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

Yesterday, Mayor Dellums announced that the Oakland Police Department would investigate the killing of Oscar Grant III by a BART police officer on a BART platform. There is no reason the Oakland PD should undertake such an investigation. Mr. Grant, a resident of Hayward, was arrested because of his involvement in a fight that began in San Francisco. A regional police officer unjustifiably killed him. Though the arrest and killing happened at the Fruitvale BART station, within the boundaries of the City of Oakland, the Oakland police department is not involved and has no jurisdiction over the BART system. Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff is responsible for prosecuting the responsible officer, Johannes Mehserle. Mr. Orloff works not for Oakland, but for the entire County, and is uninterested in prosecuting Oakland homicides. Many are angry at the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, but Oakland is only one of many cities in the four-county BART district, and a glance at the ward map will reveal that it is not well-represented on the board.

Just as vandalizing Creative African Braids and the charming shops along 17th Street is not justice, holding Oakland responsible for the actions of a regional body that happens to be headquartered in a Lake Merritt high-rise is unfair. Mayor Dellums has proposed using scarce Oakland Police Department resources to investigate the incident, yet their most recent high-profile projects have been scandalous, including the Chauncey Bailey and Acorn Gang investigations. And what is there to investigate? We all know that Mr. Mehserle killed Mr. Grant. With what to charge him is the prosecutor’s decision. Instead of investigating the BART Police, the OPD should investigate their own response to Wednesday night’s riots, especially how fewer than one hundred vandals were able to terrorize a large residential neighborhood.

Within the dense Lake Merritt Apartment District, at least one car was set afire, dozens of cars were damaged, and residents were prevented by police from returning to their homes. An officer gave extraordinarily unsafe directions to Uptown to a friend, who wisely took refuge in a bar until past midnight. The Oakland Police, as Fox Theater developer Phil Tagami implied, were poorly prepared for the riot and handled the situation badly. The Oakland Police Department, far from acting as an independent investigator of the BART Police, should investigate its own handling of a protest that may not have needed to become so destructive.

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.

“We’re aware of the allegations. We take them very seriously. They’re very serious allegations, and as we speak, we’re looking into them,” said Mayor Dellums. When asked if Edgerly still had her job, the mayor replied “That is to be determined.”

Ms. Edgerly revealed that she wrote a Request For Proposal to executive search firms for her replacement. She made herself available to stay on after July 31st to ease the transition, though “there are some cruises” she wants to take. Her resignation letter, whose “integrity” Mayor Dellums “agreed to maintain,” discussed a “90 – 120 day employment period” to ensure a “seamless transition.”

The City Administrator runs the entire city, including the police department (though the chief will now report directly to Mayor Dellums). The City Council is mandated by the charter to go through her if they want to do anything. The administrator “shall serve at the pleasure of the mayor,” meaning that he can fire her without cause but the City Council cannot even with cause. Alongside writing ordinances and spending money, the City Council’s authority rests in ordering the Administrator (or the department heads that report to her) to implement motions. The administrator and department heads are then in turn dependent on lower-level bureaucrats to perform the work.

It is therefore integral to the functioning of Oakland’s government that the City Administrator have the full confidence of her 5000-person staff and all elected officials. Deborah Edgerly does not, and Dellums has done a terrible job communicating the situation with city employees. The Council should be frustrated, and the public should question whether the Mayor values their faith and confidence in local government. Not only did he decline to remove Ms. Edgerly from office, but he is allowing her to guide the search for her replacement. Ms. Edgerly issued RFPs for a search team Monday Friday, she said, though she did not instruct the assembled press and onlookers how to find the documents.

With New York State rejecting $354m of federal matching funds for congestion pricing and transit upgrades, other cities are getting into the mix. Chicago has proposed an amibitious BRT network, and Los Angeles is angling for more money to supplement their record-breaking public investments in transit. Meanwhile, Berkeley residents seek to put all traffic and transit improvements to public vote, to block a regional project that goes only about a mile into Berkeley.

Finally, someone who is already on the City Council (besides Ignacio, of course) talks about the need to implement policing strategies and technologies now commonplace in other large cities! SF’s new crime czar is singing the same tune. It seems like elections bring out the best in politicians, except when they don’t.

