Finance & Management Committee - Regular Meeting

Good morning and welcome to the Finance and Management Committee meeting of Tuesday, July 14th, 2026. The time is now 9.31 a.m. and this meeting may come to order. Before taking a roll, I will provide instructions on how to submit speaker cards for items on this agenda. If you're here with us in chamber and would like to submit a speaker card, please fill one out and turn one into myself or a clerk representative no later than 10 minutes after the start of this meeting or before the item is read into record. Registering to speak via Zoom is now due 24 hours prior to the start of this meeting time. This meeting came to order at 9.31 a.m. and speaker cards will no longer be accepted 10 minutes after making that time 9.41 a.m. We'll now proceed with taking roll. Council Members Brown? Present. Unger? Here. Wong? Present. And Chair Ramachandran?

Here.

Thank you. We have four members present. Chair, before we begin, do you have any announcements at this time? No, this is the last set of committees before our summer recess Which is why we have a packed agenda today, and I look forward to getting through it Thank you reading in item 1 approval of the draft minutes from the committee meeting of June 23rd 2020 3 or sorry 2026 we have one speaker that signed up, but he's not on the zoom queue and

All right, is there a motion?

So moved.

Thank you. Sorry. Thank you. We have a motion made by Council Member Unger, seconded by Council Member Brown to approve the draft minutes from the committee meeting of June 23rd, 2026. On roll, Council Members Brown. Aye. Unger. Aye. Wong. Aye. And Chair Ramachandran.

Aye.

Thank you. Item one passes with four ayes to accept the draft minutes from June 23rd, 2026. reading in item two determination of schedule of outstanding committee items also known as your pending list we have one speaker that signed up but he is not in the queue so okay thank you anything from administration nothing at this time thank you okay i will entertain a motion Second. Thank you. That's a motion made by Councilmember Unger, seconded by Councilmember Brown to accept the determination of schedule of outstanding committee items as is. On roll, Councilmembers Brown? Aye. Unger? Aye. Wong? Aye. And Chair Ramachandran? Aye. Thank you. Item two passes with four ayes to accept the determination of schedule of outstanding committee items as is. Reading in item three. Adopt a resolution to accept and appropriate grant funds from the Oakland Fund in an amount not to exceed $202,500 for a comprehensive independent audit of the City of Oakland's technology systems. And we have three speakers that signed up to speak on this item.

All right, we will hear from staff.

Good morning chair and members. I'm Erica Estrella, Director of Data and Technology Transformation in the office of Mayor Barbara Lee. The item before you is a resolution to accept $202,500 in grant funds from the Oakland Fund. The funds will pay for an independent audit of the city's technology systems. If I may share an anecdote, when I started last year, I sat in the budget meeting and learned about people needing to hand walk hiring documents between departments due to lack of systems integration. I have to say I was shocked. For context, my background is over 20 years in private sector technology, and if that had ever been the case anywhere I worked, everyone would drop everything to get it fixed. We pursued this funding because we have heard over and over that our systems failures like this are part of many of the challenges facing the city, not only just in hiring, but in contracting and other areas as well. We cannot land on the right fixes for these issues without fully understanding the problems. This audit will show us what we need to do to make our systems work for our employees and our residents. We will follow the city's existing contracting processes to select an independent firm to conduct the audit. The audit will give us a complete list of every system the city uses. It will trace how technology supports our hiring and contracting work from start to finish. It will show us where our systems fail to connect and will rank every problem it finds, what needs work, how urgent it is, how hard it would be to fix, and what the fix would cost. This will give city leadership a clear-eyed view into the state of our technology systems and what it will take to improve them. Oakland deserves systems that work. This is one step to getting there. Any questions?

Thank you. I only have a question for our finance department. I see that the funds come from 2999. Was this previously budgeted in the biennial cycle, this project, or is it a new project that we're identifying funds for?

To the chair, no this is a new item that was not included in your biennial or mid-cycle adopted budget. 299 is our miscellaneous grant fund. That's normally where we would receive the grant of the nature in.

Okay, thank you. Colleagues, council members Brown then Wong.

Excellent, well thank you so much for your work on this. I'm very excited that we're moving forward with an initiative in this manner. I believe that is long overdue, and I know we've had the opportunity to talk at great length about some of these tech opportunities, and so I look forward to seeing the results of the audit. But just a couple questions that I did have. Would you happen to know the specific timeline for the RFP process? I'll start with that first.

I don't know the timeline. We'll follow the city's existing contracting and RFP processes to determine which contractor we'll use for this.

Excellent, and as I was reading through the report, I guess, correct me if I'm wrong, will you all need to come back once you find the, once you select the folks to do the audit, or can you just move forward?

I believe we can just move forward.

Okay, excellent, thank you.

Council Member Vaughan.

Thank you. First of all, thank you so much for pursuing this. I agree. I think your reaction mirrors mine. And I have worked in the government, so I'm comparing Oakland's city government compared to other governments which are notoriously behind the ball on technology so I think one thing I just have a quick question on is one thing that I have notices a continual challenge in the city of Oakland is our ability to enforce against civil and administrative fines that came uncovered around the illegal dumping challenges. I know that the expenditure plan should help resolve some of those issues, but it's pretty much across the board. And so I would like, if this audit has room for additional things to look at, that that be part of the audit to figure out just, I think there's a disconnect across the departments in terms of our ability to do this sort of civil enforcement that is a basic function of city government.

Through the chair, we'll absolutely consider that if we have room and audit for it.

Okay, great, thank you.

Yes.

Calling in the names that signed up to speak on item number three. In no particular order, you can come up to the podium. Or if you're on Zoom, please raise your hand to be easily identified. Kevin Daly, Blair Beekman, and Mrs. Sato-Olivalla.

Hi, Kevin Daly. I have a couple of well, my main question, how do members of the public submit suggestions for areas that the audit needs to cover? I'm going to mention a couple areas that I think are a problem. definitely would like an audit of how 311 calls are handled after they leave 311. The 311 database communicates with multiple different databases. Sorry, how much time do I have now? Okay, thanks. They communicate with multiple 311 databases. If I report a pothole, I can't determine which department it was signed to unless I call the 311 support and talk to a person. Sometimes it should be go to the 311, sorry, to the pothole department, but other times it needs to go to the permit department because there was something not correctly done that left a hole in the street. So I definitely want to make sure that there's a way for community engagement for the tech audit. Another suggestion that just hit today I would love to have a way on the agenda sign up to find out which items I've signed up for. So when I arrived today, I was nearly positive that I'd signed up for this item. But there's no way to go to e-comment once you're at 23 hours and 59 minutes before the meeting. That disappears. So it no longer tells me whether I'm signed up. I have to go to email. click on Speak Up Oakland and hope I can figure out which of the way too many items that I signed up for. It's the one that I want to talk about right now. So anyway, hoping to hear more about this. Thanks.

I'm going to bring this to your attention again since you tend to ignore important things. Data centers, you have taken no position on data centers in the city of Oakland. And that impacts electricity, water, and noise issues. So somewhere, I can't remember what state or city, the water that's coming from the data center, it's been discovered it has a bacteria that's affecting the quality of the water. So this is your last meeting, all committees, you're not gonna have anything all summer to deal with the data centers. You got time for sanctuary cities, but you don't have time for this issue. I don't understand how this issue is coming from the mayor's office. It would seem like this would come from the Department of Technology. I don't know how that happened that it comes from that source. Whenever you have an audit, it is common knowledge to be able to estimate from the vendor how much time it's gonna take to complete the audit. And I think you asked the question and they didn't know. And we should know. How time sensitive is this? Once you go through phase one the next phase is recommendations and that's going to have a cost component. The question is can the city function if we are unable to meet any of the recommendations because of the cost component because of staffing. Because of equipment. So we're going through a process where we haven't looked at the whole picture. Don't start phase one, spending all this money, if you can't complete phase two to some satisfaction. What sense does it make to identify a problem when you can't resolve the problem? So the grant is, whenever you have a grant, what is the source of this grant money? Can it be used for other higher priority things? always X if the grant requires matching funds. Nobody X that.

Thank you for your comments. Chair, that concludes all speakers on this item.

All right, thank you. I will entertain a motion.

So moved.

Thank you. We have a motion made by Council Member Brown, seconded by Council Member Unger, to approve the recommendations of staff and to forward this item to the July 21st City Council agenda. On roll, Council Members Brown?

Aye.

Unger? Aye. Wong? Aye. And Chair Ramachandran? Aye. Thank you. Item number three passes with four ayes. To forward this item to the July 21st City Council agenda and to the makers of the motion, is that on consent? Okay, thank you, on consent. Reading in item four, receive an informational report on the one year update to the fiscal year 2026 to 30 Oakland roadmap to fiscal health, a plan to address mid and long term city financial challenges. And we have three speakers that signed up to speak on this item.

