Closing the library over the holidays was criminal: it was in total contradiction to an important educational goal of the library system. When students aren’t in school, the library allows them to continue or catch up on their studies, and eases the burden on their parents. We didn’t need a Chronicle article to tell us how awful it was to have this vital public service completely closed exactly when it was most needed. The library furloughs are in addition to losing a day of branch library service every week, an 18% cut. Some Councilmembers like to say that they were able to balance last year’s budget without closing libraries: in fact, the libraries are now closed a lot, and of course the budget isn’t balanced.

For most people, the library (along with senior centers, rec centers and parks) is their primary use of the service side of Oakland City government (as opposed to the enforcement side). But for many others, losing access to various city services is a major hassle. Like other active citizens, I often contact Code Enforcement, the Planning Department, and Council staff. Professionally, I use city services, whether it’s the permit desk, the business license department, the bike/ped program, the facade improvement program, or Business Attraction. Removing 5% of city service hours has a commensurate impact on the private sector, and of course the City’s sclerotic bureaucracy can’t easily adjust to odd schedules.

Because Oakland’s budget problems are only going to get worse, short-term fixes like furloughs deprive citizens of needed services without providing a long-term budget solution. The City unions prefer furloughs to pay cuts because furloughs are theoretically temporary and don’t affect baseline pay, and because they want the public to feel their pain. But the public deserves access to services, not painful closures. If the City is going to downsize services, we should reduce the nature and breadth of services, not cut service hours. Students shouldn’t be punished because the City can’t afford its payroll, the highest in the nation according to the US Census. Oakland has a part-time City Council, but we deserve a full-time City.

Yesterday I had an hour between meetings to have coffee with my mother in Rockridge. I thought it would be a good opportunity to twitter the latest BART protest, and hopefully to pick up a few more readers of my microblog thanks to intrepid, live reporting of what promised to be a large and potentially riotous demonstration in the heart of Oakland’s supposedly “power elite” neighborhood. Unfortunately for me and for the protesters, it was a complete bust. The media outnumbered the handful of protesters, and BART and the neighborhood took no chances securing the transit station. I enjoyed no discernible uptake in my twitter popularity, and the protesters looked pathetic and marginalized. But lost in their divisive and extremist rhetoric is the fact that the protesters are basically right: BART is a deeply flawed and unjust organization.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system opened in the early 1970s with a promise of uniting the central Bay Area with a high-speed rail system. The system’s construction wreaked havoc on Oakland and San Francisco’s downtowns, precipitating the fall of the DTO as an upscale shopping destination by tearing up Broadway for years, and driving the final nail into the coffin of West Oakland’s once-vibrant 7th St. As the system expanded throughout the 80s and 90s, far-flung suburbs received high-intensity transit service far out of proportion to their size and density, and the residents of central cities found themselves subsidizing suburban transportation at an ever-increasing rate. Despite failing to meet ridership projections, a uniquely costly construction type, and decades-long problems with escalators and elevators, BART remains the most politically popular transit service, receiving a share of regional transportation dollars far out of proportion to its ridership. Today, BART’s legacy is an ever-expanding regional development footprint and fantastically wasteful expansion plans that starve the much more efficient and larger bus agencies of needed operating funds. This is not just an issue of priorities, it is an issue of social and environmental justice.

BART’s per-rider public subsidy (at an average of $6.14) is more than twice that of AC Transit ($2.78), neatly intersecting (PDF) with the fact that its ridership is twice as white as AC Transit’s (43% to 21%). Its subsidized parking lots in the suburbs encourage driving and transfer additional funds to the suburbs at the expense of the inner cities. Most galling, fares from the outer suburbs don’t come close to covering the operating costs of those train lines, while intra-city fares in Oakland are actually more than the operating cost of a trip from, say, Fruitvale to the DTO. This means that every trip within Oakland is subsidizing a trip from the outer suburbs. Both the structure and the operation of BART is subsidizing suburbanites at the expense of the central cities, and its low-cost parking has been shown to encourage more driving.

This is not just a legacy of the 1950s BART plan, it is a result of continuing policy choices by the elected BART Board. The same Board that for decades refused to create a civilian oversight board for its large police force has chosen to create an unjust fare structure and repeatedly break promises made to voters. Those broken promises include a shockingly wasteful Airport Connector that bears no resemblance to the project approved by Alameda County voters, and the VTA’s 2008 tax measure that took all of a month after it was approved for the transit agency to announce that it would jettison all of the local-serving projects in the tax and redirect the funds to the duplicative San Jose expansion (which won’t even go to downtown San Jose, as promised to Alameda County voters when they approved the Warm Springs extension).

