Make Oakland Better Now! Looks at the Mayor’s Budget and Two Proposed Amendments – Part 3

Posted on June 12, 2013 by | 5 Comments

On June 13, Make Oakland Better Now! will be present at the Oakland City Council Meeting at 6:30pm to urge the City Council to adopt the Mayor’s proposed budget with Council President Kernighan’s proposed changes.  In recent posts, we’ve been looking at budget amendments proposed by Council President Kernighan and others proposed by Council Members Brooks, Reid, and Gallo.  We encourage all Oaklanders to join us at council in urging your representatives to adopt a budget reflecting the city’s need for public safety and fiscal responsibility.

A recent resolution enacted by council has significantly increased the involvement in the budget process of the Budget Advisory Committee.  That committee met last week, and has submitted its recommendations to council here.  The highlights:

  • Much of the budget debate over the past months has centered around the city’s public employees, and what they can expect in terms of raises.  BAC recommends that “the collective bargaining process and the budgeting process should take place at different times during the year. . .” and suggests that the city “engage in labor negotiations on a calendar year schedule, while keeping budget negotiations on a fiscal year schedule.”
  • BAC urges the city to adhere to its existing policy that one-time revenues be used for one-time expenditures such as capital improvements, negative fund pay down, debt retirement etc.
  • BAC generally supports the Mayor’s budget and Council President Kernighan’s proposed amendments.
  • BAC supports prioritization for improving public safety, while recognizing this includes services, blight abatement efforts, etc.  BAC also supports civilianization of public safety services “where it makes sense.”
  • Finally, BAC “agrees that the city must creatively, equitably and sustainably support a best-in-class workforce.”

Make Oakland Better Now! has also weighed in with its views on the budget.  Our letter to the Mayor and council follows:

Dear Mayor Quan, City Administrator Santana,
Council President Kernighan and Council Members:

Make Oakland Better Now! is a citizens group advocating for public safety, public works, transparency, accountability and budget reform in the City of Oakland.  As the City of Oakland approaches final decisions concerning its budget for 2013 to 2015, we wish to give you our views concerning these critical decisions that lie ahead.

Transparency in The Budget Process

This cycle’s budget process is, without question, the most transparent and open we have ever seen.  We applaud the mayor, the City Administrator and the Budget Director for an outstanding job in this regard.  We also congratulate the City Council for enacting the recent resolution supporting a more transparent process now and in the future, and give full credit to Council Member Schaaf, the city’s Budget Advisory Committee and Oakland Rising for their support of this important effort.

Police Services and Civilian Support

Almost everyone in Oakland city government agrees that public safety is our number one priority.  Unfortunately, neither the Mayor’s proposed budget nor the proposed alternatives reflect that “number one” status, nor do they adequately reflect the need to combat the public safety crisis in the streets that seriously threatens our most vulnerable populations:  the young, the old, and the economically disadvantaged.

Oakland has the highest per capita level of calls for police services of any major city in the United States.  It is the most violent city in the State of California, and has one of the highest violent crime rates in the country.  While we laud the Mayor for beginning to move the department in the right direction, 697 officers is not enough.  By any available metric, Oakland needs at least 900 officers.  This obviously will not happen overnight.  But it needs to be acknowledged for the city’s long-term planning.

We join with other community organizations that have called for increased use of civilians as part of our policing effort.  For this reason, we strongly urge the Council to adopt Council President Kernighan’s proposed addition of evidence, crime lab, fingerprint and DNA technicians.  We also urge the City to fully maintain funding for the California Highway Patrol contribution to the city’s patrol effort.

The citizens and taxpayers of Oakland are entitled to cost-effective policing, to new approaches to cost management, and creative approaches to revenue raising.  Two years ago, the Oakland Police Officers Association agreed to enter into ongoing negotiations for a reduced-priced, second tier compensation schedule for new officers.  As far as we can tell, the City of Oakland has never undertaken these negotiations.  And last fall, in its Five Year Projection, the administration provided thirty ideas for reducing costs or achieving government efficiencies.  We see no evidence that any of these have been seriously investigated.  Oakland must investigate these, and others.

