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.

Eager readers of the blogoaksphere certainly noticed many bloggers’ cause du jour – preventing the city from installing a surface parking lot in the middle of downtown’s up-and-coming Uptown neighborhood. The issue touched on a lot of the causes dear to bloggers’ hearts: pedestrian and transit-oriented planning, civic engagement, and enjoying nightlife. While advocates were clearly outlobbied at the City Council yesterday, and I find the Community and Economic Development Committee’s pro-parking decision as frustrating as everyone else, I see how the city came to this decision. It’s not just that the CED Committeemembers decided, for whatever reason, that they love parking and don’t understand its pedestrian impact, but also contributing to this result are the structural flaws that beset Oakland’s government in general. It’s the poor performance of the Redevelopment Agency, the deeply flawed labor contract, and the city’s lack of transportation planning that lead the city to push for parking lots instead of better solutions.

An ineffectual agency

It was the Redevelopment Agency that made the decision to ask the Council and Forest City for a surface parking lot. I have been told that the decision was reached after much internal debate, since Redevelopment had the option to ask Forest City for pretty much anything as a condition of extending their lease on the 19th and Telegraph parcel. Parking won out because the Agency has planned to build a parking structure on 18th and San Pablo for almost ten years, but can’t get it together to move forward. In fact, last year they ignored an unsolicited offer to build a structure with a bowling alley on top, and have no timeline for issuing an RFP. Yet Redevelopment told the Council that temporary parking is needed because it will take some time to build new parking, which is entirely the Agency’s fault, as the planed parking structure could have been built at any time in the last decade. In effect, pedestrians are being punished for Redevelopment’s inefficiency. And long-promised Uptown sidewalk improvements are still going nowhere, adding insult to pedestrian injury.

Labor issues

The city employees’ contract, which expired last summer but is still basically in effect, imposes stringent work rules that limit the City Council’s ability to pursue programs or efficiently manage the workforce. Several of the rules governing employees limit the options available to Councilmembers concerned about adequate parking in Uptown. Pedestrian advocates and local businesses suggested that, to increase the supply of street-side car storage, parking meter hours be extended until 2am, and street sweeping hours be pushed back until 2 or 3am. The City Council ignored those cost-effective ideas, because city work rules prevent meter maids from working after 6pm and street-sweeping crews from working past 3am. Since the city workers’ contract prevents the Council from adjusting parking enforcement to meet the needs of a late-night district, adding additional parking becomes an easier prospect than increasing the use of existing parking. It’s not just the enormous expense of the city workers’ contract that’s holding Oakland back, but its work rules as well.

Lack of transportation planning

Oakland’s transportation connections are the engine of its economy and the linchpin of residential demand. However, overlapping jurisdictions severely complicate the picture: AC Transit and BART provide most public transportation (though not all: Emeryville’s Emery-Go-Round, Contra Costa County’s WestCat, and the Water Emergency Transit Authority’s ferries also serve Oakland), CalTrans controls the freeways and some major roads, the Public Utilities Commission oversees railroads, and the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency and Transportation Improvement Authority direct most local transportation funds. When the City of Oakland is provided representation on these commissions, it is spread among the elected officials: Rebecca Kaplan is Oakland’s ACTIA rep, Larry Reid is Oakland’s CMA rep, and Jane Brunner sits on the joint ABAG/MTC policy-making board. The officials are free to pursue whatever policies they think are best on each commission without talking to one another, and the citizens of Oakland have no opportunity to influence transportation planning at public hearings.

Making matters worse, Oakland’s bureaucratic and official structure does not unify transportation decision-making. The Redevelopment Agency (the only part of Oakland city government with any money) is responsible for many if not most transportation improvements, and they do not necessarily work with CEDA’s bike/ped program or the planning department. Building Services also has jurisdiction over many transportation issues, especially as related to large-scale development projects. When Pat Kernighan asked the head of Redevelopment at the parking lot hearing if he was working with BART on signage and wayfinding, he said no. However, the bike/ped program is in fact working with BART on signage, but probably don’t realize that there are redevelopment goals that the signage can further. Transportation policy decisions are made by several different Council committees: most parking issues are handled by Finance and Management, planning for parking or transit-oriented development goes to Economic Development, most street improvements are heard by the Public Works Committee, and taxi regulation is governed by the Public Safety Committee. With most policy decisions made at the Committee level, Oakland’s City Council is structurally unable to coordinate transportation policy.

How does this lead to a bad parking lot? Besides the fact that a parking lot is obviously bad planning, if the Council committeemembers were up to speed on its transportation planning they may not have approved it. There is a transportation plan for Uptown, and it involves moving major vehicle traffic off of Telegraph and to Broadway at 20th St, a goal that clearly conflicts with a parking lot on 19th St. Sidewalk and bicycle improvements and a plaza are planned for lower Telegraph, AC Transit has already built their transit center on 20th and moved bus stops off of lower Telegraph, and Oakland’s taxi regulator is exploring adding a taxi stand to Uptown. Had the CED Committee been able to evaluate the parking lot in the context of these plans, they may have realized that it just doesn’t work. But not only is the Council unaware of existing transportation plans, it appears that city staff is as well. In such an environment, it is impossible to implement a transportation plan. It’s because of these factors, which also impact other aspects of Oakland’s poor governance, that Uptown pedestrians may be stuck with a parking lot.

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

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.

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.