The BART Board flies below the radar of public and media interest. The last contested BART election, for the North Oakland-Berkeley seat, saw a transit advocate unseated by Bob Franklin, a union leader upset by Roy Nakadegawa’s efforts to run the system more equitably. The wasteful nature of BART is part of its political power: the construction companies and unions are strongly supportive of the enormous costs of expansion, which go directly into their pockets, while low-cost bus systems aren’t lucrative to big political donors. AC Transit is relentlessly criticized for buying nice buses and for attempting a widely successful Bus Rapid Transit project, yet nary a peep is raised by the media when BART embarks on trains to nowhere, at the cost of over half a billion dollars a mile.

So how does this relate to Oscar Grant? The protesters are eager to connect Oscar Grant’s death with wider social justice causes, yet they focus exclusively on the BART police. BART’s unjust operating structure, the subject of a racial-discrimination lawsuit, has been utterly ignored, and the protesters appear to fail to understand that the elected BART Board is fully responsible for a lack of civilian oversight for the BART police, as well as the despicable response to the incident in the first place. This gives BART Directors, like the aforementioned Bob Franklin, cover to claim they “take the protesters’ demands seriously” while in fact doing nothing to address the substance of those criticisms. Unless and until the protesters connect the dots of BART’s deeply unjust operations and the culpability of its elected officials (who are accountable to the voters), lame attempts to shut down urban stations will do nothing to improve transportation equity or social justice.

Yesterday, deeply unpopular Mayor Ron Dellums named his long-time aide, Interim City Administrator Dan Lindheim, permanent City Administrator. Nevermind that the interim appointment of Mr. Lindheim was illegal, or that Mr. Lindheim has no experience as a city manager, or that his seven months as interim administration have been among the city’s worst. His appointment must be confirmed by five members of the City Council, and it is up to them whether Oakland continues its deeply frightening downward spiral or demands professional, competent, and qualified management instead of cronyism.

The City Administrator is the single most powerful official in the City of Oakland. He has power over all 5000 city employees and every department’s budget. The Chief of Police, the CEDA Director, and the Budget Director are among the top administrators that report to him. It was former City Administrator Deborah Edgerly’s intimate involvement in the Police Department that allowed her to allegedly tip off a relative that he was under surveillance. Oakland simply cannot afford a subpar City Administrator in charge of everything from parking tickets to gang investigations.

Dan Lindheim, Dellums’ longtime Congressional aide who later worked for the World Bank, does not meet the most basic qualifications to be the top official of this troubled 420,000-person city. He has been the Interim City Administrator for almost seven months, during which time he has overseen the complete meltdown of city functions from policing to labor relations to parking, including several public-safety scandals that contributed to Chief Tucker’s resignation. Appointing Mr. Lindheim City Administrator is entirely unacceptable, and activists are asking citizens to write their Councilmembers in opposition.

Mayor Dellums claims he used public funds to conduct a nationwide search for City Administrator. How did Dan Lindheim, who has no relevant experience, win that competition? The public deserves a real City Administrator with a successful record, and our representatives need to know. Oakland’s only hope is for a public outcry to prevent the Council from approving Dellums’ unqualified crony to run the city including its police department. Please email your Councilmembers asking for them to oppose the appointment of Dan Lindheim as City Administrator because he is utterly unqualified, and Oakland deserves better.

UPDATE: Becks at Living in the O also calls for citizens to urge their representatives to oppose Lindheim’s appointment, and A Better Oakland agrees.

District One (Rockridge – Piedmont – North Hills – Golden Gate): Jane Brunner, jbrunner at oaklandnet dot com

District Two (Grand Lake – Chinatown – San Antonio): Pat Kernighan, pkernighan at oaklandnet dot com

District Three (West Oakland – Downtown – Adams Point): Nancy Nadel, nnadel at oaklandnet dot com

District Four (Montclair – Dimond – Laurel): Jean Quan, jquan at oaklandnet dot com

District Five (Fruitvale – Glenview – Jingletown): Ignacio de la Fuente, idelafuente at oaklandnet dot com

District Six (Millsmont – Seminary – East Oakland): Desley Brooks, dbrooks at oaklandnet dot com

District Seven (Outer East Oakland – Airport – Coliseum): Larry Reid, lreid at oaklandnet dot com