Nancy Nadel revealed at the HarriOak / Adam’s Point / WOBO candidates’ forum that Fresh & Easy, contrary to her assertion late last year, will not be coming to West Oakland’s Acorn Shopping Center (they will open a store in the Eastmont Mall). She noted approvingly that Fresh & Easy was rejected by EBALDC, their putative landlord, over wages. “Do we want a grocery store that won’t pay a living wage?” she asked rhetorically. A Better Oakland cites the wage difference that torpedoed the grocery store, which focuses on low-priced but organic goods, at $0.39/hour.

A local blogger invents a pro-Dellums argument out of thin air: because the mayor was in Capetown, South Africa roughly around the same time as a shipment of arms bound for Zimbabwe was turned away from a Durban, South Africa, port, he must have been instrumental in keeping those arms out of Mugabe’s hands! I often piece together superficially unrelated news stories to create a narrative, but I hope they’re a bit more persuasive.

Los Angeles is paying attention to what transit users and pedestrians desire and installing eye-catching, well-located and comfortable street furniture as part of a “Community Living Room” initiative. Apparently the idea started in Oakland, but I certainly haven’t seen anything like that here. Maybe it’s because I live in D3.

Washington, DC became the first US city to implement a citywide bike-sharing program, funded by advertisers (in this case, Clear Channel Outdoor, headquartered in Oakland). Too bad Oakland’s proposed downtown zoning precludes billboards. The proposed zoning would also ban storage, which has been making a comeback lately as an asset class in the form of develop-and-hold REITs, for reasons including the Smart Growth trend toward real-estate downsizing, which creates new storage needs.

Beserkeley announced the results of a city-funded study. It confirmed that, yes, Virginia, there are many artists in West Berkeley, at least according to what they consider art. Though computer-based design doesn’t count according to Berkeley’s strict zoning, yoga studios do, so clearly nothing should be developed in order to protect valuable artists of the “expressive” variety.

San Francisco is relaxing height limits in the lower-rise parts of their city center. A marked contrast to proposals presented by Oakland’s city staff under the direction of Dan Lindheim. Not all of Oakland’s planners seem to be on-message, though.

Sacramento leaders including Governor Schwarzenegger and President Pro-Tem Perata are suggesting expanding the state’s sales tax to services. This could be a great boon to Oakland, because competitive goods are often sold outside the city but services are usually consumed nearby. For example, a woman might buy a pair of fashionable stiletto sandals in San Francisco, but will get her pedicures in Oakland (and the heels will be repaired here as well).

Scraperbikes are cool.

And everyone’s favorite rag the Berkeley Daily Planet goes weekly, starting tomorrow. I will endeavor to be somewhat more constant in my own writing, as well. Thanks for the encouragement!

However, I can’t ignore Mayor Dellums forever. Recently, two local thinkers presented persuasive and original takes on recent Dellums news.

Much was made of Ron Dellums, Barbara Lee and Sandre Swanson (who are all intimately linked) writing letters on behalf of Your Black Muslim Bakery when it was forced to file for bankruptcy. In a letter published in yesterday’s Express, Malik Russell pointed out that politicians regularly write such letters, and that it’s a vital part of helping constituents. More broadly, he notes that YBMB represents a long-term failure of local institutions:

the main fault should lie at the foot of law enforcement and the institutions that should have held them accountable.

The Express should go through its own archives from 2002 and begin identifying all these individuals who were aware of the wrongdoings at the bakery and in a position to address these issues, particularly from the law enforcement perspective. Attempting to somehow dump the Bailey assassination and tragedy onto the lap of Ron Dellums is a big stretch and seriously unfair.

There is genuine distrust of the white “system” by the black community and black politicians alike, and news media with its sick myopic approach to black politicians tends to make us even more paranoid. The process in a sense is what continually allows organizations within the black community to navigate between the cracks and often maintain no-longer-warranted legitimacy. This happens because as we see in this article, a mayor with decades of good service and integrity can by sleight of hand and one minor degree of association be categorized with murderers and assassins instead of being seen as one of the many whose good intentions were exploited.

