Next Thursday (June 18), the Oakland City Council Rules Committee will hear a request from Councilmember Nancy Nadel to agendize a discussion of the proposed Oakland Airport Connector project. Ms. Nadel will request the connector be discussed at the Public Works Committee, which she chairs, and that the project then be forwarded to the full Council. The project is being sold to the region as a great investment in Oakland, yet Oakland’s elected officials have not had an opportunity to examine it in eight years, and the project has changed substantially since then. Nevertheless, transit advocates expect a fight over whether Oakland should even have a discussion.

A lot is at stake for Oakland. On one hand, project supporters claim that it will improve the Oakland Airport area, attracting more airline passengers and perhaps more businesses to Airport and surrounding area. For the reality-based community, however, there are enormous costs to the City of Oakland to moving ahead with the project. ACTIA funds that would otherwise go to East Oakland bike/ped/transit improvements, such as a mooted transit village at the Coliseum BART station, would be lost. The Port of Oakland will have to use funds that would otherwise go to airport renovation and expansion. Regional stimulus funds would go to this instead of to shoring up AC Transit and BART service. And the City of Oakland will lose the opportunity to improve transit service that would serve the workers and businesses in the Hegenberger Corridor, since the RFP for the Airport Connector does not include any intermediate stops. Many of these problems are a result of changes to the project, and many former supporters are now opponents.

A half-billion-dollar regional investment in Oakland should clearly merit some review by the Oakland City Council. However, transit advocates expect Councilmember Larry Reid, who represents the Airport and is on the Rules Committee, to resist allowing a public hearing on the project. He has claimed several times, most recently this morning at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission committee hearing, that six of the eight councilmembers support the project. If that’s true, why wouldn’t he welcome a public hearing and the opportunity for the Council as a body to weigh in? Supporters of the Oakland Airport Connector, mainly BART and MTC staff, have been resisting any review of alternatives to the project (today MTC Director Steve Heminger said it was “too late” to look at alternatives, even though they’ve been mooted for years). BART staff have repeatedly lied to decision-makers about the specifics of the project, for example telling the Port Commission about local hire and project labor agreements that are mysteriously missing from the RFP, or providing outdated ridership projections to the MTC. A well-placed City Hall source tells me that when Council staff contacted BART about having a public hearing on the project, BART said they would rather meet privately with each councilmember. Clearly Airport Connector supporters don’t think they have the truth on their side.

So, what do you think? If you agree that Oakland’s elected official should weigh in on the project, with public comment, please send an email to the members of the Rules Committee, especially Council President Jane Brunner (addresses below). If you think projects should be decided without the input of relevant elected officials, well, then you are probably quite thrilled with the direction of Bay Area transportation spending, and you don’t need to do anything. Without Oakland’s elected officials having a public hearing, the citizens of Oakland have no formal voice in the process. The Oakland City Council needs to step up to plate and make the decisions they were elected to, on behalf of the city. Please advocate for your chance to have a voice.

Rules Committee (meeting on Thursday, June 18)

Council President Jane Brunner, North Oakland: jbrunner at oaklandnet dot com

Jean Quan, Montclair-Laurel: jquan at oaklandnet dot com

Ignacio de la Fuente, Fruitvale-Glenview-Jingletown: idelafuente at oaklandnet dot com

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.

On August 4, the Oakland City Council called a special meeting and put Kids First 2, the multimillion-dollar set-aside initiative for youth-serving nonprofits, on the November ballot. Kelly Rayburn of the Tribune, after talking to Councilmember Jean Quan, wrote the Council “had to” call the meeting because Kids First had collected enough signatures to force the ballot issue. However, a reading of California election law shows that they did not have a legal obligation to place the measure on this November’s ballot. 

Oakland, though a Charter City, uses the state’s General Law to manage its elections. The General Law election code (section 9211) says the County rules apply to cities except that Board of Supervisors should be considered City Council.* Here’s how the procedure is supposed to work:

9114. … If the petition is found sufficient, the elections official shall certify the results of the examination to the board of supervisors at the next regular meeting of the board.

9215.  If the initiative petition is signed by [enough voters] the legislative body shall do one of the following:

  (a) Adopt the ordinance, without alteration, at the regular meeting at which the certification of the petition is presented, or within 10 days after it is presented.

  (b) Submit the ordinance, without alteration, to the voters pursuant to subdivision (b) of Section 1405, unless the ordinance petitioned for is required to be, or for some reason is, submitted to the voters at a special election pursuant to subdivision (a) of Section 1405.

  (c) Order a report pursuant to Section 9212 at the regular meeting at which the certification of the petition is presented.  When the report is presented to the legislative body, the legislative body shall either adopt the ordinance within 10 days or order an election pursuant to subdivision (b).