A new year presents the opportunity to dream and hope for the new. It may seem that this is not the best moment to hope for new transit service: not only will a slipping economy mean less sales-tax revenue from which to fund local transit, but one state budget-balancing idea includes stripping local transit agencies of operating subsidies in order to jump-start the construction of High Speed Rail. This rests on a calculus that High-Speed Rail will create construction jobs, while transit service merely takes people to their existing jobs. From this government-centric perspective, efficiency and broadly-shared benefits lose to glamorous and expensive new projects. Similarly, BART wants to cut existing service while still building new stations in suburbs where ridership is likely to be low. But the East Bay is about to see enormous transit improvements that are incredibly cost-effective, and a less-cost-effective project is getting another chance.

The handful of choke points connecting Alameda to Oakland’s transportation system have long bedeviled planners. Car access is considered adequate, and only a new bike/ped/transit crossing is being studied, with options to be presented to Oakland and Alameda later this year. However, the need to fit a large Coast Guard ship on the estuary is a major physical barrier to building a bridge. A drawbridge would be useless to buses because it would introduce delays, and building a tall crossing would be prohibitively expensive. But Alameda has figured out how to create reliable transit service with just a bucket of paint: bus queue-jump lanes leading to the Posey Tube. By prioritizing buses over private traffic through the tube, buses avoid a significant bottleneck and restore reliability, at basically zero cost to the public. The lanes should be painted soon.

Though not quite free, Bus Rapid Transit is extraordinarily low-cost transit service that can accommodate tens of thousands of daily riders in its eight-mile corridor for only $250m, all of which has been secured. The Measure KK vote in Berkeley shows that the general public strongly supports Bus Rapid Transit, which confirms my personal experience: everyone I tell about it immediately grasps the concept and the benefit of bus-only lanes, and very few grumble that rail would be better or that cars deserve every last inch of asphalt. The project qualifies for the Federal Small Starts program because of its cost-effectiveness (a metric often not met by rail projects), and all funding has been secured including a generous allotment for overruns. Such a large transportation benefit for little cost, though perhaps uninteresting to state-level politicians, is the perfect project for a recession.

Ironically, as BRT proves its popularity and its cost-effectiveness becomes more valuable, several developments may have made an Oakland streetcar idea more feasible. Unveiled in 2001,  the multi-jurisdictional Long-Range Investment Study looked at BART to Jack London Square, improved transit connection to Alameda, and various Rapid Transit options (BRT, LRT, and a streetcar). Ultimately most ideas were found to be expensive or otherwise infeasible. Out of this study only the aforementioned transit plans are progressing. A MacArthur BART-Downtown-JLS-O29 streetcar circulator was found to be very expensive and have no identifiable funding source, and a cheaper “rubber-tire trolley” suggested by Councilmember Nancy Nadel was not studied. Yet, in the five years since a Congestion Management Agency meeting I attended in 2003 where those conclusions were reached, several funding sources for a downtown streetcar may have presented themselves.

Without radically rejiggering the Central District Redevelopment Area’s spending formula (which provides the vast majority of funds for citywide affordable housing projects), there is no obvious financing mechanism for a downtown streetcar. The City Center and Lake Merritt office districts alone could not bear the costs, and those property owners would be unlikely to see great benefit in shipping their tenants off to Jack London Square for lunch. But the Jack London Square II project is building a substantial amount of office space, and if O29 is approved soon, there will be thousands of new residents needing new transit service. But the real clincher is the Conley Report proposal for a Mid-Broadway large-scale retail district. Since there’s no BART station between 20th and 40th Streets, and the city will be hard-pressed to fund thousands of parking spaces to support new retailers, new transit service will also be needed at the other end of the proposed streetcar route, up Broadway to the MacArthur BART station. With a mix of new retail, office and residential large-scale development along the proposed streetcar line, the prospects for its funding are much brighter, especially as it combines transportation with economic development, and is a large infrastructure project that would create jobs.

As promised in her inauguration speech, Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan will tomorrow present an urgent proposal to the Oakland City Council Rules Committee. She will ask that Oakland add actual infrastructure projects to its federal stimulus request which was woefully lacking when drawn up by the mayor, and adopt a strategy for lobbying Congress to get as many projects funded as possible. Transportation projects are expected to get additional attention, from implementing the Bicycle Master Plan to repaving every street and sidewalk in the city. Even though simple and cost-effective transit solutions are becoming more apparent, with the opportunities presented at the federal and local level (from Obama’s stimulus to Oakland’s retail revitalization plan), new transportation improvements are getting a fresh look and perhaps a fresh start.