Good morning, members of the Finance Committee. Brad Johnson, Director of Finance. In view of the time we have, I'm going to move very quickly through a brief update. The information is contained within your packet. The city's roadmap to fiscal health is an effort to address the city's long term financial challenges through structural changes to how the city does business and how we address our long term liabilities and structural budget deficit. The roadmap contained 11 planks. I will provide you a brief update on each of them. Again, there's more detail in your packet. The city's first plank, which was put into place immediately, was to establish a physical health executive team to manage our initiatives. This team does meet routinely. The second plank was to work on a more aggressive structural balance during our current binaural budget period. I'm happy to report that the structural imbalance in the general purpose fund has been reduced substantially from where it was a year ago when this was proposed to a single digit million number within your mid-cycle budget. And we'll continue as we go into our binaural process to reduce that further. The third plank was to diversify the city's revenue base. As we're all aware, the efforts to adopt Measure E, or a similar measure, were not approved at the July election, so the city council will have to consider other measures in order to fulfill this proposal at future election cycles, should that be desired. We presented earlier this calendar year, at plank number four, a multi-year plan to achieve voter mandated staffing and services levels. As you may remember, the total cost for doing that was $40 million annually. Your mid-cycle budget does make progress on this initiative by coming into compliance with measures C, D, Q, parks and homelessness, and X related to the city auditor's staffing. PLANK 5, RELATED ON A LONG-TERM PLAN TO CONTAIN RISING PENSION COSTS. THIS IS A LITTLE BIT DELAYED, ALTHOUGH WE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF PULLING IN ADDITIONAL RESOURCES TO DEVELOP THIS PLAN FOR CONTAINING PENSION AND BENEFIT COSTS. I WILL NOTE THAT THE PROPOSED ACTION FOR PREFUNDING OF OUR UNFUNDED LIABILITY AS IT RELATES TO CALPERS IS A MAJOR STEP IN THIS DIRECTION AND SHOULD BE CONSIDERED A MAJOR EFFORT TO ADDRESS THIS PLANK IN OUR POLICY. Number six, related to contingency plans regarding our state and federal risks, we did do an assessment of this in our mid-cycle budget, and we were able to allocate resources into the spaces we thought most at risk. We continue to monitor this as an ongoing effort. This fall, related to plank number seven, you will receive a comprehensive update regarding our financial policies. So this body should expect to consider a comprehensive update, including additional elements to maintain long-term fiscal health with your financial policies to be considered. This fall, we will also be doing long-term investment plans on infrastructure fleet and systems. These are in conjunction with the ongoing work to reform our procurement, hiring, contracting, and IT systems that are going at the same time, along with investments that we're taking on our deferred maintenance and fleet. We have done significant strides on plank number nine regarding ongoing revenue investment, including substantial and additional enhanced efforts to improve business tax collection and now ongoing efforts to improve collections regarding parking resources. There's an ongoing plan regarding plank 10 on buyer economic development action plan under economic workforce development department to strengthen the city's revenue base I should note that the efforts to bring Costco into West Oakland are a strong element of that plank along with the actions that this body took yesterday about development of the Coliseum site in terms of putting that into long-term economic use for the city the city is continuing to work as I mentioned on procurement efforts and performance measurement efforts for our contractors we are hoping to roll those out in our next cycle of review and we are working citywide on performance measurements and I used to see a more full implementation of that effort with your biennial budget process that is a very brief overview I've kept it brief for the benefit of this committee and it's time happy to take any questions you may have

Thank you. Just want to start off appreciating the many notes of progress that's been done over the past year. I think on a number of these items, when it comes to our budget balance, diversifying our revenue base, certainly the voter approved measures, among other things, have been the business tax collection. We've seen improvement. We've used your guidance and suggestions to help craft our budget, which I do believe we passed that hit on a number of these points as well. So I look forward to continuing the progress on all these 10 points and see how we can do even better a year from now. Colleagues, questions? Council Member Brown, sorry, Council Member Unger, Brown, then Wong.

Hi. So in 2013, we became part of the new PEPRA system, which increased the retirement age for police and fire by seven years and reduced their multiplier. In 2019, we dramatically reduced retirement medical, all but eliminating it for police and fire, especially new police and firefighters. how dramatically has this affected our bottom line how many people are under the new systems i know you shouldn't have the numbers off the top of your head but i think going forward it would be helpful for us to know sort of how that that mouse is moving through the snake and where we are in terms of how many people are under those two new systems

Absolutely, at the next update I can absolutely provide some more detail and I expect to have a more detailed report regarding the structural balancing plan as approved by your policy directive that came with the mid-cycle budget in which I will also include some of this information because it's related space. along with a more detailed report on our pension system in general. I will note at high level, the reductions to our OPEB unfunded liability are substantial, although we are still on the sharp end of that particular curve as costs increase. We will see that most of those reform efforts come into place as the workforce turns over. And so as it relates to both OPEB and PEPRA, specifically starting with PEPRA, we've seen a fair amount of the civilian workforce turn over. And so we're starting to see some of the benefit of that on our pension curve. Our sworn workforce has not turned over nearly as quickly. And I should note between the two, there's a differential between police and fire. Police has turned over much more rapidly than fire has, and so there's a little bit of a differential between the two sworn units. but we're still very much on sort of the sharper end for the sworn side of both the OPEB and the PEPRA curves. I do expect that over the course of maybe the next decade, you'll see that curve bend, but it's not sort of in a more immediate progress space. But I'm happy to provide more detailed updates to that when I bring a detailed report on it. And noted on that.

Council Member Brown then Wong.

Excellent, I just wanted to also echo the sentiments that Chair Ramachandra mentioned about just kind of like reading through the report and it was really, it felt really good to see a lot of the progress that we've been able to make in the last year and a half and I know that it took a lot of city staff and the administration to really move these key items forward and so I just wanna say thank you. to both you, your team, the entire administration for all of the hard work, because you could really see the city just moving in a more positive direction. So I want to uplift and start there. I did, of course, I did notice in the report as well, just the ongoing need to be in compliance with handful of our ballot measures calling out of course measure NN as well as measure W and how the voters really you know wanted us to move forward democracy dollars and so really trying to figure out what is our plan and our roadmap to become in compliance and move these key initiatives forward I also appreciated how throughout the document if there was an item that we you know, haven't seen an update on, we were able to get an understanding of when the item would be coming. And so I'm really grateful for that level of efficiency as well. So thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Long.

Thank you. Yeah, this is great progress and I also want to acknowledge your leadership, Director Johnson, just stepping into this role for the last year. I think everybody here appreciates the professionalism and competency by which you've run the department and improved the status of our city. So thank you for your leadership. um just a couple of questions i do have on this is um so where are we with like a forensic audit i think that was one of the things that our mayor had campaigned on is that something that is being carried out by the city you have that on your agenda as item number eight to improve a vendor wonderful okay my apologies I didn't get through the entire agenda and the other thing I just have a question on is this item Excuse me, number 11. So this is about holding the city and the contractors accountable for the delivery of city services. I really do believe that part of the failure of Measure E to pass is because we have not made more public this particular piece of the roadmap to fiscal health. And I am wondering if, since it sounds like the plan is to present this by May 2027, some version of that can be presented to this body prior to May 2027 just to provide some some input I will say that I was looking at the budget the entire budget document including some of the performance metrics and some of what I noticed is our current performance metrics I think are truly inadequate for example I think our dispatcher 911 dispatch is being measured at the number of calls being received not the number of calls that are being answered under a certain amount of time right and so it's not a true measure of performance as we have and so i think uh publicly showing some of the progress on this is going to be important for us as we move forward as a city

yeah i can provide a little bit more context so in your next item related to the citywide strategic plan as a part of that effort it's baked in to work through and develop a plan for implementing performance measures and we provide updates on that every six months so we'll be here in six months and providing an update on that program I'm in the process of hiring an assistant to the city administrator who will be managing the launching of that program. And I did interviews yesterday. So looking forward to moving more forward and having dedicated resources to get that done.

Okay, great. Thank you for the progress on that.

Chair, if I may, I do want to note I breached over in the report. the roadmap to physical health is not just my doing deputy senator administrator davis has been instrumental in that process i should note that it is also tied in to our strategic planning process which is coming later part of what we're trying to ensure we do is that all and it's a component literally of your agenda report templates now we're trying to ensure that these projects move together with one another so that the forensic audit that you're gonna hopefully approve a contract with later, our strategic planning process, your roadmap to fiscal health, our integrated efforts where we're not duplicating efforts across multiple spaces, we're aligning and we're addressing the whole problem and the deep problem as opposed to sort of superficially addressing it. So I do wanna note it's a whole of organization approach that is working in with our strategic planning team and across not just finance but the entirety of the city to ensure that we are delivering on these items.

Okay, great, thank you. Thank you. Move the item.