Mr. Russell is right that going after Dellums and his allies for YBMB is somewhat unfair, and can seem excessively negative to their base of supporters. However, that does not make it okay for local politicians to aid YBMB. Writing a letter in their support after their misdeeds were widely publicized does not mean that Dellums et al. were somehow complicit in the bakery’s behavior, but it does mean that they weren’t paying attention. Local politicians, even ones that work in Washington DC, should be aware of major issues and controversies in the community. I once had to inform Barbara Lee’s staff that American President Lines, a major Oakland employer, is majority-owned by the Singapore government and that she therefore should not support legislation preventing foreign government-owned firms from operating American ports (APL has two terminals in Oakland). Her staff was suprised, and Ms. Lee never took a position on the legislation (which did not get a vote). Mr. Russell is pretty much right, but he ignores the responsibility politicians have to be aware of the news and public opinion.

Mayor Dellums got a respite of good press when he took part in announcing a regional emergency communications system. My initial reaction was that, in the event of a major disaster, SF and Oakland aren’t going to be able to help each other out. But I didn’t take the next logical step. In this age of global gossip and wireless whatnot, do local governments really need specialized communication infrastructure? Metroblogging SF has an amusing take on this vague and unfunded September 11 announcement.

Apparently, moving radio waves & data between Oakland and SF is just a dream right now, but someday we may even be able to transmit communications all the way to Sacramento and San Jose. This of course requires building a special “emergency” system capable of true cross bay communications, and Dellums & Newsom, by golly, are just the sort of high tech, get things done, dual dudes to take credit for this modern miracle possibly happening.

Pretty lame when you think about it, huh?

It seems that Dellums is having trouble finding his way as mayor. Nancy Nadel predicted this, saying last year that she wouldn’t need “on the job training” if elected. Dellums’ staff has promised “major new initiatives” soon, including an Inclusionary Zoning recommendation (apparently they figure the Council won’t take up the BRC’s suggestions). It’s a bit of mystery – another reason to keep watching.

In his September District Five newsletter (so far only available by email), City Council President Ignacio de la Fuente today at 4:30 announced a long-term, comprehensive public safety plan. It has three points:

1. Adding more community police on the streets by shifting sworn officers away from desk jobs, and setting-aside 10% of the redevelopment tax increment for public safety officers (and looking for more creative hiring bonuses). This is a sustainable source of tax revenue that will grow faster than the General Fund. It is similar to other set-asides, such as the primary source of local low- and moderate-income housing funds (25%) and the 10% OUSD pass-through.

2. “Install GPS capabilities in every police and city vehicle” to more efficiently manage the city’s fleet, saving time and fuel. He touts the benefits to public safety in neighborhoods and during times of natural disasters.

3. Aggressively promote economic development! He talks about the importance of jobs to providing for families and keeping kids off the street, and points to many trendy industries. But fundamentally, he advocates for an open, welcoming approach to business and development.

We must stop fear of economic growth in its tracks and instead welcome growth and development as a powerful tool to improve the quality of life for all Oaklanders. We stand at the cross roads; now is the time to act boldly and courageously. I ask the business community to stay committed to Oakland, and to continue to believe! This will be the ultimate path to winning peace on our streets. With a balanced approach to governance, accountability and policy making that values the role of private innovation, capital and partnerships, Oakland will be a strong vibrant, safe, and livable city.

I couldn’t have written it better myself! With Mayor Dellums asleep at the wheel, Ignacio is tackling the real issues by providing real solutions. Let’s see how his agenda is received by the administration and the rest of the Council.

The most recent police investigation of the bakery was sparked by incidents of alleged kidnapping, robbery and torture in November 2006 and in May. After two killings outside the bakery within four days last month, Oakland police sought help from other departments.
…
On Monday, police decided that the most feasible time for a coordinated effort would be Friday morning, with officers from San Leandro, Hayward, Fremont and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department scheduled to converge on the bakery before 5 a.m.

When Bailey was killed Thursday, officers were distraught, realizing that the planned raids may have been a day too late to save his life, (Assistant Chief Howard) Jordan said.

Because the OPD is dependent on neighboring police departments for manpower, they have to schedule raids not based on community safety, but on coordination between various agencies. Moreover, the utter absence of police presence in even Oakland’s busiest neighborhoods (like downtown) certainly emboldens an assassin. As much as the local media would like to avoid this sorry but salient fact, our desperate shortage of police officers is directly responsible for the terrible tragedy of last Thursday morning.