In creating the 2007 budget, Oakland’s City Council made a critical decision that would place the most basic and necessary piece of bicycle infrastructure in serious jeopardy. In switching to higher-revenue, sidewalk-friendly “Pay and Display” parking kiosks, and so removing parking meters, Oakland would lose the vast majority of legal bicycle parking. Bike/ped activists recognized the threat and acted quickly to find a solution.

The Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee created a Bike Parking Subcommittee, which I chaired, and we identified and lobbied for budget measures to ameliorate the kiosks’ impacts on cycling. Oakland was already planning to fund a new CityRacks program, which would install bike racks over three years throughout the city’s commercial districts. Based on a successful policy I had seen in Portland, we convinced the City Council to waive the Minor Encroachment Fee for bike parking, allowing people to install custom-made racks in the sidewalk without paying $1500. But those medium-term programs joining kiosks in the budget did not address the imminent removal of all meters.

Custom bike rack in Portland, OR.

With assistance from the bike/ped program staff, we evaluated options for solving the problem temporarily. For CityRacks, the city had already determined that two racks per linear commercial block (with more available by request and extra capacity in targeted areas like Old Oakland and Temescal) would satisfy demand. It turns out that retrofitting parking meters (replacing the head with a bar big enough to prevent a lock from being slipped over it) is actually more expensive than installing new racks, though of course faster. Fortunately, the Parking Department and the bike/ped program staff worked out an agreement to retain two parking meters per block, removing the mechanism and labeling it as bike parking. The deal was presented to and approved by the City Council’s Public Works Committee.

A city staffer and an intern spent the summer of 2007 clearly marking the meters to be retained with a big white X on the sidewalk (also, apparently a merchant or two figured out what they were doing and marked their own meters). I reviewed their downtown selections and agreed with them. Once the meter was removed in front of a downtown bar at which I used to DJ, the owners were going to put in a custom rack.

But, of course, the parking meter removal was not done properly at all. Everyone sees the headless poles all over Oakland’s streets. And every bicyclist sees that very few of them had their heads retained in order to function as bike parking. Before the Parking Dept made a half-hearted effort to fix the problem, the bike/ped program found that only 47% of the 576 meters to be retained were in fact left in usable condition. The figure has been raised to about 70% through a few random head replacements and the bike/ped staff grudgingly accepting some meters retained that were not marked (like the one in front of the bar that was planning to replace it with a custom rack). Despite the City Council’s direction, affirming a plan drafted by the Parking Department itself, bicyclists lost almost a third of their needed parking through sheer incompetence on the part of city workers.

Three bikes locked to one meter, downtown Oakland.

Unlike San Francisco, Oakland has an Environmental Impact Report supporting its bicycle master plan and no barrier to installing bike parking but the time it takes to fully implement the CityRacks program (two more years). When the economy recovers, and as bicycling becomes more popular and valued, businesses will begin to take advantage of the ability to install custom-made racks. But in the meantime, we could have adequate bike parking if a large, revenue-generating city agency could perform a basic task given to them. Unfortunately, in Oakland that is simply too much to expect.

Of course, because of the legal difference between taxes and set-aside laws, Kids First 2 passed and Measure NN, to increase cops, did not, despite receiving thousands more votes. Though, as a set-aside, the threshold for passage was lower for OO (an option that anti-crime activists had considered in the Spring), nonetheless the difference in votes, about 3000, shows that cops are indeed more popular than kids’ programs. The difference in campaigns only reinforces this point.

NN met with far stiffer opposition than OO. Opposition came from those influential over potential Yes votes: the anti-police argument was strangely missing from this election, even from its most strident proponents, Councilmember Nancy Nadel (who sat the entire election out, as the only Councilmember not to endorse either Council candidate) and PUEBLO. The Safety First funding mandate’s leaders opposed NN, as did anti-crime advocates like Charles Pine and Ignacio de la Fuente (PDF). Support from Mayor Dellums and the Chamber of Commerce consisted of weak mailers sent only to poll voters. Despite this, the measure won 54% of Oakland votes. The consensus for cops, even without the support of activists, is clear.

