By Shomik Mukherjee
Bay Area News Group
OAKLAND, Calif. — A group of city councilmembers said Tuesday they have found room in Oakland’s two-year budget to prevent worker layoffs, temporary fire station closures or other deep service cuts that had been on the City Council’s table.
Their new plan for balancing the city’s $245 million deficit involves lowering the salary scale for unfilled positions, reducing the number of police-training academies and drawing more money out of a fund that insures the city against legal claims, among other measures.
The money saved would total $8 million in the next fiscal year, which begins in July, and $15 million in the following fiscal year that runs through June 2027. The savings would help avoid — for now — the worst possible budget outcomes of the city’s financial woes. But the City Hall financial struggles remain, per a new report that projects further shortfalls in the coming years.
City Council members Rowena Brown, Janani Ramachandran, Zac Unger and Charlene Wang formally announced their suggested budget tweaks a day ahead of when deliberations were set to begin over a $4.36 billion spending plan for the coming two years.
As is customary in Oakland’s budget processes, the new numbers would amend a spending proposal authored by fellow Councilmember Kevin Jenkins, who served as interim mayor before Barbara Lee was elected in April and sworn in last month to fill Oakland’s top political office.
The council, which Jenkins has since rejoined, is expected to finalize a balanced budget before the end of this month, though doing so has proven to be a steep challenge in Oakland amid declining tax revenues and bloated overtime costs for police officers and firefighters.
Jenkins’ pitch for fixing the ongoing financial crisis, at least for the next two years, called for up to 80 city worker layoffs. It also planned to “brown out” two fire stations on a temporary basis, closures that would rotate across Oakland’s 28 firehouses depending on the calendar.
But the four councilmembers, who serve on the council’s finance and management committee, said they dug through the budget and found extra cash that could hold off those dramatic reductions.
If approved by the eight-member City Council, the amendments would mark yet another departure by the council from repeated warnings by city budget officials — including Finance Director Erin Roseman, who is set to leave her position this week — that every available lever to prevent more painful cuts had already been pulled.
“The moment we’re in right now demands core, essential services to make Oakland a thriving, livable space,” Unger said Tuesday at a City Hall news conference announcing the proposed amendments.
The single largest spending cut proposed by the committee is $3.9 million saved from reducing one of the six police academies budgeted for this year and next. For context, all of the Oakland Police Department’s academies were canceled in January through the end of the fiscal year in June.
New recruits to the OPD attend these training centers, but in recent years they have struggled with enrollment, graduating just 12 cadets in the most recent class and 21 on average, officials said. Typically, the department budgets three academies each year, though it often cannot fill all of them. OPD hasn’t had success in luring officers from other departments — known as “laterals” — so increasingly the force has relied heavily on academies.
A tax measure approved by voters last year requires the city to staff a minimum of 700 police officers, which OPD has struggled to do. The department currently has around 675 sworn officers on the force but 140 of them are out on either medical or administrative leave.
Ramachandran, however, said $200,000 saved in the committee’s amendments could speed up a notoriously slow appeals process for at least some of those officers who are on leave while awaiting decisions on misconduct claims.
The committee also wants to draw an additional $7.1 million from the self-insurance liability fund, a tranche of money intended to pay out legal claims. City officials already drew money from the fund in December, staving off fears at the time that the city could become fiscally insolvent.
Their amendments also propose lowering the starting salary for unfilled city positions that weren’t already frozen by city leaders in cost-saving moves earlier this year. And the proposal looks to a smidgen of new revenue, namely a contract for new advertising money in public spaces.
In addition to the avoided layoffs, the city would be able to keep all of its fire stations opened, a reality that Oaklanders have enjoyed in recent days after earlier budgetary brownouts.
But the city is likely to once again face deeper budget cuts down the road, according to its five-year financial forecast, which projects shortfalls through the end of the decade due to the rising costs of paying worker pensions.
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