Part 1
I’ve never met Rebecca Kaplan, the Councilmember At-Large on Oakland’s City Council and the city’s Vice Mayor. But a few days ago she started following me on Twitter, and I thought, How nice. So I asked if she’d like to meet for coffee or something. I figured, since the Coalition for a Better Oakland is going to be around for a while, its President (me) and such an important figure in Oakland politics (her) ought to get to know each other.
I still very much hope for such a meeting. After I said my piece at yesterday’s Oakland City Council Retreat asking for full funding for the Oakland Police Department, I got an email from Kaplan’s Chief of Staff, Kimberly S. Jones. It stated that Kaplan “wants me [Jones] to share the City Administrator's memo, dated December 20, 2020, which discusses the administrative budget cuts undertaken by the City Administrator at that time without City Council input.” My presumption, on reading this, was that City Administrator Ed Reiskin’s memo from six months ago constitutes Kaplan’s answer to the question of why she would want to cut OPD’s budget during a crime wave.
I read carefully Reiskin’s 13-page memo and in all honesty I have to say that, as far as I—a reasonably intelligent person—can tell, its facts and presumptions have been completely outdated by developments over the last six months.
Reiskin wrote that Oakland’s 2019-2021 budget (about to be overtaken by the 2021-2023 budget, which the City Council is now deliberating) has “a $62 million…deficit,” and that this is the reason why the city must implement “cost-cutting measures…immediately,” including for the Police and Fire Departments, which “must bear the largest cuts and service impacts in order to address the GPF [General Purpose Fund] deficit.” He proposed cutting OPD’s budget by nearly $15 million.
That was on Dec. 20, 2020. What has happened since then?
1. Oakland got $36.9 million for CARES Act funding from the State of California.
2. In addition, the S.F. Chronicle reported on March 10, “Oakland is poised to get up to $192 million from the federal stimulus bill [the American Rescue Plan], which passed the House Wednesday, sweeping away most of the city’s anticipated $218 million budget deficit over the next two years.”
Did Oakland ever get that money? KPIX-TV reported (5/7/21) that Oakland “received” [past tense] the $192 million. The Oakland Police Officers’ Association “urged” Oakland “to invest Oakland’s $192 million…in protecting our communities and reducing violent crime.”
It looks to me like an infusion of $229 million into Oakland’s coffers should easily take care of Reiskin’s and Kaplan’s budgetary concerns, meaning that there’s absolutely no reason to cut OPD’s budget—unless it’s from sheer vengeance. Madame Vice Mayor, am I seeing things wrong?
Steve Heimoff
Part 2 will be published tomorrow morning