In October, No on OO campaigners including Sharon Cornu of the Alameda Central Labor Council and Susan Montauk of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board begged the City Council at Open Forum to campaign against the measure. They didn’t. No on OO only had the funds to send a mailer to absentee voters (Yes on OO sent a mailer to poll voters), and I never saw Councilmembers do more than a make brief mention in their newsletters. The old and new media fell in against OO but their influence is limited, and the largest, the Chronicle, didn’t do Oakland endorsements. Overall, OO was a low-information campaign that most voters probably decided just by looking at the ballot question.

OO was packaged, deceptively, as a costless means of keeping existing youth-serving programs. NN was a tax increase to expand policing resources. Three thousand more Oaklanders voted to tax themselves for more police than to keep existing children’s programs for free. In November’s election, Oakland voters were more supportive of cops than kids.

While library cuts and management perks dominate headlines about Oakland’s budget, the vast majority of city spending is currently being negotiated behind closed doors: employee compensation. City staff, who have been working without a contract since the summer, have complained to their ally Mayor Dellums as well as to the Council and the public that talks aren’t going well for them. Last week, the largest city employees’ union* turned up the heat by setting a strike authorization vote for October 14th.

To set the stage, a union organizer penned an op-ed for BeyondChron, asking for a “bailout for the needy of Oakland” – the coddled city workforce. The piece highlights the union’s strongest complaint, that librarians do not have adequate security, but largely focuses on outside vendors that city and Port workers blame for cost-cutting pressures. The mainstream media, which has totally ignored the labor strife that threatens to consume City Hall, is helping the unions by focusing on management travel perks that are small potatoes compared to the legions of city workers who are overpaid by many measures.

Though the union has repeatedly offered to help the city find efficiencies, many City Hall watchers blame the union itself for much of Oakland’s inefficiency. After all, front-line workers are often rude to citizens, and overall the city workforce is clearly underperforming. The unions oppose productivity measures such as a 311 system or GPS on city-owned vehicles. Union support helped secure reelection for Councilmembers who reward the unions with lax oversight. Most damagingly, Oakland’s combination of labor and civil service rules make it impossible to manage employees who can be neither fired nor transferred even for egregiously bad job performance.

From at least one perspective, the autonomy given to city staff has been abused. Union organizers who are also city employees, like IFTE 21’s Jeff Levin, appear to be attending to union business on the city’s time. City staff serving policymaking bodies often ignore and thwart the commissioners they are supposed to serve. The performance of city staff during the Downtown Zoning Update is deplorable: from repeatedly providing false and misleading information to outright refusing to follow Commission direction that conflicts with their recommendations, city staff is playing the role of policymaker rather than policy staff. Because they are not accountable to the commissions they serve or really to anyone at all, they can engage in unprofessional behavior without consequences.

The unions have already engaged in hardball tactics, including at least one “sick out” that nobody noticed (and participants were paid during their absence). The unions are in a bad position in negotiations not only because they are clearly overpaid and the city simply cannot afford them, but also because their job performance is so poor that the public doesn’t notice when they leave their posts. That conclusion may be put the test if city workers vote to strike next Tuesday.

*The city does not have detailed information or current contact information about union representation even on its internal website. However, SEIU 1021 is certainly the most visible union and appears to be the biggest.

Over the last month, A Better Oakland has presented three different measurements of Oakland’s employee compensation, which is currently being negotiated with the unions by a professional team under the direction of the Interim City Administrator and the Council. These are excellent data to determine an appropriate level of city employee compensation. The data show that Oakland has the highest average payroll in the entire country, that most employee positions are paid far more than in regional municipalities, and that city employees have received cost of living raises totaling more than 10% over the CPI since 2002. To put that in perspective, 10% of the city’s payroll* is $59m, more than enough to pay for the LLAD deficit and the police service ballot measure.

To put both the number and pay of Oakland’s bureaucracy into perspective, V Smoothe shared a chart from the Census Bureau (PDF) listing the number, per-capita number, and average monthly payroll of every US city over 250,000 residents. While there are vast differences between the cities (for example, many cities perform duties assumed here by Alameda County and the OUSD), Oakland appeared to have a significantly above-average number of city employees per-capita. But more stunning is that Oakland has the highest average monthly payroll of all mid-sized and large American municipalities. How can cash-strapped Oakland have higher average employee pay than New York City, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle?