Other Public Safety Efforts

Like many others who will communicate with you on budget matters, we realize that there are more elements to public safety than police.  For that reason, we are encouraged by the proposals of Council President Kernighan and Council Members Brooks, Reid and Gallo to increase resources to combat such aspects of blight as illegal dumping, graffiti and other manifestations of blight.  However, just as all other city services must be provided on a tight budget, resources for these must be dispensed with care and caution.  And the city should closely monitor the impacts of these and all efforts on public safety, reporting to Oakland’s residents as to the results of the efforts they pay for.

The Real Estate Transfer Tax

We note there has been recent debate concerning the city’s revenue from the Real Estate Transfer Tax.  We have several observations about this subject.  First, the best way to ensure an increase in the Real Estate Transfer Tax is to make the city safer.  While Oakland, along with the rest of the bay area, experiences a significant increase in real estate sales prices, nothing can help increase these prices, and support more RETT revenue, than significant reductions in crime and the perception of crime.  Second, never before has it been more important to protect excess RETT revenue as required by the current city ordinance.  With the police department under court supervision, and with no real information about what the Compliance Director will require, it would be a serious error in judgment not to maintain a significant reserve.  Furthermore, while the Mayor’s budget acknowledges the enormous structural deficit caused by unfunded liabilities for pensions, retiree medical expenses and inappropriate internal fund borrowing, it does little to correct these problems. Compliance with Ordinance No. 13134, however, can move Oakland at least somewhat in the right direction.

Public Ethics Staffing

We are glad to see the positive progress in funding for Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission.  After the current budget cycle is concluded, we encourage council to take a hard look at staffing for this important commission, which clearly is unable to accomplish its mandates with current resources.

Employee Compensation

Much of the budget debate over the past several months has centered on the extent, if any, to which Oakland can afford to increase the pay of its employees after ending the mandatory furloughs of recent years.

Make Oakland Better Now! strongly supports the collective bargaining process.  For that reason, we believe collective bargaining between the city and its unions should take place at the negotiating table, and not in budget deliberations.  And we join the city’s Budget Advisory Committee in urging the city to separate these processes and to enter only into contracts – with sworn and miscellaneous employees alike – that are sustainable and neither jeopardize city services nor create the risk of layoffs in future years.  In this regard, if the city believes further compensation to employees is a priority, we urge the city to look hard at (a) one-time means of increased compensation; and (b) prioritizing increased compensation for the lowest paid city employees.

Conclusion

We recognize the difficulty of the task before you.  While many of Oakland’s recent struggles have been caused by the recent great recession, still more are rooted in poor public safety and fiscal decisions going back fifty or more years.  It is time for Oakland to turn the tide.  The opportunity is yours, and it is now.

Sincerely,
Make Oakland Better Now!

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Posted in City Budget, Transparency / Accountability

Make Oakland Better Now! Looks At Two Proposed Amendments to the Mayor’s Budget – Part 2

Posted on June 10, 2013 by | 3 Comments

Make Oakland Better Now! will be present at the next Oakland City Council Meeting on June 13th at 6:30pm to urge the City Council to adopt the Mayor’s proposed budget with Council President Kernighan’s proposed changes.  This post is the second in a series to look at the budget amendments proposed by Council President Kernighan and those proposed by Council Members Brooks, Reid and Gallo.  More information can be found in the Oakland Tribune’s Coverage, here, and Chip Johnson’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle, here (paywall).  We encourage all Oaklanders to join us at council in urging your representatives to adopt a budget reflecting the city’s need for public safety and fiscal responsibility.

Make Oakland Better Now! was set to publish a post today that costed out the City Council President’s proposed budget amendments (we’ve been calling the proposal “APB1”) and the proposed amendments to the budget by Council Members Brooks, Reid and Gallo (“APB2”).  We had reached the conclusion that APB2 would result in a city budget out of balance by millions of dollars.

But the Budget Director and City Administrator issued a report that did the same analysis – and reached the same conclusion.  The short version:

  • 3% COLA’s don’t cost $3M per year–the cost is about $8M.
  • There is no “double counting” in the budget with respect to the Fire Department’s $7.8M grant or IT expense.
  • The City has received $9.5M in “boomerang funds” related to dissolution of the Redevelopment Agency, but this one-time revenue cannot be encumbered at this time.
  • There is no confirmation that the three city center buildings are going to be sold, so the City cannot count on the $2.7M in real estate transfer tax projected by APB2.
  • APB1 results in a two-year surplus of $280K.
  • APB2 results in a two-year shortfall of $8.7M.

