofit Housing Association of Northern California. I want to urge the Council to allocate funding from the third tranche of Measure U dollars in the amount of at least $50 million to HCD. This morning, you've already heard from many of our members, including MidPenn, Unity Council, Eden, and others. They've all made clear how critical local match funding is to be able to compete for regional dollars like Measure W, as well as state and federal resources. And I hope the council will take those concerns and comments seriously. Oakland is genuinely well positioned right now. The city has a robust pipeline of shovel ready projects that could produce over 1000 units of affordable housing. And with these local dollars, it has a competitive advantage with state funding and within the region where other other cities, local funds have dried up. But both of those assets depend on these local dollars, and without the allocation, the edge that Oakland has erodes. So I want to acknowledge that the council and staff worked really hard last year to accelerate bond sales. We were here advocating for that. That was the right call. But the value of those resources depends on putting them to work, and it would be unfortunate to wait a year to do that. Voters delivered this funding to build housing and allocating funding this year to HCD is how we make good on that. Thank you so much for your time.

Jeff Levin, you are next. Please unmute yourself and begin your comments.

Thank you. Good morning. Jeff Levin, Senior Director of Policy with East Bay Housing Organizations. We urge the City Council to ensure that the next tranche of Measure U bond sales includes a minimum of $50 million of the remaining housing funds. The city already has a pipeline of unfunded new construction projects requesting nearly $250 million in city funding. That pipeline will remain frozen without new funding and delaying funding to future years will increase the cost of these projects and reduce the number of homes that can be made available. Inclusion of housing funding in tranche three of Measure U bond sales would make possible the following. Funding for new construction, acquisition and conversion of existing housing to permanently affordable housing, and rapid response homeless housing. Positioning the city to leverage tax credit funding in 2027 and new funds that would become available if the proposed $10 billion state housing bond is approved. Ensuring that the city has local matching funds for Measure W for both interim and permanent supportive housing. Taking advantage of the current softness of Oakland's real estate market, which presents a unique and unparalleled opportunity to pursue acquisition and conversion opportunities while prices are low. Continued progress in carrying out the city's affordable housing and homelessness plans depends on an ongoing stream of local funding. We urge the council to make sure that those funds are available this year. Thank you.

If your name was called and you wish to address the council, please raise your hand or step to the podium. At this time, all names have been called. Okay, we have one more, two more. Tim Dunn, please unmute yourself and begin your comments.

Hi, good morning, Council. My name is Tim Dunn. I'm with Mercy Housing, the largest nonprofit housing organization in the country. We are currently developing, building 96 units of affordable senior housing. I'm fully subsidized with HUD subsidies in Uptown neighborhood of Oakland. We are urging you to release the $50 million for Measure U funds. It's really critical. We're only able to build the housing that we're building now because there was money available last year. Had the money not been available last year, we would have missed this opportunity to receive these HUD funds. It's essential that the funds are available when the NOFAs come out from other sources like the state, et cetera. So please support affordable housing. Thank you.

ELLIE WILSON- Kelsey, please unmute yourself and begin your comments.

Good morning, Mayor Lee and council members. My name is Kelsey Caldwell and I am a former Oakland Animal Services volunteer and longtime dog advocate. I'm sure this room holds many dog lovers. I am here in support of the staff and volunteers at OAS Oakland Animal Services. For years, they have done everything they can with too few resources. Too little space, a building falling apart, and way too much responsibility. Taxpayers, volunteers, fosters, and donors have been forced to subsidize what should be an adequately funded public service. The recent tragedy involving Miranda's rescue in Fortuna, California, exposed a crisis many of us have warned about for years. Miranda's rescue was a transfer partner that OAS sent more dogs to than any other shelter in the state of California. This rescue was a scam and was telling OAS dogs were adopted out when instead these dogs were actually being shot in their faces. I believe this investigation in Humboldt County will bring to light thousands of dogs were killed this way. It has been crushing for our community. It was the result of a system stretched beyond its limits. The city plays a direct role in that. OAS has struggled with overcrowding and a lack of safe placement options for years. It must be adequately funded. What are you doing to prevent odor surrenders? What investments are being made in spay and neuter services? The animals, taxpayers, and volunteers deserve better. I urge you to fund OAS for the reality it faces.

That was the last speaker at this time. All names have been called.

Thank you to everybody who came out and spoke about varying issues that our city is facing. Thanks to the city workers that came out and spoke as well. Colleagues, I'm gonna lay out a timeline that we have for passing the budget amendments and such. So the first opportunity to pass the budget will be the 12th. for that meeting, your amendments would need to be in by Friday, what time, clerk? Yeah.

They need to be in Thursday by four.

So amendments to this budget, if the budget is to be passed on the 12th, need to be in by this Thursday at four. The second opportunity to pass the budget will be the 17th, and when would amendments need to be in by then? preferably friday by noon the latest we could probably accept is monday the 15th you guys don't have to write this down misha will send this out to everyone so the first date to pass budget is 12th and for that you need your amendments in by thursday at 4 p.m The second opportunity to pass the budget will be the 17th and the clerks want that in on Friday the what?

I apologize for your Friday the 12th meeting year, but your amendments need to be in by Monday the 8th by noon.

Monday the 8th by noon. Yeah. And so we'll send this all out in an email. The final opportunity to pass a budget without an extension will be the 30th. And hopefully we will be done by then. If I could share my screen. Yes.

So this is the one that I respond and react to, right? Right here?

Yes.

I mean, I've seen four or five different versions.

Yeah, and it's online as well.

Okay, so this is the one. Okay.

All right, all right. So a number of the speakers came in and talked about civilianization, the NSA. I had the pleasure of going to court with Councilmember Houston, and the mayor was there, and the judge was very... optimistic right that we have not only been in compliance but that we can keep up constitutional policing in our city and a constitutional policing officer administrator is the judge raved about that position and the city's commitment if I could share my screen madam clerk okay Just a little. Just a little? So I wanna point my colleagues to Oakland Municipal Code 245.100. And this talks about, here we go, right there. And so this talks about how the council needs to staff the OIG, this is our municipal code, this is what we're supposed to be governed by. So section C, the city shall allocate sufficient budget for the OIG to perform its functions and duties set forth in section budgeting one full-time staff position comparable to the position of police program and audit supervisor. And then in section D, within 30 days after the first inspector general was hired, the policy analyst position and funding uh funding then budgeted to the agency shall be reallocated to oig bradley are we funding those positions right now those positions are not included in this budget what positions do the oig have funded does that oig office of the oig have funded

There is a project manager two position that is funded. If I'm more clear, it's a two position. It may be a three. In the OIG budget, there is also an administrative assistant and a public information officer.

Thank you. As Ms. Milley said, it's important for the OIG to conduct audits as we're getting out of the NSA and not have to contract out to do the audits. And so I think it's something that we should look at in this budget, making sure that the OIG has what is mandated by Oakland Municipal Code and also positions that are necessary to perform the functions of complying with the NSA after we're out of NSA. Thank you. Council Member Houston.

Through the chair, I'd like to say, yes, we went over to the federal building. I mean, Council President Jenkins caught the barred over. We had a good conversation, and I really appreciate what the mayor said. Everything there that was said was positive, just total positive energy. I appreciate it. I appreciate the mayor. I appreciate Chief Beard. Hopefully he can be our permanent chief. So I appreciate what they said. So we're just positive and I appreciate the Mayor where she at. Thank you Mayor, thank you President.

Okay, if that's all, Council Member Fife.

Just regarding the statement that you made, are you suggesting that the Office of Inspector General be funded through this, through budget amendments? in addition to the $450,000 for the position in the city administrator's office.

So not suggesting anything, just alerting council to the fact that OMC is there and these are the positions that it says we shall budget also to my good friends at the Coalition for Police Accountability stating that the auditor needs to be able to do his job, and I agree. He shouldn't contract out to do the audits. He should do the audits and he should have somebody on staff that should do the audits. So just alerting the council to that fact. Council Member Cahill, press your button.

I mean, we have so many... Can you hear me okay? Testing one, two. It's regarding the public safety discussion we're having. Can you also share what... We have so many public safety advisory committees and commissions. We specifically created the police commission to move forward and have that evaluation take place. But, you know, we keep hiring staff, more staff and more staff when I need people on the street doing the work. And just let, I mean, we have one advisory commission after another after another trying to give oversight, given information, and just share that with my council people here how many we have and what are their responsibilities. And so we don't keep adding and adding and adding and come up with the same result. And we need people on the street getting the work done. And... and we don't need more administration to be involved, and certainly I've been to all the federal court hearings from the past, and certainly the judge comes up, well, you gotta wait till September this time. Well, no, you got two left. Well, no, you had one last time, and it keeps going on and on, but just advise the council how many advisory committees and commissions that our police department has to go through, thank you.

Thank you. Is there someone? Definitely. If there's nothing else, if nothing else, oh, one more thing. Two more thing.

20.

20 more things, all right.