Well, we will go to public comment, but we'll note you moved it. I'll second it. I just have a quick note before we move to public comment. Following on what Council Member Wong said, I wanted to offer a suggestion. So in our policy directives, this is tied into this item, that we passed with the budget this year, there's two items around public communications and public information. I think this fiscal roadmap... Because to be honest, it's a little hard to find. I've asked people, where is this roadmap? And it's linked to this informational report. But some kind of public messaging around these 10 points, whether that's an infographic or interactive page or whatnot, I think can very clearly show progress. I know in the heads of a lot of us, we're like, we want a dashboard. But we know that actually takes a lot of resources to create. But something that publicly displays these 10 points or sorry 11 points and a few notes on progress made i think would fulfill some of those policy directive goals and show to the public here's where here's things we've actively worked on here's things in the next year we're hoping to work on so thank you and uh we can move to public comment calling in the names that signed up to speak on item number four miss asada olabala kevin daly and blair beekman

Kevin Daly, I appreciate this road map. There is one area that's a little bit tricky to have it included in the road map, but I think it is an important part, and that's the settlements that are related to traffic injuries and deaths. It's common to have multi-million dollar settlements for deaths and severe injuries. And the injuries are not random events. They are things that cannot be completely controlled but can be greatly reduced through smart decisions on street design. In many cases, Oak Dot has been underfunded. Hiring has been slowed down. If we improve the hiring and improve the funding, we will see, I hope, reductions in injuries, which includes reductions in the settlements. The city chose to skip bond sales for a year, which slowed repaving. Now, as you know, my friend died on Skyline two years ago because it was not paved because we didn't have money. So good news is things are improving with the funding of Oak Dot. Megan Weir is doing a great job of looking at how getting better information on injuries and deaths. And I know she's back here, so I have to call her out and appreciate her. And I think we're going to get a better handle on what we can do to decrease injuries and deaths. And it would be nice to have that mentioned as something that we spend way too much money on. Thank you.

So you failed to follow the roadmap of Seattle related to democracy dollars. When they put it on the ballot, they put it on the ballot for voters and they put it on the ballot for a funding source to be identified. You didn't do that. It was originally presented as democracy dollars for voters because your need for sanctuary city inclusion, all residents would get money. Now you've reduced it that they're gonna have some kind of lottery system where some people will get money, excluding all voters. So that's crazy, but you're still gonna push for it even though it's not being done right. Related to Measure E, you make it seem like people need to get more information about Measure E. The main reason why people didn't vote for Measure E is because of the deceptive way you introduced it to the public. It was not a citizen's initiative. It was the labor unions in the city of Oakland, including council members, collaborated to put Measure E on the ballot in order to get the 50% plus one necessary to pass rather than the two-thirds percent necessary to pass. Manipulation, lack of integrity, lack of moral code. So you have challenges. You have challenges with the general cost for police or fire and street repairs are challenging. You also have the pension payroll costs, slumping commercial revenue, federal funding cuts, lost property tax dollars, lost revenue, and now it's coming up that you might have to reduce or impact fees. The governor was here yesterday saying in order to get more money for housing, you're gonna have to look at your impact fees. You have all of these challenges, but the biggest thing is you lack moral integrity to do the work the way it needs to be.

Thank you for your comments, Chair. That concludes all speakers on this item. And we do have a motion on the floor. Thank you. We have a motion made by Council Member Wong, seconded by Chair Ramachandran to approve the recommendations of staff and to receive and file this informational report in committee. On roll, Council Members Brown. Aye. Unger. Aye. Wong. Aye. And Chair Ramachandran. Aye. Thank you. Item four passes with four ayes to receive and file this informational report in committee. on to item number five receive an informational report from the city administrator on the fiscal year 2025 to 2028 citywide strategic sorry citywide strategic plan one year update and we have three speakers that signed up to speak on this item

Good morning, Chair Ramachandran, council members, members of the public and staff. My name is Monica Davis. I'm the deputy city administrator and I'm here to report out on our one year progress for our citywide strategic plan. I believe the presentation will be put up momentarily, but just wanted to remind you all that in March of 2024, we launched this planning effort really to better facilitate balancing our resource constraints, but still trying to deliver to our residents in the best way we can. In that planning effort, we spent about a year developing our strategic priorities. And we are now at the one year mark where the team has been implementing action items. and also assessing some of the originally decided action items and making a few changes. So looking ahead to the next two years, we will continue to implement action items and do a little shifting where it makes sense based on the feedback we've been gathering. I just wanted to uplift, there are five citywide strategic priorities, streamlining operations, fostering cross-departmental collaboration, enhancing our communication and coordination, Number four is optimizing our workforce management, and five, particularly fond of aligning our budget with our city-wide priorities. I will note that we have about 30 high-performing staff members dedicated to helping move these forward. I'm really grateful for Caleb Smith in preparing the staff report. Vis Ayer, Patricia Marino-Price have been co-leading with me to make sure this effort continues to move forward, and Andrea Mariano has also been joining us to continue to co-lead. I did want to invite the members of the respective teams to share out our progress for each of these and what you can expect looking ahead.

Assistant City Administrator Davis, about how much time do you need? They're planning to do about two minutes of priority, so ten minutes total. Can we move, because we have a number of items, can we put five minutes on the clock instead?

We'll do our best to comply. Thank you. We're very excited, obviously. You have read the report, so I'm grateful for that. So we'll keep it as short as sweet as possible. With that, I'll turn it over to Tara to share about the streamlined operations.

Good morning. I'm presenting for team two of streamlined operations. Some of the work that we've done includes hearing about the draft ordinance to update procurement that's in the works. At this time, the scope and status is unknown to us, unclear to us, I should say. Our next steps in regards to contracting is to identify additional process improvements and assess whether staffing capacity aligns with the city's contracting workload. There have been some new ideas put forth by HR that are currently on hold pending the contract improvements. There haven't been any advancements with the payroll processes as of yet. The next steps will be to reconnect with HR and payroll. Thank you. I'll hand it over to team two.

Good day, Robin Abad with the city administrator's office, representing strategic priority team number two, fostering cross-department collaboration. We've had a great interagency team working on this, including Rec and Park, Public Works, our office, the city administrator's office, the police department, and I think I already said Rec and Park. We get double recognition. Our first area within this priority is to maximize community engagement and our coordination in terms of outreach. This has had huge impacts. We've made excellent progress. We've started to implement a structure across all departments that allow for better communication and coordination around all the great work that the city departments are doing. The second item has to do with our housing and delivering housing in Oakland. This by far of all of the areas within strategic priority number two is where we have made the most progress. And I'll go quickly since I know that we are crunched for time. We're also seeking to ensure that we are deeply coordinated around emergency preparedness and our approach to public safety. So that is ongoing work in terms of making sure that especially our first responder departments are coordinating, having higher contact, and there's better responsiveness betwixt departments in doing emergency preparedness response as well as planning and strategy. We're also interested in ensuring that all expertise and insights from all levels and strata of the departments are more effectively involved in decision making, rolling up to directors and of course to the city administrator's office. Workforce development is also something that is by nature interdisciplinary and really demands the coordination and participation of many of our agencies and disciplines. So as you can see here, there are a number of items that are underway to better ensure that we can be responsive and supportive around economic development. So with that, I will close and pass it to my colleague to talk about strategic priority number three. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kima Takia Joseph, and I am with Oakland Police Department, and I'm here representing Group 3, which is the Enhanced Communication and Coordination Team. It's headed by Monica Palayo-Lock and Kalila Haynes with Planning and Building. So our objective is to enhance communication and coordination across city departments. And so we're focusing on the three areas, which is to streamline communication channels between the city administrator's office and city council, and citywide, strengthening internal citywide communication practices, and enhanced decision transparency and staff engagement. And so the idea of the best way to accomplish this goal was by creating a newsletter in a shared location everyone could have access to. So we've reached the milestone of one year of the three-year plan, and since the original introduction, the idea has gone from thought to reality.

Slide two, please.

Oh, I have it, okay. All right, and so here's the example template of an internal newsletter that the city could produce to meet the stated goals. And that is to, the purpose of the internet, excuse me, internal communication is to build awareness of the services offered, lessons learned in future initiatives, to deepen connection to the mission of our work, and to create collaborated spaces across city departments to improve and streamline services. All right, and so in year one, strengthening internal statewide communication practices the city is looking to set up a monthly internal newsletter and is currently refining the content structure and template i apologize to cut you off five minutes is over about how many more minutes okay can i put on you know there's one more person left so i'll just we'll put three more minutes on okay thank you um deep in connection to the mission of our work create collaborative spaces across city departments to improve and streamline services Slide three, the city is looking to set up a monthly internal newsletter and is currently refining the content structure and template. The next steps will be to pilot the newsletter and develop standard operating procedures. The community engagement working group has become a central hub for communications work and training across departments. The meeting space has had workshops around ADA compliance and website edits. Currently, work is being done to standardize branding using the branding guidelines as well as standard templates that all departments can access and use. There has been progress at the director level with the implementation of a director's bi-weekly report for the city administrator and the mayor. And Citywide Communications has been working with emergency services on developing emergency communications best practices, which was successfully tested during the annual Golden Eagle exercises. And this is the goals for year 2 and year 3 and that is to implement an internal communications framework that ensures timely updates from City Council and the city administrator's office are shared across all staff levels and for the city administrator's office to identify potential policies and practices for sharing the impact and purpose of decisions and decision making and I'll now hand you off to my colleague team to representing.

Hello everybody, I get we're at the end of this thing, so I'm gonna just try to give you some major points. I'm Jamaica Moon, I'm from the Oakland Public Works Department, and I'm here to provide you an update on group four, which is focused on optimizing workforce management. Our work supports three strategic areas.