The long version is here.

In our next budget post, we will be looking at a third approach, being offered by Oakland’s Budget Advisory Committee.

Reminder to Oaklanders:  Would you like to help us help our neighbors?

The West Oakland Green Initiative (WOGI) maintains many of the over 500 trees they have planted in the last year.  They need some help from volunteers in the community.  What would be better than Make Oakland Better Now! lending a hand in making a corner of our town a little more beautiful? Most of our board will be there Sunday afternoon, June 16, and we would LOVE to have you come and join us. 

What: West Oakland Community Clean up and Tree Maintenance

When: Sunday, 6/16, 1 – 4:30 p.m.

Where: Raimondi Park, 18th @ Campbell, Oakland 94607 

We will be involved in basic tree maintenance, placing some new soil around the base of the trees, and cleaning up litter around the park.  WOGI is donating all the material and tools needed to perform the work.  All we need is you and a handful of your friends eager to lend a hand.  

If you plan on attending, have any questions, or need help with a ride, please e-mail Oaklanders@makeoaklandbetternow.org.  We hope to see you there.

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Posted in City Administrator, City Budget, City Council, Mayor

Tagged , ,

Make Oakland Better Now! Looks At Two Proposed Amendments to the Mayor’s Budget – Part 1

Posted on June 7, 2013 by | 5 Comments

On June 13, Make Oakland Better Now! will be present at the Oakland City Council Meeting at 6:30 p.m., urging the City Council to adopt the Mayor’s proposed budget with Council President Kernighan’s proposed changes.  This post is the first in a series to look at the budget amendments proposed by Council President Kernighan and those proposed by Council Members Brooks, Reid, and Gallo.  More information can be found in the Oakland Tribune’s Coverage, here, and Chip Johnson’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle, here (paywall).  We encourage all Oaklanders to join us at council in urging your representatives to adopt a budget reflecting the city’s need for public safety and fiscal responsibility.

Oaklanders who follow these things know what’s happening with the city budget.  As our City Council gets ready to pass a new two-year budget between now and July 1, we have the following:

In this post, and the two that follow, we will show that the Mayor’s budget, with APB1, is an imperfect but reasonable approach.  But as we will also show, APB2 constitutes an assault on efforts to restore public safety to Oakland. It is a potential public policy disaster, and it is based on millions of dollars in errors and wrong assumptions.

The Mayor’s budget is not perfect.  Among other things, it seeks to raise the sworn staffing of the Oakland Police Department to about 700 officers, while implying that this number is the goal; Make Oakland Better Now! believes that public safety is a top priority for the city, and that our police department is drastically understaffed. We further believe that the minimum number of sworn officers serving should be 900.  We believe the Mayor’s projected police attrition rates are unrealistic, so that her plan and budget will not even get us to 700.  But this budget is, at least, a step in the right direction.  And the budget’s supporting documents make it clear the Mayor appreciates the seriousness of Oakland’s long-term fiscal problems.

Recently, Council and the administration have begun evaluating how to amend the proposed budget to address a slight increase in anticipated revenues ($3.02M in Year 1 and $2.46M in Year 2) and some one-time revenues. With APB1, Council President Kernighan has proposed restoring two code compliance inspectors to enforce graffiti, blight and unpermitted mobile vendors, an illegal dumping crew, litter mitigation crew and $500K to restore 34 seats in San Antonio Head Start.

Critically, and in line with either the letter or the spirit of the recent Wasserman / Bratton recommendations, APB1 proposes adding the following civilian police support:  4 police evidence technicians, 3 criminalists for the crime lab, 1 latent print examiner, 2 CODIS (DNA index) investigators and an additional Neighborhood Services Coordinator, so that there will be 2 coordinators in each of the five new police districts.

About 40% of APB1’s proposed additions are public-safety related, which seems reasonable for a city that says its first priority is public safety.  None of the additions are for sworn personnel. As a whole, APB1 makes sense to us.