Yeah, I'm just gonna run through a couple questions not all of the questions several were answered by Some of the presentations that we have but I do have a couple specific questions about positions that are added and deleted Through the chair to our finance director Hopefully you can help regarding the deletion of well addition in operations in the city administrator's office, we recently discussed a disparity study, and there's 782,000 being added to address O&M and implement policy and programmatic changes. What study is that related to?

There is some ongoing work regarding improving the procurement process, which would be tied to your disparity study, so it's the broader procurement process in general.

And how much of that allocation is specifically for that disparity study work?

It's all sort of, I would say it's a related project. In order to address the disparities, they have to also address the other concerns we have with procurement and the procurement cycle. So it's being looked at sort of on a holistic basis. So it's the outcomes in terms of disparity, but it's also the, if one's gonna address those, one has to look at the input processes that flow into it, not just the results, but what does the bidding process look like? What do the approval process looks like? How do we get more competitive veterans in? How do we ensure compliance with our other code elements, et cetera? And so it's a part of a broader look at the full lifecycle of procurement.

And so, but it will address the findings from the disparity study. That is the goal to address. Yes. And then specifically, maybe this is something Director Weinstein can support with. I'm deeply concerned about the lack of funding for affordable housing as well. We're not seeing resources in California right now for market rate housing. And we, as many of the speakers said, we have a unique opportunity to take advantage of this moment and without measure you funding, I don't know how we're gonna have the match. So how do we balance out? Well, I'm gonna make an amendment just so we're clear. I'm gonna make an amendment around the affordable housing dollars because we do need that in order to continue to even address homelessness, right? But I want to be clear about the $400,000 of miscellaneous personnel for outreach and homelessness. What are we doing outreach for if our budget was reduced for homelessness? What are we actually communicating? What is that $400,000 for?

I will direct that to our Office of Homeless Solutions administrator regarding the outreach budget, and I can speak to some of the housing allocations if Director Weinstein's not here.

Yeah, with so many shelter beds closing, is it to, I think I saw something about letting the public know that we're closing them. So if you could just explain.

Yes, thanks Council Member for the question. So this is specifically in regards to the new encampment abatement policy, high visibility, low vulnerability areas.

I see. On another note, are the updated maps available and who is creating those updated maps?

So it's an internal thank you for the question, council member. It's an internal process. We are currently undertaking that because of the influx of the amount of emails we're receiving from all over Oakland. We're going to be very intentional. I can respond at a later date with that timeline. Right now, we're meeting this week to have that internal conversation about the mapping and the vulnerability. Thank you.

I'm going to move to ITD because I was here when we had the ransomware attack. So through the chair, I don't see our IT director, but I will say that does the position that I think there were two frozen positions and one is still being frozen. So does a position being frozen mean that we don't actually need the work? I'm very concerned about the vulnerabilities of the city of Oakland specifically because all of our information is on the dark web, right? We had lawsuits as a result of that happening, so I wanna, the director said that there are impacts, and I wanna be clear about how serious those impacts are if he's around.

I do not see him here, and Councilman, we're happy to get back to you with a written response to that question to make sure we address the security concerns if those impacts are related to the security architecture of the city's IT systems.

Okay, and then with the Department of Violence Prevention. I see that we're adding one full-time violence prevention services supervisor, first of all, The DVP has been smashing it. I don't know if anybody's seen it in the news. I wanna just give a shout out to you, Dr. Joshu, for the work that you've done with the Department of Violence Prevention. I just was curious about the repurposing of 539,000 in O&M. for ceasefire lifeline positions because of, I believe there was a decrease in the budget from some other sources that you had anticipated. Will these be one-time funds from this particular budget allocation? And is that sufficient for you to continue the work that you're doing?

Yes, ma'am, thank you for the question. Holly Joshi, Chief of the Department of Violence Prevention. We did decrease our O&M budget in order to piecemeal the budget that we anticipated having from the state grant, CalVIP, which we did not receive this year. And so in order to safeguard those direct practice positions, that is what you're seeing there.

Is it one time funding that you're moving from O&M? And do you anticipate getting CalVIP in the future? Will it continue?

We can apply for CalVIP again in two and a half years. So over the next two and a half years, we will be doing what we do, which is fundraising and writing other grants in order to keep the work moving forward. You know, we do have Kaiser still. At this point, we still have a federal investment. Of course, that is always up in the air and extremely nerve-wracking considering we just received word last week that one of the federal grants that we have to support the school VIP program was slated to end September 30th of this year, but the feds are canceling it four months early because it no longer meets the federal guidelines and is no longer within the purview of this administration's beliefs about how to keep schools safe. So we were flagged during a review of federal grants, and so I say that to say that grant is ending four months early. The other grant that we have that supports Department of Violence Prevention staff is slated to go through the summer 2027, but I do think that we should be braced and ready to get a call about that one as well.

Wow. Is there a list, and perhaps Director Johnson, you can help, is there some database of all of the funds that we are potentially losing from the federal government and the departments that it impacts?

I believe so. I believe that's part of our citywide grant coordinator's role, and I see City Administrator Betsy Lake saying yes.

administrator lake thank you for that yes do we have access to that and if not when will we or when could we i'm happy to work with our grant coordinator to get that to you do you think it will be before we're done with this process i would assume they know what we're yes okay thank you thank you thank you um and director Director Johnson, through the chair, there are positions that are currently in parks and rec. There's one, oh, IT.

Yeah, sorry, it's through the chair to Council Member Fife. I believe there was a question about the frozen position in the department.

Correct, it sounded like that was a really critical senior level position that is intended to address cyber security. If you could just expand on that.

Yeah, sure.

And tell me the impacts, because you said it could potentially have impacts, what are those?

Yeah, again, through the chair. So the position is an information system specialist three, which is the highest level non-management position in the department. So it's the highest classification in the IT kind of hierarchy. And it's... focused on cybersecurity and infrastructure. It's very high a skill level. This is a position that would be overseeing duties like remediating threats, responding to threats, scanning for threats, staying abreast of the changes in the landscape, in the industry, coordinating with vendors, leading projects, leading initiatives around cybersecurity such as improving you know, systems and tools to respond and monitor the network, monitor accounts, also filling in gaps where we may have gaps in our current services, identifying those gaps and then proposing projects and solutions to fill them. So it's really a key position that would help grow the team. The team is still pretty small right now as we're talking about maybe three or four people who are directly responsible, although those duties do disperse out into the larger department there are really only the team the information security team is really only three people and so this these two roles which have been vacant in the department for quite some time and we've been trying to fill them we're going to come directly into that team and kind of grow it so the loss of that position would result in the reduction of our ability to do those that kind of growth We would really be keeping what we have now stable and secure, but not really growing and expanding the way that we could.

When was the cyber attack? What year was that? The ransomware attack?

That was February 9th, 2023, a date that I'll never forget.

Wow. I will say that that is significant for me because when I was first elected and the orientation that we had in January of 2021, the then ITD director warned of a pending cyber attack and that he said that the city of Oakland was extremely vulnerable. and they that we didn't have the resources to adequately address what we were up against and so that's why you know experiencing this attack um was very impactful for us it was a really scary time in the city and i don't want us to you know continue down that pathway if possible so i just appreciate you sharing this information um and we'll take that into account appreciate that thank you um Thank you. So through the chair to Director Johnson, if there are staff positions currently in one department that I'm looking at moving into potentially another department. There's a position in Public Works that takes care of all of the community gardens in the city of Oakland, and it's a part-time position. But because they're in Parks and Rec, and Parks and Rec is one of the most under-resourced departments in the entire city, they often end up not being able to maintain our community gardens. and we lose the capacity to feed our neighborhoods if they were maintained. Is it possible to move positions? I know this is not necessarily inside of the budget, but I'm wondering if there would need to be a budget reallocation in order to make this person full-time in another department, perhaps Public Works.

That would be, that actually is a budget amendment, like to be clear, that is absolutely during within the budget. As it relates to people, there is often a need for meet and confer depending on the bargaining unit for that particular individual and what's going on with them individually. So there may be requirements based on the MOU that we have to then do administratively, but reallocating positions between departments is the purview of the council within the budget amendment process.

And I hear you saying that it is germane to the conversation, but is it Tito? Nevermind, excuse me. So positions are currently, Positions currently vacant doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't service impacts, so I'm gonna move to Head Start, because as a life enrichment chair, I have to scrutinize that a little bit more. Do the service impacts or the deletions, and is there anyone here from Human Services? And this is particularly sensitive because there have been so many changes in the department.

Good morning. I'm the interim director for HSD.

Have we met?

Not yet. I've been here four days.

Four days. And what is your name, sir?

I'm Greg Elliott.

It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Elliott. Can you answer these questions?

I can get back to you with the answer.

There you go, that's a great answer. That's a great answer. I just wanted to know if reductions of vacant positions in HSD are gonna have an impact on Head Start. They've been vacant, so Bradley's back there saying some things.

