How CFABO Speakers Shook Up a Workplace Therapy Session
In a lineup of citizen comments that typically wanted more funding for second tier projects facing lean-year funding constraints, Coalition For a Better Oakland President Steve Heimoff spoke just to the big issues, urging the council to reject the unpopular police department cuts promoted by the ultra woke, and instead enforce the Oakland laws on homeless encampments passed nearly a year ago, yet never implemented.
Leslie Landberg, a CFABO steering committee member, followed with a two-minute stem-winder, based on the many hours she has spent in the camps, courageously befriending people, asking questions and learning for herself what goes on there. The camps are not the mellow villages that some homeless advocates contend are best serviced with necessities and left alone, but rather “filthy places over-run by rats where human beings live in squalor,” she said.
“Activists who claim to be compassionate” feed on the millions in public dollars that keep the camps afloat, Landberg said. She denounced “the homeless industrial complex” -- careerists whose interests are served by as large and concentrated a raft of unhoused people as possible.
When the public comment period ended, Zoom citizens could sense a grinding shift in gear. Monday’s day-long meeting was to be the second day of the annual City Council retreat, and whatever had gone on the first day plainly had ended with no surplus of bonhomie.
The facilitator’s first slide tried to pick up where the councilmembers had left off the day prior. Phrases on his slide were: Mistrust. Indifference. Personal blow-ups.
“It’s very personal.” scowled Councilmember Carroll Fife. “Dishonest, unclear, disingenuous.”
Fife explained that government at all levels “undermines poor, Black, and queer people” with systems and structures that people with money and conventional educations find easy to work with. “It’s up to us to decide whether to uphold those systems, or break them.” In her view, the honorable course is to break the government to better serve poor people. In a word, justice.
Fife seemed in a quarrelsome mood. Referring to Councilmember Treva Reid, Fife said: “Treva’s comments are being uplifted while mine are being ignored.” Uplifted is city council speak for acknowledged.
Fife also demanded “some restorative justice” for herself, complaining that last winter’s Covid emergency police budget cuts were ordered by the mayor, yet she (Fife) was being blamed by angry constituents. Ordinarily, Fife contends that OPD cuts are popular with voters.
As the therapy session droned on, Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan pointed the finger at the city staff, which she said maliciously stalls things, even after the city council votes to take action.
City Administrator Ed Reiskin pled a heavy workload. “The volume of these things adds up,” he said. “It’s a huge list, not at all consistent with any definition of priorities.”
Councilmember Loren Taylor said currently pending council priorities stand at 67, an unusually long list by corporate standards.
Government, of course, is different -- but this one seems backwardly bureaucratic even by government standards. For example, no inquiry made by anyone, including the president of the city council, may be answered (even if the person who is asked knows the answer to a dead certainty) until a department head has first seen the question and approved answering it. That can take weeks. Or years, some members complained.
“I and my staff know managers at many levels that we know can help, but we can’t ask them without first going through a department head,” said Councilmember Sheng Thao.
“I understand workload,” Councilmember Dan Kalb said, “But this is somebody saying, ‘This is not important.’”
Reiskin, the beleaguered administrator, promised the staff would set up a tracking system online so that everyone can check progress on the 67 priority items currently on hold.
Councilmember Thao suggested the council set up its own tracking system, so that any interested party could compare the two tracking systems. This is how bureaucracy grows.
Although city council amendments to Mayor Schaaf’s proposed FY 2021-23 spending plan will not be formally drafted until this Friday, for discussion June 17, Council President Bas hinted that the Defund forces are still in the driver’s seat. She said she was thinking of cutting the six police academies that Schaaf had recommended to backfill a large and snowballing officer attrition touched off by the toxic politicization of policing last year. The mayor said she was aiming to eventually rebuild a full-strength force of approximately 800.
Bas said her version uses 678 officers as the floor, and only because it says so in Measure Z. She acknowledged that “there will be service impacts we must address.”
Councilmember Kalb called foul after an hour or so during which councilmembers all listed other worthy projects that might be funded that might funded if the raid on the police budget were as aggressive as called for by anti-police zealots, $150 million a year.
“It’s not going to happen,” Kalb said decisively. “Not enough money.” Kalb challenged all members to set down in writing “with some specificity” those police services they would be willing to sacrifice.
From Bas’s perspective, the future of Oakland appears to be full-blown woke. Restorative justice holds pride of place on her slides where Schaaf had put a fully staffed OPD. Restorative justice, which rules out jail time in favor of a meeting of the minds between criminal and victim, is joined in Bas’s vision by a panoply of “alterative policing” schemes to include violence interruption, community ambassadors, gender-based violence services, cannabis social equity programs, a Universal Basic Income pilot program, business improvement “in flatland neighborhoods” – even a Public Bank.
There would be new, more progressive business taxes promoted by Bas. Also on the economic development agenda is Councilmember Taylor’s plan for beefed up worker protection laws, and a “workforce development program” aimed at helping “homeless entrepreneurs build their businesses.” A progressive vision, indeed.