I apologize, can KTOP move the slides to what's being discussed? Oh, I'm sorry. Or is that, okay.

No, I'm sorry, I have the. Okay, thank you. There we go. Sorry, guys. Our work supports three strategic areas. Strengthening employee performance and HR coordination, optimizing the internet to improve communication and transparency, increasing communication and resources related to equity indicators and goals. We'll go ahead and move on. I won't bore you with all our details. Our first area is strengthening employee performance and HR coordination. Through our work in the past year, we reviewed existing work and initiatives in the Human Resource Management Department. These initiatives include retention strategies, projects, and the departmental personnel support optimization. We will support the project base as needed. In year two, we will work on plans to engage department managers and their HR single points of contact, which are our SPOCs. During the first half of the year, we also experienced the departure of two team members, which understandably affected our capacity. Rather than pause the work completely, we shifted our approach and brought on some new members. We'll go ahead and go on. The group.

We can, you have a couple more minutes, it's fine.

Okay, thank you, thank you. The group met with group three, we work really closely with group three. We will focus on area number one, to develop content related to strengthening employee performance and HR coordination. Our second priority focused on improving communication through the city's intranet. The original vision was to create a more centralized, user-friendly resource for employees by improving information sharing and establishing more consistent department page templates. We also reviewed examples of existing SharePoint sites across departments, met with information technology and explored several options for how HR information could be best organized, including whether resources should live on department SharePoint sites, within document libraries, or through updated page templates and information architecture. There's a whole lot more information that we wanna share with you that we will on the next round, but I'll just go ahead to slide four. This slide four is for an item for year number three, The equity indicators report will not be refreshed. DRE provided a demonstration of a salary disparity dashboard. We will consider how to incorporate it. Our third priority is increasing communication and resources related to the city's equity indicators report. Our goal is to help departments better understand how equity data can inform workforce planning and decision making. During the first year, I'm sorry, during the first half of the year, we had the opportunity to review and discuss the equity indicators report and attend a demonstration of the salary dashboard developed by the Department of Race and Equity. However, because the updated equity indicators report is still under development, we recognize that it would be premature to build new workforce management tools or processes around data that is still evolving. As a result, we intentionally placed this initiative on hold until the new report is available. In the meantime, we'll continue researching how organizations use equity indicators to support workplace planning. identify lessons learned and best practices, and begin thinking about how equity metrics can eventually be integrated into workforce management strategies. We'll also continue coordinating with Group One to identify opportunities where equity data can support future performance management initiatives. Although progress on this priority has been more limited than originally anticipated, we believe waiting for reliable data will ultimately lead to a stronger, more meaningful outcome. And that's what I have for you today. Is there time for me to pass it on to?

Good morning, Madam Chair and esteemed committee. Devon Simmons, Deputy Chief, Oakland Fire Department. I'm part of team number five, and our strategic goal is to align budget with citywide priorities. We have two specific action items. The current action item we're working on is integrating and exercising the evaluation criteria scale that was put together by the strategic plan and that evaluation criteria scale consists of six different dimensions. We've exercised that criteria scale using several different departments. We received feedback. We can continue to fine tune that evaluation criteria scale into the work plan so that as departments prepare for the budgeting process for the next two fiscal years,

they will have an objective tool for assessing special projects and programs based on citywide initiatives and priorities and available funds and that's what we are as of today thank you thank you I have a couple of questions so especially for the teams one and four the priorities one and four the first one I On streamlining operations, I feel like there's a number of very critical things that council has talked about quite a bit, especially when it comes to procurement and contracting, as well as hiring and transparency in hiring. It seems, just to be frank, that very little has happened on this bucket of things. Can you talk a little bit more about the roadblocks to progress on this item?

So I can share, I actually anticipate in the fall we'll be bringing a more complete report on our progress for streamlining the contracting processes. We're working on a package of administrative changes. So it's just an involved process. We've been bringing components like last month you heard the prompt payment policy so just trying to solicit feedback on related administrative changes that we can bring so we'll actually be bringing a full package in the fall of changes we are moving forward it doesn't seem like it but it's a large beast okay great and then there's

Again, I know this is a big set of issues and not all these priorities have the same scope of work, clearly, but the hiring as well, it seems in this update that It doesn't seem like there's a big update, basically, when it comes to, and then maybe this ties in with the item four. I would love to know from anyone working on the items, the priorities one and four, how you feel the coordination with HR has been going on the various items.

They have been, through the chair, they have been open to meeting with us. I think we've met with them once or twice at this point. At this point, I think there are some roadblocks that we're experiencing, they're experiencing, I should say, and those roadblocks are unclear to us, but we do hope to continue moving forward through the next several months, and as Monica said, we should have an update for you in the next set of updates.

Thank you, Ms. Davis, are you able to elaborate on the HR roadblocks?

Yeah, so actually we just added Amber Lytle to Team 4 to better support and uplift the workforce management movement for that priority. So having her join the team, Jamaica is wonderful and also just joined.

And I just wanted to speak, because you asked about the communication with HR. Group 4 were heavy in HR. And so we kind of have a streamline right to that department to be able to, and as I spoke to in the slide, we've already reviewed with human resources management department, the initiatives that I spoke to. And so there's a really close working relationship with them in our group four.

Okay, thank you. And just elaborating on that, if Ms. Moon wouldn't mind answering a couple other questions. I'm glad that there is collaboration with HR for, I guess the priority one was the hiring, which I think I was interested in, and then the priority four seemed other HR issues. What are the kind of issues that you feel like you've made progress on with HR?

Just collaborating closer with them and getting engaged with the, well, we're still working towards this part, closely with HR management, but getting to engage with department managers and our SPOCs and have clear communication through them, if that helps. We're working to build those relationships with the heads of all these people who make everything work in order to make better decisions.

Okay, great, thank you. And I can also uplift for Team 4 some of the work that Andrea Mariano had been leading as it relates to supporting the Team 4 effort is building a strategic retention effort to be able to engage staff on staying interviews and trying to support and retaining staff here. Because we all know it costs way more to train brand new employees and we value our employees and want to keep them.

And do we, and perhaps that comes in the next staffing report, so let's understand if you don't have that information yet, but I'm interested in those retention numbers. I think we've seen it for our sworn staff, PD and fire, but I would love to see how we compare in our non-sworn positions to some of our neighboring cities, if this is not already contemplated in the second staffing report coming this year. Okay, colleagues, Council Member Wong, sorry, Council Member Brown, then Wong.

Excellent. So I have a series of questions, but I'll start first just by, you know, just genuinely thanking all of the teams. I know that all of you have your, you know, regular, your everyday, you know, jobs and things that you, and responsibilities that you have to, manage and take care of and so then being a part of this team that's really working to move key make key changes in the city is really important so i want to start first by thanking all of the teams and i think maybe just for efficiency i'll ask most of my questions to miss davis so my first question is can you refresh my memory how often do the teams meet

We have team meetings on a monthly basis and many of the teams meet off schedule on their own to just progress the action items.

Got you. And when will this item return to this body again?

In six months.

Excellent. Okay, so most of my questions are related to team one and team four and five. And so can you share who is actually leading out on the shifts and changes that we need to make around contracting, procurement and contracting within the city of Oakland? Like who's leading that team?

The streamlining operations strategic planning team is playing dual roles. They're making sure that this priority gets implemented and they are actually doing a small component of implementing a change to the contracting process. But in a separate effort, I'm actually leading a contracting working group through the city administrator's office and convening the key owners of all the contracting changes. the existing plans to make contracting changes. So from finance, trying to implement the Baker-Tilly study, the feedback and the plan that M brought related to the small local business enterprise changes. So I'm facilitating and mapping out and developing a process, and this is why I advise that we'll be bringing a report on that in the fall.

Okay, excellent, thank you so much for that update, because I think that that has to do with a lot of my questions, and I think that an important flag that I would make is that in the last year and a half, being the chair of CED, or even in some of the other committees, I feel like there is a theme that also speaks to the results of that Mason-Tillman study that I, so as I'm reading through this, I feel like somewhere I'm looking for consultation with council members as a key component and also like the community component And so I guess that leads me to my next question. I know that in this moment we are really looking internally about our internal processes, but at the end of the day the impacts are on Oaklanders. Is there a community engagement component to this?

Yes, absolutely. So Chuck Baker, our assistant city administrator, is leading the effort in supporting the issues that were raised by key community stakeholders around the disparity study. And so he's developing a community engagement plan to be able to work with those folks to ensure that there's feedback integrated and provided back down to the contracting changes that I'll be implementing, as well as some other changes that will be brought.

Okay, that sounds good. And so would a fair expectation be that when the report comes in the fall, we'll also get more insight into that community engagement plan, what has occurred, or will it just be still like in a planning format?

I don't have an answer for you yet on the schedule of when those specific changes are gonna come. I will note that I believe I have been working with some council member staff to identify legislative changes and so I'm happy as we progress through that if there's interest in having those conversations to support and do briefings on that work.

