Fife has never given up on her dream to abolish the Oakland Police Department. She’s tried her best for the last 3-1/2 years, ever since she’s been on the City Council, but she couldn’t quite pull it off, because the idea is really unpopular among the citizens of Oakland, and even Fife occasionally must defer to public opinion.
This has frustrated Fife to no end. And, of course, she has her BFF, Cat Brooks, continuing to demand OPD be abolished. But now, with the city’s deficit, which is variously estimated at $150 million, or $200 million, or $1 billion, depending whom you ask, Fife has an excuse for cutting OPD’s budget. And in fact the city has already told OPD to reduce its current expenditures by $82 million, which is about 20% of their budget.
This is in line with projections that city revenues will be about 22% of what was expected. Why? For all the reasons we’ve told you about: businesses fleeing town, taking their tax dollars with them. Lower transfer taxes (down 52% in the current budget cycle), lower business taxes (down 7.6%), lower sales taxes (down 7.3%), lower hotel taxes (down 12.8%), and lower “miscellaneous income” (which can mean anything, down 72.7%)—it’s a huge amount of money that the City Council, in their infinite wisdom, assumed would be coming in, but didn’t.
But the main reason why Oakland is broke is because of years of giving unionized city employees and contractors massive raises. This is at the behest—no, the demand of the various unions, who fund candidates like Fife, Bas, Thao and Kaplan, and who demand their pound of flesh in return. The unions don’t care if Oakland spends money it doesn’t have; all they care about is extorting those big raises for their members. If it bankrupts Oakland, hey, it’s not their fault or their problem. The City Council will have to pay the higher wages anyway, because it’s in the ironclad labor contracts.
The City Council has a rather unrealistic view of money, to put it mildly. Like most progressives, they think that money comes from an inexhaustible spigot that will never stop flowing. Someone—the Federal government, the State government, philanthropists, a generous unicorn—will always bail out Oakland, so why should the wokes worry about over-spending? And, of course, during the pandemic, the Federal government did step up to the plate and send Oakland hundreds of millions of dollars, which helped us avoid a massive deficit in 2020-2021.
But that Federal aid has now stopped. The progressives knew it would, but reality has never been their strong point. They figured that somehow, they could continue to give city employees massive raises, year after year, and it would all work out. They could always raise taxes, especially business taxes, and they could always put new parcel taxes on the ballot, which always pass in Oakland because most residents are renters. And I guarantee you this: there are already discussions happening, probably in Carroll Fife’s office, on new parcel taxes.
It’s just about impossible to get real-time information on just which union members are getting big raises, but suffice it to say it’s the usual suspects: SEIU, nurses, and technical and professional engineers. See which unions are listed as contributors to various progressive electeds in Oakland, and you can be confident their employees are making out like bandits. Yes, it’s nice when clerical workers get raises, but just for once I’d like to see, say, Sheng Thao stand up to her union paymasters and say, “Look, guys, I know I promised you I’d get your members big raises, but Oakland’s in a fiscal crisis, and I have to reneg.” SEIU, IFPTE, United Food and Commercial Workers and other unions all contributed the maximum amount allowable to her mayoral run, and no doubt they expected a maximum return on their investment, since the game has always been played that way in Oakland. But we’ll never really know what’s going on behind the scenes with Thao and her unions, because they’ll never tell us the truth.
Which brings us back to Carroll Fife and her joy over Oakland’s financial troubles. Finally, she can gut OPD, and if people slam her for it, she can say, “I hate to do it, honest, but Oakland really needs to cut back on spending.” For OPD, yes. For the Department of Violence Prevention, for the Department of Race & Equity, no. These phony departments can expect to get raises, even when OPD is being cut 20%. Do you feel safer now?
Steve Heimoff