But then there is the APB2 proposal.  The proponents of APB2 claim to have identified additional revenue of $9M in 13-14 and $8M in 14-15, and propose spending over $6M in the two years for 3% cost of living adjustments for all miscellaneous (i.e., non-sworn) employees.  As we will show, we believe these calculations and many of their cost and revenue assumptions are erroneous.

APB2 adds nothing for public safety other than what is required by the Compliance Director.  It inexplicably doubles the Compliance Director’s salary (giving him $540K per year instead of the $270K ordered by Judge Henderson).  Just as inexplicably, it includes a new $300K budget line to “Hire Consultant to Craft Comprehensive Community Safety & Services Plan” – something Oakland has already done (i.e., Wasserman’s consultancy).  Meanwhile, APB2 proposes to eliminate the City’s contract with the California Highway Patrol and the five new police dispatchers, who are critical to managing the City’s ability to take 911 calls.  It includes no funding related to the OPD’s civilian staffing needs or to the Wasserman / Bratton Recommendations.  This is not how we make our city safer.

In our next installment, we will show how APB1 follows city policy, while APB2 , if adopted, would violate city policy and widely-accepted principles of municipal budgeting.

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Posted in City Budget, City Council, Mayor, Public Safety

Here are the slides from Make Oakland Better Now!’s Public Safety Forum

Posted on May 17, 2013 by | 1 Comment

Close to 100 Oaklanders attended our forum on Sunday, April 28, and heard presentations on Oakland’s public safety budget challenges from City Administrator Deanna Santana, Assistant Andrew Murray, then (now retired) Police Chief Howard Jordan, then Captain, now Assistant Chief of Police Paul Figueroa, and Deputy Director, Bureau of Services Gil Garcia.  We are presently editing, and expect to post video clips from the presentations next week.  In the meantime, here are the city’s slides.  You can also download them here.

We will have much more to say about recent events and their impact on public safety very soon, so watch this space.

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Posted in City Budget, Public Safety

Justin McCrary: The Economic Argument for Policing

Posted on April 27, 2013 by | 8 Comments

On Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 1:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Church, 114 Montecito, Make Oakland Better Now! will sponsor a public forum, “Can Oakland Afford to Be Safe?,” featuring Chief of Police Howard Jordan, City Administrator Deanna Santana and key staff members to discuss the connection between Oakland’s budget challenges and the need to rebuild the Oakland Police Department. All concerned Oaklanders are urged to attend. Meanwhile, we are looking at issues related to the economics and financing of public safety.

On Thursday night, as part of Council Member Libby Schaaf’s Safe Oakland speaker series, economist and Berkeley Law Professor Justin McCrary spoke about his and Aaron Chelfin’s study, “The Effect of Police on Crime: New Evidence from U.S. Cities, 1960-2010.” Like many academic papers — particularly those in the field of economics — the study will seem fairly ponderous to lay persons. So it was helpful to have him give a relatively simple presentation of his findings, and field questions from Chief of Police Howard Jordan, Assemblyman Rob Bonta, Council Member Noel Gallo, and Council Member Schaaf. His presentation can be summarized in the following bullet points:

  • In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a prevailing “old view” among scholars that the level of police staffing did not affect the crime rate all that much. But in the 1990s and 2000s, there has been a growing body of evidence indicating substantial effects of police on crime.
  • In “The Effect of Police on Crime,” he and Gelfin reviewed changes in police staffing and crime in more than 200 cities over a 50 year period, and found the evidence clear: increased levels of police result in lower crime rates. The effects are larger in the recent era, as police departments have become more innovative.
  • Their study is in accord with the experience Professor Zimring chronicled in New York, where the number of police went up and the crime rates plummeted (murder at 17% of the 1990 level, robbery at 18%, and motor vehicle theft at 7%). Likewise, it is in accord with the Los Angeles experience, where murder, robbery, and motor vehicle theft are at 25% of the 1990 levels.
  • Cities with the biggest crime drops have done two primary things: invested in police staffing and in new strategies, primarily saturation policing and aggressively using information technology
  • There is a “police elasticity of crime” of minus 0.50 (minus one half). This means that a 10% increase in police results in a 5% reduction in crime, a 5% increase in police results in a 2.5% decrease in crime, and the converse is true as well: a 10% decrease in police will result in a 5% increase in crime.
  • This reduction in crime results is a reduction in incarcerations; thus, saving money that would otherwise be spent on prisons.
  • Transportation agencies (such as Caltrans) assign a dollar value to a human life to conduct transportation safety measures cost-benefit analyses. According to Professor McCrary, the Caltrans number for a human life is $7 million (although we have seen numbers ranging anywhere from $2.6 million to about $9 million). Using the $7 million, figure (and, presumably, the more calculable cost of property crime), McCrary calculates that every dollar spent in Oakland on policing will result in a $2.90 improvement in public safety, not including the amount that is saved by lowering the incarceration rate.