Clearly the City Council is not required to call a special meeting to put an initiative on the ballot, just that they have to do so at their next regular meeting. Therefore, because the statement of sufficiency (the certification that the initiative got enough signatures) wasn’t delivered to the Council before they went on recess, they had no legal obligation to consider placing the measure on the ballot until they return in September, well after the ballot deadline of last Friday, August 8.

Furthermore, the City has ten days in which to make a decision on whether to put the measure on the ballot or just adopt it themselves, a timeline that also would put the decision past the ballot deadline. There also appears to be an option for the Council to delay a decision by 30 days in order to get a report on the impact of adopting the measure (Section 9212).

While some may argue that delaying the measure until June 2010 does not necessarily make it easier to defeat, it would at least hold off the measure for two years to give the city time to balance the budget. Also, a June election would probably be easier to defeat the measure because there are traditionally fewer voters in June elections than November ones, and this November is expected to generate high turnout from young voters who may not understand fiscal limits and be sympathetic to youth programs.

Using technicalities to keep the measure off the ballot could have been difficult for the Council politically, but they had other options to help defeat this unaffordable spending mandate. They should have put a competing measure on the ballot that overrode the KF2 initiative and only mandated the city to do what it agreed to voluntarily in the Spring. With voters being unable to tell the difference, and more support for the Council measure than the nonprofits’, it would have had a great chance of passing with more votes than KF2, saving the Council and the public from the prospect of throwing money to nonprofits while vital public services, including those that serve youth, see drastic cuts.

* The state website uses a search function to find the law, so I can’t link directly to the legal language. All of the quoted sections can be verified with a search on LegInfo.

Last week, the City Council discussed a compromise hastily placed on the Council’s agenda by Councilmember Jean Quan to have the Council place its own compromise with Kids First (a long-term spending mandate) on the ballot. It was rejected by all but Ms. Quan and Councilmember Nancy Nadel, with the Council majority citing the expense of the measure. However, it was never presented publicly that the initiative had to be placed on the ballot by the Council even if they didn’t want to support one themselves, because enough signatures were gathered. The Berkeley City Council scheduled citizen ballot measures for its last two meetings, but neither Kids First’s backers, or the City Attorney or City Clerk, realized that Oakland had to do the same. Now the the Council is forced to call a special meeting with the hope that there are enough Councilmembers in town to avoid a lawsuit from Kids First.

Taking advantage of this extra meeting, Councilmember Pat Kernighan collected the signatures of two of her colleagues to force an additional item onto the agenda. The Council is now to discuss “clarifying” the police ballot parcel tax, presumably to address concerns raised by opponents. It is unclear what was wrong with the regularly-scheduled discussions at the Rules Committee and City Council which produced the once-final version of the ballot measure. Now, with only the bare minimum of 48 hours notice, the Council is to revisit the ballot measure with the possibility of substantial changes to major tax investment Oaklanders will be asked to make in November. Hopefully interested citizens will notice.

Last week, on the parcel tax, the same city councilmembers who called for this special meeting addressed concerns raised by the public over the city’s wasteful spending. The parcel tax proposal was a response to a community initiative that sought an increase in the police force without additional taxes. Speakers on the parcel tax proposal told the Council last week that police services could be funded by eliminating wasteful spending. This view was supported by Council President Ignacio de la Fuente who voted against placing the tax on the ballot. Ms. Quan in response said that there was on perhaps a million dollars in the budget that could be reallocated. Now, however, she’s proposing spending an additional $13m on grants to youth programs without an accompanying tax hike.

So which is it? Can we only spend an extra $1m on new officers, or $13m, without raising taxes? Or are youth programs more important than police officers? Mayor Dellums also called for the parcel tax publicly while taking a dim view of spending more money without raising taxes.

Tomorrow morning’s vote is a major test of the Council majority’s fiscal responsibility and honesty. They told the public last week that there was no way to spend more than a million more dollars on police services without raising taxes, now they are to vote on spending up to $13m without raising taxes. Ms. Quan claims that the Council is over a barrel because the Kids First! nonprofits have collected enough signatures to place their spending mandate on the ballot. A recent poll shared with the media by the mayor’s office shows that 20% of Oaklanders will vote no on the police tax mainly because of concerns over government waste and inefficiency, and 69% of those polled say “the amount of taxes people have to pay for city services” is a very, somewhat or extremely serious problem. A compromise measure placed on the ballot by the Council would not only be more likely to pass than KF2’s more extreme measure, but will also confirm the worst fears of the voters who are wary of supporting the police tax, severely hurting its already-iffy chances of passing. Oaklanders will see tomorrow whether a majority of the Council values police services or a program that hands out grants to nonprofits without accountability.