Thank you, and thank you to Interim Director Elliott. We're working to get him up to speed on all the details with his budget in this cycle. We do not believe we'll see any on the ground impacts from the freezing of the vacant positions within Head Start. There are some also changes of positions within Head Start. got our last head start grant allocation we often had a number of placeholder job classifications and our human resources department has been working through the process of creating permanent job classifications and so some of the deletes and ads in this budget are actually us going from a placeholder job classification to a real job classification so that it can then be filled on a permanent civil service basis which is part of the processing when we um did this most recent round for Head Start, there were a number of new roles of the federal government through its process that we needed to create, and so some of that is that continuing ongoing process.

Understood, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Elliott. What he said. What he said, absolutely. I have... I have a lot of questions. I think what I will do is, because I feel like I'm talking too long, I will summarize the questions that I have. I'm deeply concerned about the impacts to our workers and some of the public comments that I heard today about not being able to afford to live in Oakland and then also having to do the jobs of multiple people. I don't know how we get our arms around the increased costs of healthcare and all of the things, but I'm not sure what's being proposed is the answer, but I also don't know what the answers are, so that's something that we have to wrestle with as a body. But I'm also, I guess I should say that I'm very happy with the mayor's work on this budget. I would not wanna be the mayor of a small, big city like Oakland ever, so I wanna just congratulate the mayor for her work on this. And one of the things that stands out to me is something I'm happy about is restoring part of the film rebate program that I worked on a few years ago. It's a minor addition to the initial allocation that we budgeted, but I just want to make sure that the staffing is there to support this program. We just saw, if you haven't seen I Love Boosters, Definitely go check it out. It's a local filmmaker in the city of Oakland boots Riley who has Commentary on a lot of things in Oakland and we want to produce more boots Riley's right the film rebate program will allow us to do that but we also on our end have to make sure that we have the staff to Monitor this program and for all of the other questions that I have and the concerns that I have I will work through your office, Director Johnson, to make sure that we have answers to the questions that I have. And I will be bringing budget amendments that will not be available Thursday. So I just want to state that for the record. You'll get it from me a little later.

Thank you. Hi, thank you. If Cupid could come up to the diocese. I wanted to follow up on the comment that my fellow council member made, Houston, on the fact that the county is willing to step in on some of the shelter beds that are poised to close. I want to make sure it's not just lip service for the, if Measure E does not pass, and we do need to close the 190 shelter beds,

it is the county going to magically step in is there a plan or actually are we going to see 190 people out on the streets thanks council member so one of the things that we've done with the county is to talk about the gap funding that would be available we're having a similar conversation about the federal funding that might not be available also so a part of our conversation is if there is a lack of resources would the county be able and willing to step up and what is the methodology that they're going to use to determine how much they're going to assist so that is actively a conversation that we're having okay i'm not hearing that this is a hundred percent though that the the beds that we would have to close if measure e doesn't pass it's a guarantee though yeah it's not a guarantee so this is an ongoing conversation that we and and i i would suggest that we have that at a higher level higher than my level but a conversation with their electeds also because we have continuously said, how is Measure W going to be allocated? And if there is any gaps, what is the methodology that you're going to use to make a decision on if you're going to support making sure that these beds stay available?

Okay, thank you. I have a question for Bradley. I noticed in the budget too that, because I'm pretty sure in public works and transportation we had held up or paused the transfer of the parking positions from transportation to finance, but I see that within this budget there is that transfer of 17 positions. Just have not heard the justification why this is going to somehow improve our parking citation collection So why is that in this budget?

Sorry, and I will note that there will be a report back to the full council coming, I believe, on the 9th that details all that. The proposal is to move the collection functions from the Department of Transportation to the Finance Department, where they did reside more recently. It's one of the more recent moves to DOT. And the goal is to enhance the collection and enforcement practices on that side of it. So it's to ensure that we have better compliance and better utilization of our DMV intercept program of our tax intercept programs in terms of ensuring that we have a better collection rate on Citations outstanding and those and now would include the speeding camera citations So there's a collection process back in process and we think that that those would be better housed within finance We would have better compliance And what do we mean by compliance? we were able to ensure that people who violate our local muni code or the state laws regarding them appropriately and timely pay their citations and whatnot.

Okay, I think just in this report, as I had noted in the last one, it was not robust enough. Like I've seen your work, you do incredible thorough reports. In that report that we had before public works and transportation, it was not, to me it did not really justify the transfer and I think that is incredibly important for this council to move forward with that. So, okay. Then I have a question actually to OPD. So Chief Beer. So I also wanna note to this body that tomorrow we are voting on measure, we are also voting on the measure and end spending plan, right? And one of the things that was noteworthy in that measure and end spending plan is that 30 to 34% is dedicated to measure and end. Is there no general fund allocated to the ceasefire staffing? And the reason I bring this up is because I think there is more and more scrutiny by the general public on each of our parcel measures and whether we're spending the money in ways that reflect their wants and their desires and the number one thing that came out of the measure nn advocacy was bring down the 911 response time i don't see that reflected enough in the measure and then spending plan i do see a lot of ceasefire and don't get me wrong i think ceasefire is incredibly important i want to maintain that i just wonder if are we not funding that with our general funds, or are we solely relying on Measure NN to maintain our ceasefire staffing within OPD?

no ceasefire is not completely dependent on measure nn however ceasefire greatly assists with all of our violence reduction which is contributing to the highest reduction of homicide since the late 60s so it is a very important arm in our ceasefire strategy and that's one of the reasons why we leverage them not just when it comes to organized um is also used for uh anywhere from human trafficking operations for long-term investigations and and the firearms reduction the staffing is um is the staffing for the officers assigned to ceasefire are funded by measure nn but the overtime isn't so overtime is coming from the general fund yes okay all right thank you for that clarification

Are you complete?

Okay.

Council Member Guile in Houston.

For the Violence Prevention Director, if you can please join us. I have a specific question that I, considering the challenge of public safety when it comes to human trafficking, prostitution, and you and I, when I started, we worked together, and you were on the street helping us out, making sure that Oakland did not experience that, and right now, is the violence prevention department involved with the human trafficking prostitution? Because, I mean, 20 girls, anybody who drives down the street, and you'll see the young ladies 20 years and younger on the street. And some of these are, and I work with you directly with, when we cleared prostitution out of my area. And so the question that I have is violence prevention involved with that effort? Because, you know, through your leadership, we were able to connect with the Catholic Church that housed a lot of the young girls and in different locations through your leadership, but also I still remember flying them back home. Right? You know, if I, if, you know, my friend here was doing that, well, I flew you back home to wherever you're from. And you were, you were very instrumental in doing that, and I was just wondering or asking for the public, are you involved with that? Because the one, the complaint that I'm getting now on a week, daily basis, we have prostitution going on the abandoned boats that I have on the estuary. Jack London Square and throughout by the Coast Guard where Prostitution is happening at nighttime and the police cannot address it because they don't have the police that used to help me with the abandoned boats, right? Or the stolen boats that are out there on the water. And just so the question is, is your department involved with that directly?

Yes, Mr. Gallo, through the chair. Thank you for that question. As you mentioned, my involvement in this city in the issue of sex trafficking goes back to 2004. And so many things have changed in the landscape of the city since 2004, both in terms of the ways in which exploiters move girls around the city, both in terms of the laws, and OPD can speak to that a bit more, But in terms of the Department of Violence Prevention's current role, we definitely currently play a significant role, although it's much different than the one that I was playing when I was running the Human Trafficking Unit at OPD and we were working together. It really is about intervention. And so one of the things that we fund is a hotline, 24-hour hotline, that anyone experiencing sex trafficking, domestic violence, or sexual assault can call to get supports. And that is picked up by a live person who can immediately begin to triage that survivor's needs. The other thing we do have is crisis intervention and crisis navigation. The community-based organization that we're currently funding to provide that crisis navigation support is Family Violence Law Center, and they most oftentimes are working directly with the Oakland Police Department during operations or if OPD patrol officers happen across a survivor particularly a juvenile in the middle of the night who needs supports, who needs to be reunited with their family, or unfortunately put into the Child Protective Services system. So we have that crisis navigation and 24-hour response available, which we did not have in 2024. So we pivoted back to fund that really important support crisis navigation and intervention. We also have relocation funding, which you're speaking about, which we used to do very well, which is making sure that the adults, if they need a quick relocation into a hotel, we can do that. Of course, we can't do that with juveniles and minors. They need to be reunited with a safe adult. or placed in CPS custody. But we also have a travel fund, so if people do have a family to get back to or a family that's willing to support them in getting out of the life, we can pay for buses, all of that. And then, of course, the longer-term care that is necessary for survivors to continue making healthy choices and to heal includes therapeutic supports that we pay for one-on-one, talk therapy, and then group and peer supports, long-term case management, pathways to employment, et cetera. So again, I say all of that to say the Department of Violence Prevention is involved and up to and including some street outreach, but it is a very different role than I was playing when we were working together.