The answer lies in a little-noticed city survey (PDF) unearthed at A Better Oakland today. Comparing Oakland’s city positions to those of other Bay Area cities, 67 of the 72 job classifications are paid more in Oakland. The unfortunate five underpaid positions include Neighborhood Services Coordinator, Recreation Supervisor, Plumber, and Gardener II. The salary figures were adjusted for a 40-hour workweek (Oakland city employees are only expected to work 37.5 hours, 6% less than standard) and include pension contributions. The average position enjoys a 14% compensation premium over the median compensation of a Bay Area colleague. In addition, the city’s cost-of-living raises have been a compounded 10.1% more than the actual inflation rate since 2002, meaning that the city employees have experienced a real income gain of over 10% in six years while the average American worker’s income has declined in real terms.

The factor that is not taken into account by these data is productivity. The figures above suggest that Oakland should be performing at 110%, 114%, or even better than any other city in the US. Oakland clearly is not doing a superior job delivering services. 10% from the payroll, the sum of overpaid inflation increases, is $59m, more than the LLAD deficit ($10m) and the police services proposal ($40m) put together. Are city employees performing well enough to justify tax hikes to cover their excessive pay? While I have had the pleasure of working with many excellent people from the city, as a whole it’s clear that the city employees’ productivity does not justify gross overpayment. There is no excuse for Oakland to have the highest average monthly payroll in the entire country. Face with a budget deficit of up to 8% of payroll, and two tax proposals this year totaling 8.5%, comparative data show that employee compensation is too much, not that tax receipts are too little. With salary negotiations ongoing, city leaders will have to make decisions now about how much compensation Oakland can actually afford.

* According to the City Auditor (PDF, p. 10), the payroll in 2006 – 2007 budget year was $589m, 56% of the total budget.

I have adjusted some figures since this was first posted.

This afternoon, our unpopular Mayor Ron Dellums held a press conference is an overcrowded city hearing room usually reserved for small committee meetings. Flanked by t-shirt-wearing city employee union activists, the police and fire chiefs, and interim City Administrator Dan Lindheim, Dellums announced that the budget “that was presented” (by him) and ratified by the City Council is fundamentally flawed and that a deficit “in the tens of millions of dollars” is likely. He gave no indications of how he’ll close the budget gap, but the presence of the city employees’ unions and a brief aside about the futility of growing the city without new infrastructure funded by the federal government reveal that he doesn’t know how to balance the city budget.

The main problem with Oakland’s budget is the large number of public employees and the poor quality of their work.* When discussing Kids First yesterday, Councilmember Pat Kernighan said that nonprofits provide more service for fewer dollars than the city. That is undoubtedly true. Perhaps a more research-oriented blogger may look at how many employees we have per-capita, but since 75% of the city’s budget is spent on salaries, and city services are widely acknowledged to be poor (as a recent poll confirms), major changes in the union contract will be the only way to solve a fiscal crisis in this town.

Except, of course, a revenue increase. While a retail revitalization plan may be long-term and even require city investment up-front, there are much shorter-term ways to raise revenue. One is to allow more real estate development. With more than 55% of city’s budget coming from real estate, and city finances structurally dependent on property taxes, real estate development is the only way to increase city revenues. Condo maps literally create new property, and other kinds of development transform underutilized properties into “higher and better uses” that generate sharply higher tax revenues. Businesses, on the other hand, are mostly helpful to tax receipts because of the property demands they create: less than 2% of city revenues come from business taxes.

So when Dellums cast aspersions on ABAG’s demand that Oakland increase its population by noting the poor-quality infrastructure (that developers pay to upgrade), he was dismissing the most immediate way that Oakland can substantially raise revenues. He killed an enormous project in West Oakland that would have produced tens of millions in immediate tax benefits, and his Planning Commission and CEDA appointments have given developers the impression that they are no longer welcome. The mayor is thus far doing everything he can to prevent Oakland from increasing its tax base.

Dellums’ press conference, to announce a review of the flawed budget he submitted two weeks late, was a stark reminder that just as he failed to properly oversee the mid-cycle budget, he is unable to grasp the causes of or solutions to Oakland’s budget problems. The phalanx of city employee union leaders standing behind him, the same people who recruited him into the race and bitterly opposed Ignacio de la Fuente’s reelection, are the barriers to solving the city’s problems. Until our city leaders start expecting efficient delivery of services from the city employees, and stop acting as if city jobs are there to help ease our unemployment problem, Oakland’s budget deficit will never close.

* I don’t mean that individual city employees are bad workers. But the overall level of service delivery is poor compared to the budget and size of the workforce. Much of this reflects poor policy choices by the City Council. Reducing the size or cost of the city bureaucracy until revenues increase is the only way to significantly reduce expenditures.