You may have heard that the Oakland City Council’s Finance and Management Committee, responsible for the city’s budget, canceled its most recent scheduled meeting, for Oct. 15, and rescheduled it for Oct. 22. This has many people wondering what’s going on with the people who are tasked with managing Oakland’s money, in such a fiscally precarious time as this. The city’s budget, obviously, is headed toward a fiscal cliff. The sale of the Coliseum to AASEG, on which Thao was depending on, appears increasingly shaky, as AASEG has already missed one scheduled payment. There are conflicting reports on whether a so-called contingency budget is already in effect. The primary victim of all this uncertainty is the Oakland Police Department, which is facing the historic elimination of scores of officers—at a time when the #1 issue among voters is public safety.
So you’d think the Finance and Management Committee would have kept their Oct. 15 meeting. Why didn’t they? Because not enough of its members showed up. That resulted in lack of a quorum, meaning that the meeting could not be held.
Who didn’t show up? Kaplan and Bas. As far as is known, neither offered a reason for absence. This was to be no ordinary meeting of the committee; it was a Special meeting, to discuss the horrible deficit that threatens the normal functioning of the city. For Kaplan and Bas to have boycotted it is extraordinary, to say the least. We have to thank committee members Ramachandran, Reid and Gallo for sounding the alarm. “I was deeply disturbed this meeting was canceled," Reid said. "This is the third time we've called a meeting to hear about a budget that's supposedly on track."
We have also to ask why Kaplan and Bas boycotted. Let me offer my explanation.
Kaplan and Bas are, let’s remember, two of the most virulently anti-police members of the City Council, along with Fife. They have not been shy about their desire to transfer a large percentage of OPD’s budget to social services and so-called violence prevention programs. However, October, 2024, just weeks before the November elections (including the Recalls), is not a good time for a politician to be labeled as a police defunder, particularly if that politician is running for office. Kaplan isn’t running for anything, but Bas is (for Board of Supervisors). According to my sources—and they’re pretty high up—no politician with any ambition wants to be associated with Thao or her budget. Coming right after her loss of the Oakland A’s, the FBI raid, and her regime’s inability to deal with crime and homelessness, Thao is toxic—and so, despite the urgency of transparently passing a budget, politicians want to avoid headlines about the deficit until after the Nov. 5 elections.
This is an obvious ploy. Delay the bad news until you’re safely ensconced in office for another 4 years, then let voters find out what you’ve done when it’s too late for them to react. As for Kaplan, she’s not running for anything yet—but she’s been continually running for something for years, and even though she’s been on the losing end, politics is in her blood. It’s the only job she’s ever had. We can expect her back on some campaign trail or other before long—and she thus doesn’t want to burn her bridges to the unions and her progressive backers. She may even be angling for a cushy job with AASEG.
Do I smell Carroll Fife in all this? You bet I do. She’s not on the Finance and Management Committee, but she’s tight with both Bas and Kaplan, and has worked alongside them for years to defund the police. Fife has always resorted to trickery to camouflage her hatred of the police. She often lets others do her dirty work for her. I’ve suggested for a long time that Fife, Bas and Kaplan welcome budget crises because it gives them the opportunity to defund OPD. They can then argue that, Hey, circumstances—not ideology—forced us to take these steps. This is hogwash, of course, but it’s how these people work, by hook or by crook.
At any rate, we’ll be watching the rescheduled Finance and Management Committee meeting on Oct. 22. Since that’s still prior to the election, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bas and Kaplan, with the collaboration of the wishy-washy chairman, Kevin Jenkins, manage to sabotage that meeting, as well. The overly-ambitious Jenkins voted in July to approve Thao’s OPD-slashing budget, along with Bas, Fife, Kaplan and Kalb, showing that he, Jenkins, is a card-carrying member of the defund-the-police crowd, or at least that he’s mindful of the donations he gets from powerful woke forces who want to bring OPD to its knees.
Steve Heimoff