Thank you for that information. I am back involved with Victory Outreach now again and been having lunch with some of the young ladies that are on the street, and they're not from Oakland. Well, like before. They were being bused in, flown in through the airport. But anyways, I'd like to continue to work with you to address that issue. Yes, of course. Because they're under the age. Some of them were 15, 16 years old. But anyways, thank you, and I'll reach out to you. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Gallo. Then we'll go to Houston and I'll entertain a motion after that to receive and file this report as we have another item as well. Council Member Houston.

Yeah, my understanding through the chair is real brief. On page... 567 the third paragraph as the vice chair of public safety and my chair um wayne charlene as the chair of public safety i get all these calls from from council member fife's district and and and and um charlene's district about this graffiti vandalism that we spend millions and multi-millions of dollars a year that's a visual cue of deterioration from our businesses. I'm not talking about the business owners that are saying they're gonna leave because they can't rid it because of that visual cue. Back in the day, it was like nine individuals that worked under Bradley. Now it's only two that does the abatement and two in the queue waiting to get hired. I didn't see anything about that. because that's a real huge piece and it should be handled just like illegal dumping and the same, not just abate, abate, abate. It should deter it where we can use these millions and multi-millions of dollars that we spend every year. I mean multi-millions. It can go to our seniors, it can go to our children, it can go to our libraries, right? So we only have two individuals that are actually doing that across the city. And we have two individuals that are in the queue. What's happening with that through the chair?

I'll defer to our public works director on anything more directly related to the graffiti abatement program, but the budget does not reduce the graffiti abatement program. It does not enhance it from its current level. And Director Garland, would you like to speak more to what our current status of those positions is?

Sure. Thank you, Liam Garland, Oakland Public Works Director. Yes, Councilmember Houston, the proposed budget essentially continues our existing level of service. There are vacancies in our painters, especially the ones working in the right of way, and we're working hard to fill those. The hiring requisitions have been submitted. We anticipate over the next couple months to get those hires made, but those positions, the total number of positions from this current fiscal year to next would stay the same. It's just my hope is we fill those painter positions so we can abate more graffiti. Does that make sense?

It does through the chair, but like I said, we need to do it like we do the legal dumping. We need to prosecute or deter it, because spending millions and millions of dollars, which can go other places, what's the strategy for this? Are we just gonna go paint it, leave tracks and traces, and not go after these individuals? Because many of them are coming from out of town and out of the state. right um it's called graffiti tourism so um and i presented that to charlene um so we need to do more to that so we can use those funds something else because we only have two across the whole city that's doing this thank you thank you i'll entertain a motion to file and report this so moved reporting power receiving power

On the motion by Council Member Ramachandran, second by Council Member Brown to receive and file item four. Council Member Brown.

Aye.

Council Member Fife. Aye. Council Member Gallo. Aye. Council Member Houston.

Aye.

Council Member Ramachandran. Aye. Council Member Unger is excused. Council Member Wong. Aye. Chair Jenkins.

Aye.

motion passes with a vote of seven ayes one excuse hunger and just before we go to the next item let me clarify the due dates for your materials for the June 12th meeting the materials are due June 8th at noon for the June 17th meeting your materials are due June 12th at 4 p.m. I know that there's a meeting that day so they will be due when they're due. June 30th, your materials are due June 25th at 4 p.m. One more time, in June 12th, that's the first opportunity to pass the budget.

June 17th is the second opportunity to pass the budget.

Going to item five, receive the Budget Advisory Commission report with recommendations related to fiscal year 26 through 27, proposed mid-cycle budget. You have 11 speakers on this item.

Council President, I'd like to introduce Mike Pettahoff and Ben Gould from the Budget Advisory Commission. They are a group of residents from here in the city of Oakland who help advise you on issues related to budget. We are happy to receive their feedback report. I want to thank them for all their work. Mike and Ben, go ahead.

Thank you. I'll do some introductions and then we'll jump in. My name is Mike Pettahuff. I'm the Vice Chair of the Budget Advisory Commission. I also chair the Working Group on Public Safety and Economic Development. I'll be returning in a moment to talk about some of the issues we've talked about today related to structural deficit and the long-term roadmap to fiscal health. Commissioner Gould will be talking about some of the issues directly related to the mid-year budget review, and I'll say that it's really been a three-person group. This is a report from the whole back. Karen Roy, who was also part of that ad hoc group, could not join us today, but Ben and I will be presenting on those topics. So I'll return a moment to talk about long-term recommendations for reducing the structural deficit, and now here's Commissioner Gould.