Okay, excellent, thank you so much. And then my last question has to do with team five and just the last sentence or item number two around like align priorities. Well, this is like establish a priority alignment process amongst the mayor's office, city council, city administration. And I believe this is related to the budget and this would come in year three, but not very much there's no engagement on that. I do see that a tool was piloted during the spring. I think I recall maybe hearing a little bit about that, maybe specifically under the DVP, like a DVP item or just that process, but is kind of more information coming in six months on this or?

Yeah, so this first round, a handful of departments piloted the tool, including DVP, ITD, part of the fire department, and using the evaluation criteria in sort of like the pilot phase. We received some learning from that effort, and so we re-envisioned and hopefully launched with the biennial budget. And so that will be available in our process. And then hopefully, we're trying to figure out how best to provide transparency in that scoring for the council members, for the mayor as she's making her choices, and then also for members of the public.

I see, and for the pilot, do you feel that as we get into the next budget cycle, the tool that was used, will it then be used by other departments now?

The idea is that all departments would now move forward with the tool for the biannual budget.

Okay, very interesting. Okay, thank you. Yes.

Council Member Wong.

Thank you, and thank you, Deputy Administrator Davis, for your leadership on this work, as well as every single one of the leads that presented. I did want to echo my colleagues' comments just around HR. We know this is a continual challenge just for the city, so I'm looking forward to that report that you will all be providing. One item I actually wanted to uplift, which I think is incredibly important, and it actually, I'm very happy to see this within the foster cross-departmental collaboration team, is the engagement of middle management in decision-making processes. As it's noted here, middle management are the closest link to frontline staff, and as someone who's worked within all levels of various government bureaucracies, it is often frontline staff in the middle management who are working closest with the issue and often have ideas on how to improve operations within the city. But depending on the culture of the department, those ideas are not always translated upwards to department leadership. I'm seeing all kinds of different cultures within bureaucracies and so the fact that you all are intentionally pursuing this does make me very happy to see that but I do want to note that it is at risk the status and so I would just emphasize that making progress on this item is important both in operational improvements but also morale improvement because And this is not a critique of city of Oakland bureaucracy but so often frontline staff suffer from morale because they feel like they have ideas but don't feel empowered to communicate that upward to leadership. So I've just seen that play out and people not feeling supported in their roles and so I think it's also about retention, this piece, thanks.

Okay, we can move to public speakers.

Calling in the names that sign up to speak on item five, Kevin Daly, Mrs. Sada-Olivalla, and Blair Beekman.

The issue of data collection. Data has to be the basis for evidence that is reliable and creditable. You have unreliable data. Counting time, for example, is not an accurate count of our homeless population. It's identified that that counting time for homeless population is an estimate. But you present reports like this is the amount of, or the number of homeless people we have in the city of Oakland. That's an estimate. You have an item on the agenda in public safety later this evening where the Oakland Police Department has to provide a report to the California Highway Patrol related to collisions. But you have stripped the report of data, name, address, social security number, driver's license, stripped it to protect people who are here illegally. You also have no data that you collect on people that are here illegally, but you are a sanctuary city with no data to support you are a sanctuary city. You have no data that you collect on gentrification. You have no data, you haven't even had a discussion on reparations. You have a system where you are doing equity analysis and you don't have data. You don't speak about the 10% unemployment of African Americans. You don't speak about the fact that housing is an issue related to you provide housing for people no matter where they come from. Do you know that the State Motor Vehicles Department had to revoke 20,000 commercial truck licenses because the visas had expired? This unknown data.

Kevin Daly, thanks for presenting this strategic plan. I really appreciate mentioning HR in hiring. But mostly I'm going to talk about enhancing team three, enhancing communication. I'm hoping that the tech tech audit mentioned earlier will help with the communication. And I'm glad that the communication between the city administrator and the council is mentioned. I've noticed, I think some of the council members have noticed that there often isn't enough communication that often the city administrator brings items to council. without time to make really substantive suggestions or changes to the items. It's an emergency. Everything has to be passed. It needs to be passed in the next two weeks. Maybe next time we can discuss the renewal of the contract in more detail. So I'm hoping that enhancing communication improves getting to council early. And I also want to sort of call out what happened with the parking reorg over the last year. To me, this was an area where the city administrator failed in communication, both with the council and with the staff. that things were changing constantly i'm glad they changed quite a bit from the initial proposals but reports were delayed there wasn't sufficient communication what can we do to reduce reduce these changes and to improve the communication decrease the crises in the future thanks

Thank you for your comments. If your name was called and you still wish to speak, please raise your hand on the Zoom queue. Okay. Chair, at this time, all names have been called.

Thank you. And to the administration, are you looking for this to go to the full city council or to be filed here? On consent. Thank you. Okay. I will entertain a motion to move this to the next city council meeting on consent.

So moved. Thank you, we have a motion made by Council Member Wong, seconded by Council Member Brown to approve the recommendations of staff and to receive and forward this item to the July 21st City Council Agenda on Consent. On roll, Council Members Brown?

Aye.

Unger? Aye. Wong? Aye. And Chair Ramachandran? Aye. Thank you, item five passes with four ayes to receive and forward this informational report to the July 21st City Council agenda on consent. Reading in item six, adopt a resolution authorizing the city administrator to amend the professional services agreement with the city of Oakland parking partners for operation and management of municipal parking facilities to extend the term for up to three years, including a two-year extension and an optional month-to-month extension for up to one additional year for a total amount not to exceed $12,399,000, sorry, $12,399,039 waiving the competitive request for proposal qualification requirements under Oakland Municipal Code Section 2.04.051 .

adopting CEQA findings and we have three speakers on this item good morning through the chair my name is Jose Segura assistant revenue and tax administrator with the finance department today I am presenting a resolution requesting authorization for the city administrator to amend the professional services agreement with city of Oakland parking partners for the continued operation and management of the city's parking garages City of Oakland parking partners supports daily garage operations, including customer service, security, maintenance, and facility management services. The current agreement expires on July 31, 2026. The proposed amendment would extend the agreement for two additional years with an option for up to one year of month-to-month extensions. The annual contract amount would remain unchanged from the current agreement at approximately 4.1 million. Staff recommends this extension to ensure uninterrupted parking operations while the city develops and conducts a competitive request for proposals process for a new agreement. We finance assuming responsibility for these functions beginning in the current fiscal year. The department will evaluate garage operations as part of the RFP process to identify opportunities to improve enforcement, revenue collection, and overall performance.

that concludes my presentation and i'm available to answer any questions thank you i have a few questions um what are we paying this city of oakland parking partners for and what all companies does it include

So the annual amount, or up to its 4.1 million, it's mainly staffing expenditures is the main item. And I see Director Johnson that you- Sure.

Sure. City of Oakland Parking Partners is a conglomerate business entity that operates all of our parking garages. So if we were to go over here to the parking garage below 250, they're the staff that are actually there dealing with the garage, dealing with the operations of the garage facilities. Same would be true for City Center West and the other City of Oakland operated garage facilities. And so what are we paying them? When someone comes and parks in a garage, That is our revenue. We pay the contractor to manage them. So when you talk about this in terms of a dollar amount, the revenue flow is through the city and then back out to the vendor in terms of the management structure. So the largest, the resource coming from that 4.2 million, if I remember correctly, is actually the fees received and then it comes back as a payment to the vendor, if that is helpful.

Partly, but not really. How many garages is this for that's owned by the city?

So it's a total of seven garages and eight parking lots that this organization covers.

And so it's for staffing of the seven garages and eight parking lots, not the technology or anything like that, just for the individual staff?

Well, that's the main component, but it's the management of the facilities in general. do minor maintenance, provide security services for the garages. And so they're in charge of the overall operations basically of this group of garages.

Now do they do enforcement to collect the parking fees as well?

No, the enforcement is done to the chair. Enforcement is done when it relates to the sort of where you come in and use your phone to pay by application and note it. That would be done by city of Oakland staff in our parking garages to the extent that that's the enforcement mechanism. If there is gated entry to a garage at a space, the gating structure would be handled by that. Maybe to bring in the question you're getting here, part of the reason why finance is asking for this extension is we do want to explore other models of collecting revenue from our garages. I don't think we're satisfied with the technology, the solutions, the operations as they currently sit. We don't want to interrupt that process, but we know we need to engage in a full sort of and then RFP in a full competitive process in order to get better outcomes and results. And tell me, I don't want to preempt your thoughts on this chair, but I think I have the same concerns as you do around the total amount of revenue we're collecting, the fact that it has not recovered since the pandemic, the capacity for people to scofflaw park at our garages. Those are our concerns as well. We don't want to interrupt garage operations in the meantime and given the time to get a full RFP for a contract of the scale and scope and really in a full and competitive way to maximize value we're asking for the contract the current contract to be extended so we can engage in that process but those are the same concerns that we would engage in in the next rfp process thank you um yes the the lack of collecting revenue from these garages definitely is my concern i mean there's

a commonly held belief that you can just park in the city garage next to City Hall and never pay because of how messed up the technology is in practice, not to say that a pay-by-meter, not to say that the gate is a perfect solution. I know there's been transition in a number of our garages from that, but this pay-by-license clearly isn't working either if people just know that you can go park for free and get away with it. I am highly uncomfortable with having this be a two-year extension. I appreciate that you do need, I understand that you do need time to issue an RFP and look for other vendors. I also don't see anywhere all of the companies that's listed as part of this operating contract. I checked the report on the attachment unless I'm missing something. Where are the list of companies and the full list of garages?

