They’re at it again, the police defunders. This time, they want to slash OPD’s budget by $20 million. And what would they do with the money? Give it to Oakland’s Department of Transportation (OAKdot), to “spend on upgrades to road safety.”
I suspect most Oaklanders know almost nothing about the Oakland Department of Transportation, beyond that they’re supposed to make sure traffic lights work, parking laws are enforced and potholes fixed. But actually, OAKdot, like most city agencies, has become a lot more than just a transportation expediter. It’s been transformed into a social justice bureaucracy, with more and more of its money going to combating what they view as “racism.”
Just why a transportation department should involve itself in racial issues is a good question. Affirmative action? Not quite. The answer lies in OAKdot’s 2017 launch, when the department said that “managing streets is about more than maintenance.” What “more” is “managing streets” about?
“Equity,” of course, is that plastic concept that values racial goals as the highest responsibility of every city department. And in order to achieve “equity,” OAKdot has been growing at a furious pace, so they can provide jobs to more people. By July of last year, the department’s staff had mushroomed to 411. In fact, the department boasts, in bold type, that “Five years after its initial launch, OakDOT will be 50% larger in budgeted headcount as of July 2022,” as if metastatic bloat alone is the criterion of success. Most of the growth has been in the addition of new divisions and units. Let’s take a look at some of them.
The Abandoned Auto Unit. This was started in July, 2022, within OAKdot’s Parking & Mobility Management division. You might think that the Abandoned Auto Unit would be responsible for clearing Oakland streets of the hundreds, maybe thousands of illegally-parked cars, trucks and campers, but you’d be wrong. Although OAKdot claims its parking division “is dedicated to the issuance of citations through the consistent enforcement of parking laws to incentivize drivers to comply with regulations,” there appears to have been almost no consistent issuance of such citations; these idled vehicles remain choking our streets, taking up valuable parking spots, often right next to parking meters. There they remain, month after month, year after year, unticketed and unperturbed and, in fact, protected by OAKdot. Illegally parked vehicles have become de facto homeless shelters through OAKdot’s benign neglect. One wonders what the Abandoned Auto Unit’s employees actually do, except to collect their paychecks and allow our streets to turn into homeless camps on wheels. (I emailed the division’s manager, Michael Ford, but he never replied.)
Then there’s the OAKdot Racial Equity Team. “The overall mission of the RET,” says OAKdot, “is to end systemic causes of racial disparity through improving and developing policies, programs, and practices at OakDOT.”
Again, you might wonder why “systemic racial disparity” is a concern of a city department ostensibly tasked with transportation issues. The reason is because, for progressives, “racial” matters are their only concern: above public safety, above keeping our parks and streets clean, above attracting new businesses to Oakland and retaining businesses already here, above building affordable housing, above supporting the police, above everything. Race is the lodestar, the touchstone of all Oakland government says and does. The OAKdot racial equity team’s mission is “to end systemic causes of racial disparity.” Not, as you might think, to make traveling in Oakland easier, and certainly not to make traveling in Oakland safer (if anything, it’s more dangerous), but to achieve nebulous race-based outcomes. Apparently, this can only be achieved by expanding the size of the DOT, hence, the profligate growth of all these synthetic agencies.
Finally, there’s the Great Streets Maintenance department, responsible for asphalt maintenance/pothole filling as well as concrete sidewalks. Back in 2016, under Libby Schaaf, Oakland voters approved Measure KK, which devoted $600 million to, among other items, repaving streets, fixing sidewalks, and filling in potholes. Now, here we are, seven years later. Are the potholes gone? Are the uneven sidewalks better? Of course not. That’s because DOT didn’t spend all the money on “streets maintenance.” According to a 2022 Report to the Mayor and City Council from Oakland’s Director of Finance, “A total of $100 million of Measure KK funds was allocated to affordable housing projects,” 99% of which was for “homeless housing.” Just how building homeless housing is connected to “great streets maintenance” can only be a matter of conjecture. But what we know is that the homeless situation in Oakland has grown infinitely worse in the last 1-1/2 years. Where did that $100 million go? Ask the bureaucrats who spent it.
To be clear: More and more Oakland government bureaucracies are nothing more than Potemkin villages—false fronts for spending on “social justice” bunkum. If you look at any Oakland department, you’ll find it stuffed, like a Christmas goose, with fancy-sounding “equity” departments that do nothing but waste our money.
Who came up with the idea of taking $20 million from OPD and giving it to OAKdot? A little-known, rather secretive private organization, the Traffic Violence Rapid Response Team. A non-profit not formally affiliated with the City of Oakland but might as well be, with its tentacles sunk deep into the City Council and Cat Brooks’ Anti Police-Terror Project, the TVRRT supposedly lobbies for safe streets. But “doing this work in Oakland, where most collision victims are Black and brown [sic] residents,” reports Oaklandside, “has meant building solidarity across lines of racial and socioeconomic difference.” Building solidarity! We’ve heard that before—from Black Panthers, communists and other wannabe revolutionaries bent on overthrowing the government and replacing it with their own totalitarianism. Even traffic safety has become just another pawn in their social-justice game. In fact, the TVRRT is a central pillar in the woke effort to defund the Oakland Police Department. They just retweeted the Anti Police-Terror Project’s tweet, presumably written by Cat Brooks, supporting stripping the $20 million and giving it to OAKdot.
Of course Brooks is in favor of defunding OPD. It’s her obsession. Oakland citizens should make no mistake what’s going on. The wokes are determined to cripple OPD and will stop at nothing to achieve their goal (even as yesterday’s S.F. Chronicle headlined about “Oakland’s worsening violence”). So far, we’ve been pretty successful at stopping them. But these secretive, leftwing radicals burrow silently through city government, like termites chewing their way in a woodpile, and the City Council—in active cahoots with them—does everything they can to help. Tell your City Council person NO when it comes to defunding the police! Not now, not ever!
Steve Heimoff