Thank you, Commissioner Pettahoff, and good morning, council members. Can KTOP pull up our presentation, please? Great. My name is Ben Gould. I serve as the FMC liaison, the Finance and Management Committee liaison from the Budget Advisory Commission. I'm here to present our short and long-term budget recommendations, while Commissioner Pettenhoff will present other additional long-term recommendations. So just for a bit of brief context, our commission had about, our ad hoc had about five days to put together these recommendations, so please forgive us if we couldn't cover everything. We tried to be as comprehensive as possible, but due to limited time, we could only do so much. I will give a brief overview that the proposed budget is generally healthy and largely consistent with the city's adopted fiscal policies We didn't find any major discrepancies or changes or unusual behaviors So we think this is generally a pretty good budget overall Most of our feedback is in the nitty-gritty details where we think the city could improve some of its decisions and possible processes around maintenance of effort requirements revenue assumptions things like that as well as some long-term forward-looking approaches to help make sure we're prioritizing the roadmap to physical health and improving transparency and performance metrics as well. Our Budget Advisory Commission has these guiding principles we use to help guide our recommendations. The first one is to ensure adherence to the consolidated fiscal policy. That's been largely met. We'll have one recommendation on that note. And the next one is to focus spending on community priorities. And our BAC last did a community survey, I think it was last year, 2025, for the previous two-year budget cycle. And so those priorities found that the community priorities are public safety, cleanliness, and housing. So we were looking at recommending priorities around those. And we think part of those community priorities also includes adhering to the requirements of voter-approved measures. So we hear about measure C and D, the city auditor's office, measure Q, measure N and so forth. We also want to ensure the budget follows best practices from other cities, as well as keeping equity considerations at the forefront of the decision-making. So our first short-term recommendation focuses on the voter approved measures. I wanted to highlight the success that this budget fully funds the requirements for libraries and the city auditor under measure C and D and the city charter. So we meet the full 14.5 million general purpose fund requirements for the libraries, plus the full 14 FTE for the city auditor. We do not meet the budget requirement for the full 700 sworn police officers for Measure NN. We are currently budgeting for only 678. However, it's also worth noting that the police department staffing report from January 31st said that current staffing was only 607 sworn officers, with 80 odd of those out for long-term leave, so only 520 available for active duty. So we think that this number is low, and even if we can't budget for more officers, we hope council will look at ways to either increase the number of officers we actually have on staff, have deployable, or have out in the field and not doing civilian desk jobs. Another issue is there's no funding for Democracy Dollars, but I did want to highlight that this budget includes funding to develop the software to make Democracy Dollars possible. So even if there was money available for the program, it wouldn't be usable because there's no way for people to submit the requests for Democracy Dollar allocations, so this budget does help move that program towards reality. And the last issue is a $1.9 million shortfall for Measure Q, that's parks required funding. There's, I think, about $20 million in unfrozen staff position, new contracts, new other programs and initiatives, and another $97 million worth of vacant but fully funded staff positions. So we think there's opportunities here for council to look into the details of these items and potentially find at least 1.9 million to fully fund Measure Q, if not other ways to improve compliance with the other voter-approved measures. The next recommendations are on contracts and grants. We noticed this issue last year in the two-year budget, and it still persists. We have about $37 million in proposed contracts and grants for which the actual use is not identified. Specifically, it says not identified as a proposed use. Most of this is in human services. We understand there is a new interim human services director who's been here for four days, so no, no blame goes to him. but hopefully this is something that can be looked into and staff can provide additional details on these unidentified contracts and grants prior to adopting the budget. We wanted to highlight another success around revenue. There's no coliseum sale in here waiting to fund the whole budget. You know, we have pretty conservative revenue projections for many of the largest sources of funding, including property tax, business license tax, and real estate transfer tax. However, we did notice that some revenue streams may be overestimated. Specifically, sales tax is projected to grow 12% year-over-year, or about $10 million, and the utility consumption tax is projected to grow about 7% year-over-year, or about $5 million. This is worth noting because of a few things here. First of all, in our last recommendations last year, the BAC noted some overestimates in property tax, which have now been realized, because property tax projections were based on previous years of growth, but we haven't seen the kind of real estate development we used to see or transaction values to lead to higher reassessments. So our previous recommendations led to sort of the current, you know, aligned with the current reality of property tax revenue. With sales tax, we currently see that in the second half of 2025, after we adopted the Measure A sales tax increase, our sales tax revenue was actually lower than before we adopted the sales tax increase. We don't know if this is because the sales tax increase or because businesses have left Oakland due to potentially crime concerns or residents just spending less on economic concerns or what is it, but it's worth noting that sales tax revenue was down in the first half of this fiscal year compared to the year prior. So we're concerned about overly ambitious projections for sales tax revenue. Similarly, this current fiscal year projected $75 million in UCT, utility consumption tax, but only saw $70 million. That's because we heard from FMC last week that utility rates are not increasing as much as they have been. This budget still maintains the $75 million projection from previously that has not been realized this year. So we're concerned that that may also be overestimated. So we'd encourage council to look carefully at these revenue projections, ask staff for additional details, and potentially identify contingency plans in case about 15, maybe 20 million revenues do not actually materialize. We had a couple of short-term findings on restricted and one-time funds. There is about 1 million of Measure NN dollars proposed to be used for equipment in the fire department rather than services. Measure NN's text is pretty clear, and I believe the intent of the voters is that it be spent on direct services and programs rather than equipment. The contracts identified in the budget actually don't identify the full 1 million proposed for fire contracts, only about 725,000 in total contracts, of which 650 is equipment. However, the fire department does have some positions in firefighter positions and 911 dispatch positions being added to general fund expenditures. So our recommendation is to, rather than moving those existing filled staff positions to the general purpose fund, move them to measure NN, use general purpose fund money for the one-time equipment expenditures to make sure that you improve compliance with the measure. Should be relatively straightforward. Another issue we saw was that the budget stated there was use of one-time funds for ongoing expenses, but we did not hear what that was. We just heard this morning some of that is Department of Violence Prevention back-filling grants that are missing, but it'd be great to hear from staff a full list of use of one-time funds for ongoing expenses in this current year budget. and the proposed plan to restore the vital services stabilization policy, which is a policy to have enough reserve funding that if there is a shortfall, such as in sales tax revenue, for instance, there's money available to backfill that gap without having to cut services mid-year. We have some long-term recommendations as well. Looking forward into this in the next fiscal year. We wanted to first and foremost reemphasize the importance of the city's long-term roadmap to fiscal health, which I think Bradley spoke to a little bit earlier. The key actions listed for the roadmap to fiscal health in this current budget cycle is to review and update the city's governing financial policies. That's a consolidated fiscal policy. The BAC has one recommendation outstanding on that. We should be hearing about that, I believe, later this year, maybe October timeframe-ish. um there's already recommendations to develop long-term investment plans for the city's infrastructure fleet and systems looking at additional revenue collection maximization approaches so business license tax we heard a little bit about parking revenue and citations there and then strengthen the city's revenue base through economic development efforts which commissioner petahoff will speak to additionally as well I also want to flag that in the next fiscal year, FY27-28, the roadmap to fiscal health highlights structures needed for city and contractor service delivery and accountability, including around contracting, procurement, prompt payments, and all that kind of stuff. So we really wanted to emphasize the importance of this long-term maintenance planning. As we heard from some of the conversations around Measure E, the city has numerous decrepit and aging equipment, vehicles. We also know that IT is underfunded and out of date. And so we really want to make sure that this fiscal year, council and staff work together to put together a long-term needs assessment and maintenance and replacement plan for all city assets, including vehicles, non-vehicle equipment like lawn mowers, that kind of stuff. facilities, infrastructure, like our roads and storm drains, and software and IT services. We think this is really important because we keep hearing time and time again about Oracle's out of date, so we can't manage police overtime. Our vehicles are breaking down, so we can't pick up litter, or dumping, dumping, you know, and so it's really important to have a long-term plan for this, and then, when possible, figure out how to budget for it or go back to the voters for additional funding to implement that long-term plan. We also wanted to see better transparency and tracking of voter approved measures. Right now, there's one spot in the budget report that sort of highlights where you're meeting or failing, but it's not really a clear overview of how we're doing, how we've been doing, what's planned, and what the performance of those measures is. and the voters understandably are concerned that the money isn't being spent appropriately and effectively, and so we think that having some sort of dashboard and very focused transparency-driven approach to making sure that those expenditures, the performance metrics are very clearly identifiable will be really helpful for improving voter trust. We also suggested improving data collection on the populations served by the city by adding in age metrics. So right now the city collects data on race and gender of who's getting served. We recommended also adding age metrics because we have the Head Start program and children's services. We have senior centers and those services. We have transitional aged youth who are looking for violence prevention or community college programming. And so better identifying who the city is currently serving across departments would help better identify where there might be shortfalls or additional needs and what funding supports those services and how that can be expanded if necessary. And our last long-term recommendation around the budget specifically is to improve the use of performance metrics in the budget. The city has started to use performance metrics, but we think they could use some improvement. We think that a dedicated effort by staff to review department level performance metrics and improving transparency and alignment between performance targets and budget decisions and what those metrics really are. So for example, right now the police department's metric is number of 911 calls. Not responded to a percentage, it's just like they want a number of 911 calls to respond to. They also have a number of homicides. Public Works has a number of creek permits to respond to. So these aren't necessarily regarding service quality or timeliness or efficiency, it's just volume of service. And so we think a careful look at these performance metrics over the next year could help make sure that city departments are meeting quality of service that the council and the public community is looking for, rather than just the volume. We also noticed that proposals for service expansions, staffing changes, and contracts are not linked to the performance metrics, so we don't know why they're being proposed in terms of if our goal is to reduce 911 response times or reduce homicides, how is this proposed staffing change or contract going to help achieve that outcome? What's the expectation? And then if we do it in the past, if we're renewing a contract, what has the outcome been for that past contract? And we think that the lack of clarity around departmental goals can contribute to poor service delivery. If no one's sure what their job exactly is, you're going to have things going all over the place. And so it's best to have a clear direction from council and from senior leadership in the city departments to make sure that the departments know what they're trying to achieve and how they're going to achieve it. And it's going to be accounted for every single year with the budget. And with that, I'll pass it off to Commissioner Pettahoff to cover the last additional long-term recommendations.

Thank you, Commissioner Gould. So let me first speak to the timing of these. We really wanted to plant the seed on what we think are some important issues. We have this persistent question of budget shortfall. So what do we do about that? And we think it's not good to wait until next budget cycle. Let's start now because some of these need staff collaboration. Some of these may need some public education. What you can do as council members is somewhat limited by what your constituents support and understand, and so we may need to do some education. The BAC has, in previous years, done a good job of surveying residents. We may actually be able to do some education and provide some new information that may inform some newer and bolder moves than we might be able to do at mid-year. The comments I'm making are certainly on this slide. They're also in our narrative report. Starting on page 15, there's an addendum, which is a package that would be able to be put forward. What we'd like to really do is reconvene as soon as the mid-cycle measures are completed, the election is done, and begin thinking now, in this summer, about long-term measures that we can adopt eventually in the next budget cycle. But it requires that advanced planning. So in the report, in the addendum and the links on page 15 provide more information on these. So let me start with on this page the bottom one which is probably the most substantial. So it's really the idea of looking at two of our biggest issues which are economic development and public safety together and seeing the synergy between them rather than looking them at competing budget line items. Let me talk about economic development and public safety and where we think there's some great opportunities. So we're seeing our revenue budget comes from the economic vibrancy of the city and our ability to tax that. We're seeing Oakland significantly behind California and California significantly behind the rest of the United States in COVID recovery. We are still having post-COVID recovery. Economics reports from the Chamber of Commerce and many others show our area to be behind. Yet we've cut our economic development budget by 60% in the last few years. So if we want to change that circumstance, we need to invest in economic development. One interesting measure is retail leakage, sort of a measure of trade imbalance between cities. Our retail leakage is about $1.5 billion of Oakland wealth that's going to surrounding cities. Why is that? We're doing a survey this year, we're considering asking residents, why do you shop here, why do you shop elsewhere, understanding that. We think certainly one issue is, do people feel safe? Now the irony here is, Conde Nast Magazine readers rated Oakland as the number one foodie destination in the United States, two years in a row, not the editorial staff, but the readers. yet our own residents go elsewhere and so what would motivate our residents and visitors to come to oakland we think public safety is part of that so these problems need to be to be addressed in tandem a key part of this nexus is research we've collaborated with the goldman school of public policy at uc berkeley the university of chicago crime lab our own own auditor's office uh ashley cannot our our development director and and the chamber of commerce to really pull together some good recommendations One is focused workforce development that can reduce crime. Research from the School of Public Policy shows by Professor Steven Raphael, what common sense would tell us is that especially property crime is influenced strongly by unemployment. So we've taken the extra step of mapping the unemployment in Oakland by police patrol.

How much, apologies, how much more time do you need? About three minutes. Three minutes?

Yeah, four minutes, maybe five minutes, yep.

We're going to run out of, we're going to hit quorum issues pretty soon, so if you could wrap it up in two minutes. Okay. We do appreciate you coming on.

So we would like to reconvene and talk more deeply about these issues, extending public safety ambassadors focused economic workforce development. For the recommendations, one is a trenching standard. We congratulate the council for your fiscal prudence to get our interest rates low. We have paving in progress, but we have the need for trenching which tears up the paving and we can make our paving dollars go much further if we have a trenching standard and the ability to make contractors pay if they don't do it right we coordinated with director rowan he's in support of this but they need council authorization we can bring back a brief actionable report on that we also have the ability to coordinate with oakland fire to coordinate ambulance service in a way that gives better service and also revenue from from that Cities have, and counties that have done this have gained tens of millions of dollars in revenue, and that could be another part on our path to fiscal solvency. Overtime management has been talked about, we can talk about that before, and also contracting management, all issues that we think we can focus on over time to increase our long-term viability and our financial sustainability and reduce the structural deficit on our roadmap to fiscal health. And we'll be available for any questions if needed.