I believe the list of companies is on the top of page four of your agenda report, and reading that aloud. It's S&P, CMA Wellington, and then two small local business enterprises, which are Oakland CMA Asset Managers and Wellington Property Co. But Jose, please jump in if I'm missing that.

That is correct, and the three main ones are Wellington, CMA, and SP Plus.

And then on the list of garages and facilities, we don't have that in there. I'd be happy to get you a supplemental report that has that listing of all the city's parking facilities. I don't actually see that here, so that's a good note for us. Happy to provide that as a supplemental.

Okay, before I pass it to my colleagues, personally, I'm very uncomfortable with passing this today, and I know that we have... Our next meeting will only be in September, but I would really appreciate if you could use that time to provide a little more details on the current operators and the garages and the numbers since the pandemic of how much we're collecting and also to explore if we can change this from a two-year contract with month-to-month extension to something much shorter to start issuing RFPs for better vendors.

And I will pass it to my colleagues before I make a motion to see their thoughts councilmember Wong then Brown I yeah, I just wanted to Emphasize and my concerns coincide with the chairs as well just around the revenue collection And I would support also shortening the length of this contract as well. I think one of the Just it doesn't seem coincidental that it the revenue decrease doesn't coincide with just the pandemic, but also the move towards the gateless system. And can you walk us through how the enforcement currently occurs in this gateless system? And I do think when this item returns or as we move towards an RFP, we need to be looking at a gated system and the cost associated with that.

through the Chair to Council Member Wong. So a couple of things. First off, on your second point, I think we concur again, finance is taking over this operation now from DOT. I think I have the same instinct as you do about the change in structure. I would note that in order to actually get this changed, It's going to take time. This is not something that we can do quickly. We are not ready to do an RFP right now on this structure. We have a lot of evaluation and homework to do about how the system is operating, what the best practices are with other garage, musically owned garages as to how to do this structure. So we'll need to do all of that prior to getting an RFP out, then competitively go through RFP process before we get to award. so part of our timeline right now is actually being able to do that appropriately without having to come back to you again and again and again for sort of short-term extensions on this we want to be able to do the full process to answer your question in a gateless garage the way it would work right now is city of oakland dot parking enforcement staff would patrol the garage using technology to identify plates that haven't haven't paid and ticket those particular plates. That's how it works. We do know that there are challenges on that. We're in the process of working hand in glove with DOT to explore those, but the concerns that you've expressed are the same concerns that we have about maximizing these resources. No one should be accessing our parking facilities without paying for them.

Right. Okay. What is a timeline that would work?

I mean, I think it will realistically, if we were to take the next six months to actually get the system we want to RFP for, and then we were to RFP it, I think the October of 27 is the soonest I could see us being ready to come back for you with award. And that's just a realistic timeline of exploring the options, doing a full competitive RFP process doing in a way that allows local and small local vendors to bid on that process of where we end up being those are time intensive processes to be done properly and we don't want to rush this one we want to do it properly so that we actually solve this problem okay thank you appreciate it Council Member Brown

okay yeah so i definitely echo um all of the sentiments that my colleagues mentioned and um i think well first i'm also shocked that the agenda report doesn't have the list of garages and so if we can please um add that um that would that would be helpful i also think that there's opportunity for us to also provide a report on the maintenance status of these garages. I think that... deciding factor for myself whether or not I park in a garage is not whether or not it's free but actually the safety of the garage and if it's actually being maintained um and so I guess like my question would be when was the last time that we actually did an audit of the garages their safety maintenance that needs to be done basically everything that said vendors should be doing. I think it says here operations, facility management, repair, security, facilities management, financial reporting. How often do we actually receive feedback from this vendor that we've been working with?

I'm not sure if this is through the chair. So there's a semi-annual performance audit that gets done, and basically every time that there's a survey that gets done to the end users, the Oakland parking partners have come out. In the words that I received, with flying colors, so they have always received a good approval rating from the end users. And so that's done semi-annually. There's no official audit that has recently been done in terms of the maintenance.

And just for clarity, is this an audit that is being done by them?

It's a survey, so it's more of a customer satisfaction survey. Ah, I see. Yeah, so there's not an official audit that I can point to recently.

To answer your question more directly, through the Chair and Council Member Brown, We need to evaluate all the facilities. You're 100% correct. Their status of maintenance and repair. I would notice any capital improvements are not actually the result of the vendor. And that's a key thing that we also need to assess. These are city of Oakland facilities and they need to be included within our capital improvements program. And so that's one of the key things that finance is also working to do to ensure that the actual asset, when it needs capital repair, properly done agendized and brought to you for consideration with our various funding sources as a consideration your capital improvement plan but you're correct we need to look at the safety for our parking patrons especially for facilities after dark in that space there are maintenance activities that need to be done and we need to be able to actually assess audit and validate those and And those are the exact kind of considerations that we need to do both as a sort of a status assessment as to where we are before we RFP, but we also need to build into any future contracting procedure for a new vendor, whoever may bid for that. So we need to have a structure by which we are receiving routine audits, updates, repairs, logs of those, not just satisfaction surveys. And so all the things that you're addressing are the kinds of things that we need to put out in our scope of work for the next RFP process. But there's a lot more that we need to address and be done so that we can go out and ensure that we have, as we talked about our prior item, We are able to ensure performance on these contracts and real performance for our partners that are patching both on the revenue and on their customer experience.

I see, and then one last, I guess, note. I would be interested in, like, when we see the list of all of the facilities, like, I would be curious, like, okay, well, you know, facility number one actually is the, I hate to use this word, but is the best, right? Like, we have the, you know, right payment method or, you know, all of the cameras are operational. versus like, you know, Facility 10, actually it looks like we need to update the gates, et cetera. So I would be curious if we can get an update in that manner. And are all the payment, like methods of payments across all of the garages analogous? Are they the same?

I don't think they all have the same pricing mechanism, if I remember correctly. I don't know if the updated status is, I don't know if the payment structure is the same. I think they are almost all using the same enforcement structure now. But what I heard you say, Councilman Brown, just to make sure I got it right, you would like to understand the revenue, the size, the ranking, the various statuses of some sort of evaluation of repair status. I think that that would be notable for this. But please, Jose, if I have not covered the council member's questions, please add anything.

And we can certainly provide the supplemental information that's been requested. We're happy to do that. We can include it as a supplemental if that's the desire. But regardless of whether we postpone this item until September or now, we are intending to initiate the RFP process immediately. So we're not waiting until a later time. We're engaging right now. and so uh you know regardless of when this may or may not be approved we are already engaging in the work that needs to be done but it will take some time it will take the rp process takes um approximately a year at least um to to be able to get someone through the door so um i guess what i'm trying to say is that regardless of uh or the the reason why we're asking for this extension is to not disrupt the the current operations because as i mentioned the uh the contract expires on July 31st. And so we are hoping to avoid a lapse in that contract while we are working. As I mentioned, we're beginning the work on the RFP immediately. We're starting right away.

Thank you. I have two more questions. So if my understanding of this is right, we basically make no money off of our garages right now? Okay.

That is a correct understanding and a notable problem.

Yeah, so then I will, Dr. Johnson, I know you've tried to do a significantly better job in bringing things to us, but not before they expire, but this item is coming to us right before it expires. But since we're making no money off of it anyway, I am very inclined to not want to move forward with this right now until we get more information. I would like to make, I know we have to hear public comment, but I would like to make a motion to continue this item to the first finance committee meeting, I believe that's September 8th. September 22nd. And a couple of things that I would like to know is what Council Member Brown said of What's the performance of different garages? Because I have, you know, just driving to different garages, they operate very differently. So I'm sure that some of them are making a little more money and others are probably operating at a loss. So garage by garage or parking lot by parking lot data, as well as which of those companies manage it, is one thing, additional information I would like. and an option to not, what are our alternatives? Because I am highly uncomfortable with spending $12 million of money over the course of two years for this. So what is the tightest timeline that we could authorize an extension in September? Could it be just for six months while an RFP is complete? It doesn't need to be nine months because if we're not making money anyway and we're spending money for these garages, I mean, I'd rather parking be free for six months than spend money on companies that are not producing results as neither is our enforcement. So I will make the motion to continue this to September 22nd with the request for that additional information. And, yeah.

I'm sorry, through the chair. So I was just advised to make it clear that But the continuation until September will create a gap in services because we won't have a contract in effect.

Does a gap in services mean that the lots will be closed or what does that mean?