Thank you. Let's go to the public speakers first.

Thank you. As I call your name, please approach the podium in any order. Please state your name for the record. If you are participating here via Zoom, please raise your hand so we can easily identify you. As usual, we'll take those who are participating here in chambers first and those who are participating online following that. We have Millie Cleveland, Matt Sherber, Asada Olaballa, Kevin Daly, Taino Tretchenberg, Chi Azuma, Ali Kashni, Jack Wolford, Chance Fowler, Mary Kane Simon, Jamaica Moon, Teslam Ikaro, in any order. If I called your name, please approach the podium. If you are having time, seated to you, please state that first. Thank you.

Hi, everybody. Good afternoon now. My name's Jamaica Moon. I'm a Public Works Supervisor II in Keep Oakland Clean and Beautiful Division. I've been here 13 years and plan on being here for the rest of my career. Last year's Budget Advisory Committee report spoke to the need to establish real overtime controls for OPD as a way to stabilize the city's budget. This was in response to the survey results direct from the residents calling on the city to put more civilians into these desk jobs and put more sworn officers back on the streets. And yet, OPD overtime spending has actually increased since last year. This year's report acknowledges the importance of proper vehicle maintenance in order to provide basic city services such as clearing illegal dumping and sweeping of our streets. How can we meet these goals if we don't follow through on what we know needs to be improved? If we don't control the police overtime, overspending, and put in controls to maintain in the long term, there will be no ability to invest in vehicle maintenance. Council Member Gallo said it, where is the money? And I think we all know where the money is. So, thank you.

Thank you, next speaker.

Emily Cleveland with Coalition for Police Accountability. I too want to stand with Labor on the issue of the elephant in the room, which is OPD's overtime. I see the recommendations reference Labor's white paper called Smarter Public Safety, but none of the recommendations are included. I would strongly recommend that perhaps in the public safety subcommittee that you actually agendize labor's smarter public safety and allow the unions to make the presentations that they can make based on the research that they have done to show how you can curtail OPDs over time. So I strongly recommend that you do that, as well as the auditor's recommendations. So please, the elephant in the room is OPDs over time. And since OPOA is in negotiations right now, It seems to me that it would be wise for you to be more on top of the recommendations so that you could advise the city administrator on how to negotiate those issues.

kevin dally i'd like to thank the commission for pointing out that performance metrics for parking enforcement need to be improved number of tickets and revenue is not enough but these metrics that are being planned is still an improvement over the no metrics of today sometimes you have to start small and slowly work the way up to better It'd be great to have people just not parking illegally and we don't give out very many tickets anymore. That would be a success. It'd be good to be able to track how many vehicles are actually blocking sidewalks, curb cuts, bike lanes, et cetera. Last week, coming home from a council meeting, I was threatened by a driver who was fully blocking a 14th Street protected bike lane in front of the library. I'd love to just not have that happen anymore. Thanks again for the report.

Thank you for your comments. Next speaker.

Mary Kane Simon again. And Chia Zuma, I'm ceding my time to Mary Kane Simon. We just wanted to talk with you a little bit more about the, and thank you again for restoring the full maintenance of effort to the public libraries and wanted to talk with you a little bit more about just the concept of maintenance. When you maintain something, it's cheaper than buying new, right? You want to maintain the libraries, which are great civic buildings, There are great meeting places where people can go for free. Hot, thirsty people in the middle of summer can go into the public library, sit down, and cool off. So you want to make sure that the air conditioning works in those buildings and that there is clean, filtered water for people to drink. That only happens with proper maintenance. You don't want to have the library's air conditioning break down in the middle of summer. Please spend money to maintain our buildings. in terms of planning for the future also, it's cheaper, we all know, it's cheaper to clean out your gutters so that water doesn't back up onto your roof. You know, a new roof is really expensive. Cleaning gutters is cheap. So why do we have weeds growing out of the roof gutters in half of the libraries of Oakland? Nobody's cleaning the gutters. I asked why that... Was it happening? And there hasn't been a clear answer why the city is not doing this basic maintenance that should be performed by people you already have working with you. You have trucks and ladders. It's a lot cheaper than buying a new roof and replacing water-damaged books. You want to have secure, safe places where people can go in to use the bathroom. Clean, sanitary toilets. This is where a lot of our unhoused population go. They spend their days, they read, they recharge their devices. There is no excuse to not have clean, safe, sanitary bathrooms. In the words of a little girl who filled out a suggestion sheet in the main library, please put the soap where the little children can reach it. Have a place where children can step up and wash their hands. There's been a lot of talk about sustainability, having a budget where you plan for the future, maintaining what you already have, and what you have in the Oakland Public Library, it's really.

Thank you, Mary, your time has ended. Thank you so much for speaking. All names have been called. If you signed up and you're here in person, please approach the podium. Otherwise, we will move to our Zoom speakers. All right, we will now go to Zoom speakers. Ms. Olaballa, you've been unmuted. You may begin.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. Some issues. Proposed grants of $37 million and contracts lack detail. Measure NN amount inconsistent. 2018 Oakland Equity, I'm sorry, 2018 Oakland Equity Indicator Report is used for data. The 2024 Unemployment U.S. Census in Oakland, Black men 20 to 24 years of age Roughly 23% of them are unemployed in this city. Violence prevention programs should be further developed. Unemployment has shown to be highly related to crime, especially property crime. 17% of police officers on payroll are unavailable for deployment. You need to improve the micro program. Because Oakland faces structural deficits, shortfalls, you are doing something that relates to the expansion of services and staff. I don't know what that means. Propose, I'm sorry. The next thing is measure NN requires that the city budget have 700 sworn officers. You don't have that. Unclear of expenditures of nonprofits, that's for sure. $37 million of grants and constitutional lax details. And my time's up.

Thank you for your comments, Ms. Olaballa. All names have been called. If you are participating in chambers, we actually approached the podium. If you participated in Zoom, all names have been called.

Thank you to the public speakers, Councilmember Houston, Councilmember Gallo, Councilmember Five.

Through the Chair, thank you for the recommendations. I'd like to make a recommendation to you. You said something about the second year in a row was what? Can you share that again, please, Ben?

I believe that we said that our recommendations last year highlighted two things that are repeated this year. So one of them was that proposed contracts and grants lack detail. We highlighted about $70 million worth of contracts and grants last year, which is the two-year budget. 30 million still remain, which is about half of the two-year budget, so it doesn't look like there's been a fix there. the other area we recommended um high recommendations that were sort of consistent was that last year we recommended that some uh revenue projections were overestimated around property tax revenue this year we're looking at utility consumption tax and sales tax revenue potentially being overestimated again i think those are the issues you're looking at got it and through the chair and the gentleman i'm sorry i didn't remember your name i'm sorry i apologize mike petalhoff mike so you said something about oakland for the second year was foodie the best for food would you say

Yes, Condé Nast magazine, sort of a travel magazine, has voted Oakland as the number one foodie destination in the United States. In other words, our cultural diversity, our interesting food is a great place to come visit, according to those people. But our own residents are going elsewhere, and people may be afraid to come here because of the reputation of crime.

So let me share this to my members. is marketing. We're trying to market within ourselves and do it on Facebook, Instagram, or whatever. We need to hire somebody that's inside but outside of the city to market these great things in the change of public safety, because it's getting safer. We got the best food, we have the best weather. We need to have someone that is from Oakland, but outside of the city to do the marketing. This is a great time to do that, so I'm making that recommendation.

Maybe that seems like a policy directive that you'll put and turn into the clerk's by next Thursday.

Thank you, President.

If I might add through the chair One Avenue is also collaborating with the chamber. The chamber does have some pretty good efforts We're hoping to find out why people may be reluctant. We think public safety is one issue It could be parking other issues also say in your comment about repeat recommendations the overtime was also repeat recommendation in the links at The page 15 of the report is a report done by SEIU. There's two sort of landmark studies. The auditor did a 2019 study of police overtime, and then more recently, SEIU did a more detailed study in 2025, and that is at the link on page 15.

Okay, thank you. Councilmember?

Yes. Okay.

All of the lights are green.

Go ahead, Councilmember Fife.

I just have a couple questions. Thank you for this presentation. I think it was very informative. How does the city rank on incorporating your recommendations into our processes over time?

I don't know if we have a specific ranking, but we do, and there's a link on page 15 is a brief PowerPoint deck that talks about other cities. For example, Boston has had a great experience with hiring youth in the summer, similar to the mayor's program, and has had statistically significant reduction in crime. Detroit has had an intervention program. They've kind of come back from the brink, a city that was not having good economic outcomes. So there's many others. We can compare to other cities that have done similar things. A notable comparison is city of San Jose, who has less officers per capita and less officers per square mile, but markedly less crime. And this is in the deck that's at the link. not only do they have less crime than us by not 10 or 20%, but by several fold, they were voted the safest large city in the United States, with less officers per capita and per square mile. We think it's not just the number of officers, certainly Measure N's important, that gap is 3%, those not hired is 9%, those on payroll but not deployable is 17% by the chief's own report as of February. So we think the deployment needs to be looked at in terms of, so we have compared with those cities, I don't know if I can give you a numerical ranking, but San Jose, actually our city auditor pointed us there because he came from there and said, look there at number, not just, he calls it pop per cop. It's not just the number of head count of sworn officers, but how effectively you're deploying them. He's also observed, if we compare to other cities, our bureau structure is somewhat self-limiting. So the 911 response times are very important, but the bureau structures are sort of a self-imposed limitation. We could, through meet and confer, address that issue and improve our 911 response time to make them more equitable before we consider more resources. So there's several comparisons to other cities without necessarily ranking that are in that report. And if we reconvene, we can bring many more of those as well.

What I wanted to understand is if the recommendations that you all bring on a regular basis to council have been implemented from what you've tracked or perhaps they haven't been tracked because they seem to be common sense recommendations. And so I don't know if Director Johnson is still over there, but I would like to figure out how, maybe you can answer the question, do we incorporate uh... some of these budget recommendations and if not do they need to come through council process because A needs assessment just seems common sense to me. We talked about potentially adding software so that there could be a longer runway of budgeting, so it's not just we're operating in these two-year chunks. It's something we discussed in the past. But how would we bring forward some of these recommendations that just seem like they make sense?

I'm happy to talk with you about any of them in specific. Most of them would require some kind of funding allocation and a project plan to implement, and would need to be dovetailed with other efforts, so happy to talk to you about them specifically. I do think some of them are in progress. I'll note that our fiscal roadmap has a number of these items already lined out in it, and that kind of details our sort of order plan, so the 10-year capital plan, the idea of an equipment plan and a technology plan are already in that roadmap space. So it's a combination of we might need resources for them and then it's a capacity question as to which one of these things do we want to bite off first.

I would love to see a dashboard that's available to the public so they can see how we're tracking our ballot measures, especially voter approved measures that when we've changed some of the allocations because of fiscal emergencies and things like that, just a dashboard would be really good. And I know we, again, talked about potentially looking more long term, so we're not doing all of these piecemeal kind of policies. They said, sir, and you both have glasses. Yeah, the last speaker, I know Ben. What's your name?

Mike Petahoff.

Mike. Petahoff? Petahoff. Did I say that correctly? Sounds like pet a dog. Okay, got it. You said that if you come back after June, after the ballot measures pass and things like that, then we can discuss maybe a pathway for

Some recommendations we may have on the city's roadmap to fiscal solvency. Certainly there are many things going on, but we have some input to that. Some which we think we wanna do early because they may require staff collaboration. It may require public education that would help you to be able to adopt these measures in the budget next year. For example, if you said workforce development is a crime-fighting measure, People may not think of that. They may, when they think of crime, think of number of sworn officers, which is certainly an important variable, but helping people understand these other variables. We actually have research that shows the importance of libraries in reducing crime.

I would like to get that calendar. I think that resonates with me. I do believe that jobs can be a crime-fighting measure, and I wanted to understand more about the map that you said where you can overlay unemployment data with crime data. Do you have that now?

Yeah, in our report that is on the agenda, on page 15 are several links, and after that is an addendum, and it's got two maps in it. One is the mapping of unemployment to police beats. The other is the coverage of public safety ambassadors currently. and where we think they might be extended. We recommended and council approved extending the two public safety ambassador programs last year to broader. We've mapped out where crime actually is and suggest looking at that further. Okay, I'll look at the... So it's in the addendum after page 15.

Thank you. And then I think the $1.5 billion in retail leakage you mentioned came from a 2000... an eight study that was commissioned by then council member Jane Bruner from the consultant that said that Oakland loses approximately 10 point, I mean, 1.5 billion in retail leakage. I do wanna just put in a little footnote to my council members that I look forward to the support of Costco because I think that will help with that retail leakage and bringing additional tax revenue to the city. So I look forward to your unanimous support on that item when it comes forward. But I would assume that it has, It has increased since 2008. That's when the study was initially done, correct?

There are several studies, but using that one as a reference, if you take the dollar escalation from 2008 to now, it's about 1.56 billion. General estimates run from 1.4 to 1.6, but it's a large number.

And because you mentioned safety, people feeling safe.

Yes.

How do you deal with facts over feelings or feelings over facts? Because if Oakland is getting safer and people still don't feel safe, what do legislators do? to address feelings that might not be based on reality?

Good question. I think reducing, actually reducing crime, we've had great progress, but since our crime is so much higher, it's not 20, 30% higher, we have a ways to go. I also think the way we market it and communicate it is important, but also public safety ambassadors, we've seen not only quantifiably reduce crime, but give a greater sense of comfort. And I think Commissioner Gould, you may have.

Sure, yeah, so Oakland is absolutely getting safer. I think we're seeing improvements in that area. I think the challenge is that looking at the data in 2024, the most recent data we had available, Oakland's per capita crime rate was between five and 10 times higher than other comparable California cities like Fremont and San Jose. So a 20 or a 40% reduction in crime still means we're two to three times higher crime than those cities were two years ago. they've likely improved since then as well so perception is one thing reality is a second thing and some of it's also just cleanliness and appearance right like I think that's an important part of it too people there may not be crime but if it looks dirty and grimy and and it looks unsafe that's a factor as well so I think sort of everything Commissioner Pettoff's talking about plus illegal dumping plus marketing plus economic development all that's important for council members and the city to support

And I want to just co-sign what Councilmember Houston said about that marketing piece. I think that's exactly right, particularly when you have the Oakland Police Officers Association that are intentionally putting out information that contradicts what the stats are, that contradicts what the truth are. They have a public information officer that is consistently undermining the movement of the city. And if we don't have a communications team that's doing the same thing, putting out what is actually happening in Oakland we're going to consistently see a situation where we're fighting ourselves this is not you know I'm not about what you all are talking about but we have to have an intentional and proactive marketing strategy for the city of Oakland that uplifts that we are the best food city in the world we have the best weather in in the region in the country and and all of the amazing things. And yes, we do have to address crime and we have to do the upstream strategies to address those things like jobs and housing and making the city, make sure the city is clean. So I am complete.

If I may respond to the chair, I think this is a public education issue. When people think of crime, the first reaction is number of sworn officers. That's an important variable. There's a report, staff report done by Chief Kirkpatrick that shows Oakland varying anywhere from 600 to over 800 officers. In 2009 to 2018, and we've actually looked at the variance in crime for that. There is some, but I think the conclusion is we can't As Commissioner Gould pointed out, the numbers are so much different. We can't solve it by policing alone. We need to do some of these other things. It's a natural human response when you're threatened to reach out for safety. And so people say, give me more officers. I want to honor our men and women in uniform. I spent years in uniform myself. I'm a member of the VFW post here in Oakland. So I honor our sworn officers, but I think we need to have a more comprehensive approach. You asked about ranking with other cities. The cities that have done well have a more comprehensive approach. It's not the only thing. And let me just say, you mentioned we're in negotiations. If we look at one of the links talks about the BACS assessment of last year's deficit. And what we saw happen was that the budget report said there's a deficit. We added up the numbers and said the the revenue shortfalls were only 40%. There was actually a cost increase, and we realized that there were negotiations, MOU negotiations, conducted exactly in the window we're in now, between mid-cycle and elections. And if you have negotiations then, there could be a lot of influence And that influences on the Fair Political Practices Commission website, you can see it. But we may want to think about the timing. In that case, those MOUs were not due for expiration, were not disclosed in the budget report, yet they made commitments Sort of a one-time funding, but it actually wasn't one-time funding because the one-time funding for the COVID grants had expired, and those agreements continue today. So I think we need to think about, with all of our MRUs being open, do we have the funds to do that? Otherwise, in the next budget cycle, you'll already be spent. Personally, it felt disingenuous to me to ask all the residents for their input on what we should do with the budget when we'd already spent it. And so we wanna be thoughtful about that and about that timing of MOU negotiations relative to elections and funding cycles. It's hard, as council members know, to raise money. It's easy to write a check if you're in a different position. So I just say that as a political reality that we should think about. I think it's probably one of the most persistent dynamics that affect Oakland over many council cycles over many, many decades.

Thank you. So I'm gonna take chair's privilege. I wanna have a special welcome to Mama Houston, Council Member Houston's mother, who came to join us for the meeting. Everyone say hello to Mama Houston. Yeah, you could be anywhere else, but you came here with us. Oh, we appreciate you. Councilmember Guile.