We do not have city staff to operate them in the meantime. And again, I apologize. I tried to get things in advance. Finance is just taking over this particular contract set. If it is helpful, it might be helpful to extend the current contracts just to October 1, which would allow us the time to get back to you at that September staff meeting. With you your ability to take action then after that particular time so that we can just do like a three months extension So we can continue the operations as they are Okay

you know to the chair I think the thing that's standing out for me is the overall operations of said garages and ensuring that even in this moment the basics are operational so I would be curious if you would be because you heard our director state that They're going to start the RFP process and get things rolling. And so I think I would be curious. One, of course, the report back right for more information. But could we do like a contract extension maybe to like the end of the year just to give a little bit more time versus I even think the October one is is is not really manageable. So I'm just trying to see if we can do like maybe six months. But the truth is, we also heard that the entire RFP process at minimum will take one year. So it's like here's this thing that we need to do in the meantime while we are trying to get to this other goal. So I think my proposal would either be if a minimal six months to a year while these other things are taking place so that the garages are indeed manageable. Because there's no city staff to take over these operations, security for these multiple garages that we don't have a list for. so that would be i was the most comfortable with with either six months to a year um let's move to public comment and think on it calling in the names that signed up to speak on item number six miss asada olaballa kevin dally and blair beekman kevin dally

I agree with Councilmember Brown here that a moderately short-term extension makes sense without getting into a crisis mode. Again, let's just stabilize it, take a look at things. Parking garages are more complicated than just a revenue source, of course, even though we're not legally required to do CEQA, the Environmental Quality is part of the existence of a parking garage. I'm glad that Oak Dot is still handling parking policy, and we should look at both the garages and the street parking policies together and see how they work. how they do work together. They're not independent entities. You know, all of us at, well, at Oak Dot at least, and some of you guys know about the high cost of free parking by Donald Shoup. It really changes this city, this choosing to make giant parking garages. We do have higher parking prices for special events at some of the garages. That's the way it should be. Otherwise, a lot is full. Sometimes a lot's full anyway. Are there garages which could be converted to housing? Uh, you know, it's worth considering. Maybe it's housing on top of a garage, especially with the open lots. There's room for housing just as Bart's converting parking at the Lake Merritt Art Station to housing. Oakland should look at the same. We should encourage transit cycling and walking in addition to driving every garage should include a bike lake locker similar to the locker that i'm using outside city hall today and hoping this goes forwards

So when I read the report, this statement stood out. Within the next 12 to 24 months, staff will envision new ways of managing the parking system. What brought that on? what's going on with management that that has to be stated and why does it take 24 months or 12 months? This is an item that's under rule 28. Now one of the things y'all need to do during the summer is instruct all departments to have the ability to bring items in a timely manner before council. and not have all of these urgency and emergency where if we don't do it, then we'll be in a situation where we won't have services or resources. This has got to stop, that we use this Rule 28 too much and staff have sufficient, if it's a staffing issue, if you can't do it, define why you can't do it. Now I have brought to your attention many times recently when you were looking at the ice rink center. That the report indicated that people that use the ice center get free parking validation parking. How does that work. Nobody thought was important enough to bring it up you haven't brought it up yet. But through some unknown system. If you if you're parking in that garage the clay Street garage you Paul for free. How does it work? Nobody brought up that the Montclair parking garages, why did you determine that the Business Improvement Association runs the garage? Why? Why don't we have the same company running the garage in Montclair, the two garages? That wasn't brought up. So I want to know how,

thank you for your comments switching to zoom user blair beekman you can unmute yourself and begin your two minute comment hi blair beekman there's a san diego city council meeting going on here so i'm i've been trying to listen to both their meeting and your meeting as well i didn't hear everything for this item but thank you that it's here um I wanted to be able to quickly comment that I hope the work with tech accountability and the LPR readers that will be a part of these future parking projects. There can be great systems developing and how policies can work around LPR readers. public policies and learning how to public policies can work well can often be a pretty exuberant experience for people once they're understanding its process. And it creates kind of like a good feeling and good understanding. Good luck reviewing good public policies for ALPR readers for these parking garages and parking lots, what that will mean and be about. And I just wanted to remind of those concepts. And thank you for this item.

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

Thank you. I'm very hesitant on this item. I think it's such a missed opportunity that we make no money from our parking garages. But beyond that, there's also operational issues that give me pause. So for example, Black Joy Parade on a Sunday had packed streets like some of our most packed days downtown. and our city garage was closed. Like one of our public commenters mentioned, special events are days to increase fees for parking, and people will actually do it because they want to come to Oakland. That could have been a couple hundred thousand dollars on one day if all of our city parking garages were open. So it's enforcement of collection is one thing, but also making sure that our garages are open at the right times. And like my colleagues mentioned, safety, all of these things together, I think really needs an overhaul in how we think of parking garages. And I understand that that takes a little bit of time to do. So I am open to extend to changing my motion and I'll make a motion to continue this to the end of the year. So I guess five and a half month contract. Sarah Silver, And I would, but I would really appreciate if, for the supplemental packet for tuesday's Council meeting, you can provide that information about garage by garage data, which I know is a short time turnaround but by. Sarah Silver, For for next week supplemental packet I would really appreciate the information, because as we continue this conversation of. how do we do better with our garages and enforcement, but also operation safety, et cetera. I think there's a lot to think about, and I think that'll help guide the conversation. So I will make a motion to amend the contract, to move it to six months rather than two years, so till the end of this year, and send it to full counsel on consent.

Second.

Thank you, we have a motion made by Chair Ramachandran, seconded by Council Member Brown to approve as amended the recommendations of staff and to send this item to the July 21st City Council agenda on consent with the amendment to the legislation to extend the contract to the end of the year with a request to staff to provide in a supplemental support a list of all city parking facilities and the garage by garage data. On roll. Council Members Brown? Aye. Unger? Aye. Wong? Aye. And Chair Ramachandran? Aye. Thank you. Item six passes with four ayes to be forwarded as amended to the July 21st City Council Agenda on Consent. Reading in item number seven. Adopt a resolution declaring the City Council's official intent to reimburse certain expenditures from proceeds of obligations for project costs in connection with the Oakland Trust for Clean Water and Safe Parks, Measure DD, Affordable Housing and Infrastructure, Measure KK, and 2022 Affordable Housing and Infrastructure Bond, Measure U. And we have three speakers on this item.

Good morning, Chairperson Ramachandran and committee members. David Jones of the Treasury Bureau. I'll make this very, very brief as this is really a formality this morning. But before you is a resolution declaring the intent to reimburse certain expenditures from proceeds of obligations for project costs in connection with Measure DD, Measure KK, and Measure U. Pursuant to IRS regulations, project expenditures that occur prior to the issuance of the bonds can be reimbursed with the bond proceeds. This proposed resolution is a requirement of the IRS to utilize tax exempt bond proceeds for such reimbursement purposes. The adoption of the proposal resolution will provide the city with the flexibility to initiate projects prior to the issuance. In a turn, this allows for projects to be efficiently completed and bond proceeds spent efficiently as the city is intending to issue its next issuance in the first quarter of 2027 to fund projects that are in accordance with ballot measures. So this essentially is a formality for the IRS basically to reimburse. expenses that have been incurred. And I'm available to answer any questions that you may have.

Thank you, colleagues. Okay, we can move to public comment.

Calling in the names that sign up to speak on item number seven, Asada Olaballa and Blair Beekman.

So even with measures like KK and you, we have limited funds. We end up with a prioritization process. We can't fund any and all things. But it really ticked me off when you use Measure U money for that Lincoln Park Recreational Center that was under Measure KK for renovation of the center. The community, the Friends of Lincoln Rec Center came up with a scope of work that would include a totally new rec center that they would pay for. And you went through a series of engaging with that group, Friends of the Rec Center, to move forward with the project with the understanding it would be paid for by the community. Then some kind of manipulation went on with BASC to have the city pay for it using Measure U, over 30 something million dollars. And why did you do that when you had a commitment from the community to pay for it? And you're moving forward with this. I saw the design. The design was done by a private agency a group, not by the city, and you're going forward with that, scope of work by a private agency. You have not approved the scope of work as a city initiative. It's their initiative, the Friends of Lincoln Rec Center. Doing these kinds of things lacks credibility again, lacks integrity. And what would we have in West Oakland? The Howard Durant Library, for 20 years, trying to get funded, hasn't gotten funded.

Thank you for your comments. If your name was called and you still wish to speak on this item, you can come up to the podium or please raise your hand. Okay, Chair, at this time all names have been called.

Okay, I will entertain a motion.

So moved. Second. We have a motion made by Council Member Brown, seconded by Council Member Wong to approve the recommendations of staff and support this item to the July 21st City Council agenda. On roll, Council Members Brown? Aye. Unger? Aye. Wong? Aye. And Chair Ramachandran? Aye. Thank you. Item seven passes with four ayes. Support this item to the July 21st City Council agenda. And to the makers of the motion, is that on consent? on consent, thank you. Reading in item number eight, adopt a resolution authorizing the city administrator to enter into a professional services agreement with Weaver and Tidwell LLP for forensic audit services for a one year term with the option to extend for an additional one year without returning to council for a total contract amount not to exceed $490,000 and we have three speakers on this item.

Good morning, Chair Ramachandran and members of the Finance and Management Committee. My name is Rose Rubel. I'm an assistant to the city administrator with the city administrator's office. The proposed resolution before you today would authorize the city administrator to enter into a professional services agreement with Weaver and Tidwell LLP for forensic audit services for a one year term with the option to extend for an additional one year for a total contract amount not to exceed $490,000. The proposed professional services agreement aligns with the office of the mayor and city administration's ongoing efforts to evaluate and strengthen the city's contracting procedures and implement best practices to improve accountability and ensure that each stage of the process is conducted in a consistent, fair, and transparent manner across departments, programs, and project types. The city issued a formal request for proposals on November 14th, 2025, followed by a Q&A document with responses to questions from potential vendors on December 26th, 2025. Responses to the formal RFP were due to the city on January 2nd of this year, and the city received a total of four proposals. The Department of Workplace and Employment Standards conducted a bid and proposal review to evaluate each proposal's responsiveness to the city's local, small local business enterprise requirements, and issued a determination on January 30th finding that two of the vendors, Protivity Government Services Inc. and Weaver & Tidwell LLP, qualified by meeting the 20% local small local business enterprise requirement for this contract. Subsequently, an internal cross-departmental staff working group conducted interviews with Protivity Government Services Inc. and Weaver & Tidwell LLP on April 13th and scored each vendor's proposal. Based upon this evaluation process, The staff working group has recommended Weaver and Tidwell LLP to be awarded the professional services agreement for forensic audit services. The scope of the audit shall include forensic audit services associated with all phases of capital projects and human services executed July 1st, 2022 through June 30th, 2025. Under the proposed scope of work, the recommended vendor, Weaver and Tidwell LLP, will perform an independent assessment of financial statements as well as performance, recovery, and contract audits in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles, financial information, adherence to financial compliance requirements and internal controls, and organization or program performance to identify areas for improvement. This will include identifying process improvement opportunities and transaction mapping from original project inception through transaction completion cycle. The audit shall include but not be limited to development of contracts, disbursement of funds, and any other relevant contract and fiscal activities. Upon completion of review and assessment, a report of findings will be delivered to city leadership. While the scope of the proposed professional services agreement is focused on capital improvement projects and contracts administered by human services, the city may identify and seek to implement changes to the contracting process more broadly based on the findings of this forensic audit. Per Oakland Municipal Code Chapter 2.04.030, city council authority is required for contract awards for professional services in excess of $250,000. Therefore, our staff is requesting that the city council authorize the city administrator to award a professional services contract to Weaver and Tidwell LLP for a one year term with the option to extend for an additional one year without returning to council for a total contract amount not to exceed $490,000. Thank you, and staff are available to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you. I have a question. Can you explain how they meet the small local business requirement? They seem like a over $300 million company based in Texas.

I'd be happy to follow up with additional information. We did receive the report from DWES with the determination, so I can certainly share more, and I'll also just defer to Deputy City Administrator Davis if she has more information to add.

Yeah, so in conversation, we did interview both those vendors and did meet with, for each of the interviews, their subcontractors who are Oakland-based.

Okay, thank you. Um, do we have names of those subcontractors?

Probably, but my brain doesn't remember off the top of my head. I am happy to get that information to you.

I would appreciate that in a supplemental report if this is voted to move to full Council Council member Unger.

So capital improvement projects and human services are a big chunk of our budget, but they're by no means all of our budget. Are there other plans to do forensic audits on other parts of our budget? How did we select these two pieces? Where are we going next?

the chair to council member unger so in order to do a comprehensive audit of the entirety of the city's local operations that would be a multi multi-million dollar contract and candidly no firm probably has the capacity to do the entirety of the city at once we did a risk assessment as to where we thought we had the most space for improvement and candidly where we had seen the highest level of dissatisfaction and concern, both from this body and from the public. So we narrowed the scope as to the places we thought we most needed improvement. And as was mentioned, we will be able to hopefully extrapolate, given these are sort of our highest risk space in terms of process improvements across the organization. A lot of what Human Services does, for example, is grant work. That'll likely be heavily applicable to other grant similar grant projects capital improvements are a large our largest capital our largest of construction related projects and so again, we think one we have sort of the highest risk or Need to audit in those spaces and we plan to extend The learning spaces across the whole organization since we get once we get there makes sense.

Thanks Okay, Councilmember Brown. Oh, sorry Councilmember Wong then Brown

Thank you. Through the chair, just one question. This particular company, what kind of findings have they been able to uncover for other cities? And what were the outcomes? What can we possibly expect in terms of process improvements?

so they've done i i don't know off the top of my head through the chair what other um uh sort of jurisdictions or agencies they've worked with i'd be happy it sounds like there may be a supplemental report coming along with this item for the full city council meeting so i'd be happy to provide those additional details in that report But as I mentioned, the sort of components of the scope of work as far as assessing financial statements and looking at performing transaction mapping exercises, looking at the sort of full cycle and development of all contracts through completion, that is work that they have done elsewhere. And again, I can provide those additional details in a supplemental report. I also defer to my colleagues if they have additional information on that question.

Through the Chair to Council Member Wong, I know that this firm has noted means of improving, doing one process improvement they've done to that in normal jurisdictions. I do note that this firm at the, I'll give you the full range of what they've done. basic process improvement, step improvement coming out of their work. We've also seen them identify literally malfeasance in their press spaces. So they are capable of doing that full cycle of work from both the, here would be some helpful steps to make your process better, more transparent, more clear, more easily understood and followable, more digestible to different stakeholders with it, to identifying a fully malfeasant or non-compliant process or outcome in the sample that they've audited and the city will be open to receiving feedback on the full scope of those things and we're looking forward to seeing what they uncover part of the process of having a forensic auditor is they are supposed to be a little bit distant from you that is kind of that's the nature of this process we will provide them the full set of records that they require to be able to dig in and encumber whatever we can help them uncover

Okay, thank you. Council Member Brown.

Second.

Okay, we can move to public speaker.

Through the chair, to the maker of the motion, can you clarify exactly what the request for supplemental information is? I have how the company meets the small local business requirement, names of all the subcontractors, and your questions, what kind of findings have this company been able to uncover from other cities, and what were those outcomes, along with what can we expect in terms of process improvement? You got it. Okay.

Sorry, I didn't hear, did you capture Council Member Ramachandran's request? Yeah.

Okay, thank you. So we have a motion made by Council Member Wong, seconded by Council Member Brown, to approve the recommendations of staff and to forward this item to the July 21st City Council Agenda on Consent with the request of staff to provide in a supplemental report of how the company meets the small local business requirement, names of all the subcontractors, What kind of findings have this company been able to uncover from other cities and what were those outcomes? And what can we expect in terms of process improvement on rural council members? Sorry.

Public comment. Oh, sorry. Yes.

We will go to public comment on, sorry, for calling in the names that signed up to speak on item number eight, Missisata Olabala, Kevin Daly, and Blair Beekman.

So here's the definition of a forensic audit. It is an in-depth examination of an organization or individual's financial records to uncover evidence for legal proceedings. Forensic audits investigate specific, suspected actions such as fraud, embezzlement, asset management, or failure to have regulatory compliance. Forensics audits are used to confirm or to rule out financial misconduct, quantity losses or quality losses, and to prepare evidence for court proceedings. I didn't hear anybody talk about that. So are we looking at specific violations that can result in legal actions? Are we soft peddling this? Is this a real forensic audit? Are you redefining forensic audit, like you said, to make corrections as necessary to improve the process? You don't need a forensic audit to do that. A forensic audit, again, has to do with potential legal actions that have to be taken based on specific circumstances of violations. So don't try to present stuff to the public where you want to soft pedal it. So what happened with capital projects? What happened in human resources that we need to have a specific forensic audit? It's not a general audit. You're looking at certain specific circumstances. That's what a forensic audit is.

Thank you. If you still wish to speak, you can come up to the podium or raise your hand. Okay, all names have been called. Again, we have a motion made by Council Member Wong, seconded by Council Member Brown to approve the recommendations of staff and to forward this item to the July 21st City Council agenda on consent with the request of staff to provide in a supplemental report how the companies meet the small local business requirements, names of all the subcontractors. What kind of findings have the company been able to uncover for other cities? And what were those outcomes? And what can we expect in terms of process improvement? On roll, Council Members Brown? Aye. Unger? Aye. Wong? Aye. And Chair Ramachandran? Aye. Thank you. Motion passes with four ayes to support this item to the July 21st City Council Agenda on Consent. Moving on to open forum, calling in the names that signed up to speak. Ms. Asada Olabala, Kevin Daly, and Blair Beekman.

The issue of immigration, I cannot believe how I'm discovering challenges related to immigration. In 1994, Barbara Jordan, commissioned by then President Clinton to look at immigration, period, immigration, the recommendations from the commission said we have to monitor immigration because at some point it's going to impact the workforce, particularly for African American low-skilled workers. Then I find out we got legal immigration going on where people come to this country pregnant and go into what is called birth houses so they can have their children be born as citizens. Most of these are Chinese. 13 birth houses are right here in California. And these people pay up to $60,000 to $80,000 to come here and do that. So when that president is talking about birthright, when you're manipulating the system, is this fair?

Thank you for your comments, Chair. That concludes all speakers of the open forum.

All right, thank you. This meeting is adjourned.