Yes. Thank you. And thank you for that information that you provided us But what I'm what I'm gonna be asking you for is to also provide present the business perspective and the management of the city of Oakland where we are today and one specifically There are many properties that we're leasing example the Public Works yard on Coliseum what we're paying what three to five million dollars to lease a property and Then we have a parking lot behind us that's been sitting empty for years that we could, under business, be able to lease it, manage it, do something with it. It's supposed to be in vacant. Another example, when it comes to business, we talk about the library. The Fruitvale Library, they're charging you, or at least they were trying to get the library out of the Fruitvale Village, because we weren't paying our monthly or annual fee of a million plus dollars, because that property is owned by BART and the Unity Council manage it. But if we can identify properties that we have from the Army base all the way to East Oakland, that we need to do a better job managing to earn a revenue from those, And as an example, I have Prologis in my area that's building a site that's been dead for many years, but they're gonna create 300 plus jobs, they're gonna create revenue for the city, but we're growing the city, and we're just not focused on the city government, bah, bah, bah, talk, talk, talk, talk. We need to create the revenue at the same time, and we have the facilities, the properties that if we utilize them well, that there would be a positive for what you're saying in terms of job creation, public use, and a revenue source for the city. And that's what's missing.

If I may, through the chair, it's not an area we're currently examining, but we could certainly look into it. I think we would need the data that would come from staff. So I might suggest we plan to have discussions, collaboration discussions with staff to bring that to their attention. I think we certainly wouldn't have the database to know all the property, but it's certainly an area that we could explore.

Thank you, and that would include the Port of Oakland as well as within the city of Oakland. They're part of our Effort in in the future. How do we work together? We talked about the county the counties neglected Oakland More recently with the stadium the Coliseum property we own half they own half but you know that we do a lot of talking and

Yeah.

Right, as opposed to the city taking control, that's a great investment, you know, not just job generation, but an opportunity for Oakland to grow, and why aren't we doing that together within the politicals, and it's been a challenge. Anyways, thank you for that information.

Definitely has been a challenge. I'm gonna go to Obama, Chandran, and Wong. Hopefully it's rapid fire, as we are, when it's issues, we're gonna start losing people.

Thank you. Just want to express my appreciation for your work. You are all volunteers who pour your blood, sweat and tears. You did this in an incredibly rapid turnaround in time. This is now my fourth budget cycle, and I know that Council has not always listened to and respected your recommendations, but I know last year and this year, Certainly, the budget team looks forward to really diving deep, including into the appendices, which I know there's some very interesting information there. Not only in this budget cycle, but as part of our long-term fiscal planning as well, because none of these things are going to be fixed overnight. But over the years, I know we've worked closely on issues like thinking about holistic public safety efforts, including safety ambassadors. immense appreciation not only for that recommendation here but over the past few budget cycles whether or not they've been funded you've continuously pushed creative solutions to our public safety crisis in a holistic manner as well as authentic reasons ways in which we can promote fiscal responsibility again I know your recommendations have not always been heated but currently I know that we are grateful for your work and we'll do what we can not only in this cycle but as far as long-term planning goes um there were some very interesting points about some of our projections um and other things that i'll note as well and very much excited to look forward um to diving a little deeper before we pass the budget thank you for your efforts thank you councilmember ramchandra and council member and then you can make a motion

Okay, sounds good. I just have a quick question. Since you guys have been digging into economic development, have you seen a relationship? Because when I go into my business corridors, the feedback I get is crime is coming down, but traffic continues to be an issue, especially because of some of our parking policies. And I'm wondering if you see a relationship where since we are pursuing you know for example paid parking on Sundays if there's a relationship with with an inverse relationship with parking and in sales tax where we could actually recruit more from our sales tax Have you done any analysis on that?

I can address it this way, and Commissioner Gould may have other thoughts, too. We have an action that's proposed, not yet adopted, that in this year's survey, resident survey, we would ask them, what makes you dine and shop in Oakland? What makes you dine and shop elsewhere? We think that we've heard from merchants is is certainly the public safety issue. Is there other customers going to get mugged? That sort of thing We've heard shoplifting is a concern is parking a concern you go to Walnut Creek. That's a nice parking garage You know, so we're trying to get more tangible data and has not been adopted a separate committee that's working on that But we think it's an opportunity to gather more information about what makes customers like like Oakland or go elsewhere So we're working on that to understand.

Okay, great, thank you. I'll make a motion.

So we got a motion to receive and file and a second.

Thank you for that, and that was a motion by Councilmember Wong, seconded by Councilmember Ramachandran to receive and file item five. Oops, apologies, one moment while I pull up the right screen. On roll for this item, Councilmember Brown? Aye. Councilmember Fife? Aye. Councilmember Gallo? Aye. Councilmember Houston?

Aye.

Ramachandran? Aye. Councilmember Unger is excused. Councilmember Wong? Aye. And Chair Jenkins?

Aye.

Item number five is approved with Seven ayes, one excused. Councilmember Unger, that now takes us to open forum. As I call your name, please approach the podium in any order. I will take those who are in person first. Please, again, state your name for the record before you begin. For those who are participating in the Zoom, please raise your hand so I can easily identify you. Miss Asada Olaballa, Kevin Daly, Millie Cleveland, Faith Kirkpatrick, and Cameron Salazar, in any order please.

Coalition for Police Accountability. I wanted to make a suggestion. It appears that since the city administrator is the one that hired the consultant for the police chief search and seems to be telling the police commission how to handle that search, that maybe they want to reconsider not having a candidate's form for police chief. A decision was initially made that they wouldn't disclose the names because some people may not want their employer to know about it, but since Chief Beer announced his candidacy for the job, the process is tainted. So maybe you could talk to the city administrator about the importance of community engagement and transparency with this process and reconsider the idea that you should have a .

Thank you for your comments. Next speaker, all names have been called. Carmen? Yes. Thank you so much.

And do you need translation? Yes.

Yes, we do have those. We do have translators participating via Zoom, so we're gonna take them off of Zoom so they can translate.

You want Maria to do it? I'll volunteer Maria.

All right. You hear that, translators? We have an in-person translator. Thank you so much.

Good morning, my name is Carmen Salazar. Good morning, everybody. El motivo que me trae aquí es porque, bueno, son varios temas. El primero es sobre el presupuesto y la manera donde un poco estoy en desacuerdo al ver de la manera como lo han organizado y olvidado lo que realmente, para lo que realmente está hecho, que es servir a la comunidad.

A few items bring me here. The number one is in regards to the budget. I'm not agreeing with it. I'm not happy with the way it's being spent. And that's one of the items.

El servicio a la comunidad es todo lo que se presenta, sea la seguridad, sea el área pública, sea lo que es la vivienda, sea lo que es la persona de venir aquí al concilio, de tener traducción, lo que no ofrecen. El hecho de poder honrar cada trabajo, pero no olvidarse que somos una ciudad, no solo somos una planilla.

Another thing is that there are services that are not being taken care of, like having an interpreter here. That's not a service that the city council provides. Public safety. Yeah, offer more services as public safety, housing, allow people or people for people to learn how to come here to council meetings.

Lo que yo estoy observando aquí es que no han hecho nada por bajar los tickets de estacionamiento, que son más de 80, ni tampoco el de hora, que son como 3 dólares, que no es lo que cuenta la población. Y ustedes mismos lo ponen ahí cuando la gente viene a hablar sobre homeless y sobre cada porcentaje que puede caer en las calles nuevamente.

Another thing is parking fees. Nothing is below $80 and also is not the $3 that they say per hour. When they come and speak to homelessness and items like that, they need more services to be provided so they can come and speak to

thank you so much we give two minutes for translation well one minute for the person to speak in one minute for translation in open forum so your time has seated and let um it lapsed so uh we would need to move on

There's something that she wishes for the council to address is for people to be able to come and express themselves about how they feel and give them more opportunities to be known of every changes in the council.

thank you so much for your comments and just to note for the record there is information on the back of the agendas to how to request for translation they're usually available on you have to reach out five days in advance of the meeting so um you can do that by looking at the back of the agenda and calling five days in advance and then we will have translators um available via zooms thank you so much thank you thank you so much

Thank you so much. You can chat with her afterwards. Anybody else?

Yes, we do have, sorry, your time has lapsed, and we have Ms. Asada Olabala and Faith and Kevin Daly. Thank you so much. Ms. Asada, you've been unmuted. You may begin.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. Can you hear me?

Yes, ma'am.

I just want to make it clear the negotiated settlement agreement has nothing to do with constitutional policing. The settlement agreement has to do with police brutality, excessive force, racial profiling, fraudulent reporting, of investigations. Keep it in that spectrum. Also, 32% of your city employees live in Oakland. That means 67 do not live in Oakland. This E initiative by the union has mostly presented by people that don't live in Oakland, your union employees. The false way you represent this to be a citizen's initiative, I hope it fails tomorrow. Continue to go forward with integrity. Stop trying to manipulate the spending and creation of funding for this city. And stop not addressing your sanctuary city status, how it is budgetarily affecting particularly African Americans economically.

All name have been called for open forum.

Thank you, this meeting is adjourned.