We have some doubts about the rather arbitrary assignment of dollar values to lives, happiness, etc. But Professor McCrary makes a good point: whether it’s transportation agencies or other state and federal agencies, they receive ever-increasing funds to save lives. Yet city governments, including Oakland, have been cutting the spending needed to save lives.  As McCrary puts it, why do we increase spending to save lives on the highways but not to save lives on the sidewalks?

Additionally, a serious policy point is this: the United States seems to be the only developed nation in the world that separately funds its policing (a local government expense) and its incarceration (a state expense). So instead of paying more for policing to prevent crime, we pay more to punish criminals once caught. If a city police force is expanded, with the resulting reduction in crime, the state’s expenses for incarceration go down, but the city gets no benefit from the reduction.

This disconnect suggests the need for some nationwide, or at least statewide, policy changes. According to Professor McCrary, no one who studies crime thinks the solution is more incarceration and fewer cops, and yet, that is the direction we are going. So while Oakland needs to find local solutions to its public safety budget dilemma, a big part of the long-term solution will ultimately have to occur at a higher level.

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Posted in Public Safety

Will the Mayor’s Proposed Budget Rebuild Oakland’s Police Department?

Posted on April 22, 2013 by | 12 Comments

On Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 1:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Church, 114 Montecito, Make Oakland Better Now! will sponsor a public forum, “Can Oakland Afford to Be Safe?,” featuring Chief of Police Howard Jordan, City Administrator Deanna Santana and key staff members to discuss the connection between Oakland’s budget challenges and the need to rebuild the Oakland Police Department. All concerned Oaklanders are urged to attend. Meanwhile, we are beginning our analysis of the mayor’s proposed policy budget and its impact on public safety.

Make Oakland Better Now! is in the process of analyzing the mayor’s proposed policy budget that was released on Wednesday. One element struck us immediately. While this is the first proposed budget to include police academies in years, we question whether those academies will result in the sworn officer increases the mayor has announced. We are concerned that because Oakland needs at least 900 officers, if not more, the goal she posted are being moved and not in the right direction.

The proposed budget assumes that the four academies budgeted for the current and next fiscal years will produce a total of 160 officers. It also assumes that the attrition rate from now until the end of fiscal year 2014-15 will be four officers per month. If these assumptions prove correct, but by our calculation Oakland will actually reach 725 officers in December 2014, dropping down to 701 at the end of this budget period in June 2015:

Academy Yield

This number is nowhere near where we need to be in terms of police staffing.The Alameda County Grand Jury recommended that the City of Oakland increase its sworn officers to a minimum of 1,200. The 2010 Police Resource Optimization System analysis called for a minimum of 86 more patrol officers than we had in 2009 (which would have taken us to 926) and optimally 183 more patrol officers (for a total of 1,013). While the city’s Public Safety Consultant Robert Wasserman has not yet made a staffing recommendation, we suspect that he will also recommend a number of sworn officers much higher than 701. And we would not be surprised if the compliance director does the same thing.

Our first concern is that the goal should not be 697 or 701 or anything close to those numbers. The goal should be, at a minimum, 900 total sworn police officers. No one thinks this is going to be easy, but when the city talks about hard decisions, it should be talking about the decisions necessary to get us to a fully staffed police department, not just adding another 50 or so officers. There should be a great deal of focus on creative solutions to this problem.

Our second concern is the issue of officer attrition. Last fall Chief Jordan projected losing five officers to attrition per month. More recently, the administration has been assuming that a recent downward trend in attrition would continue and projected a rate of losing four officers per month.

If Chief Jordan’s projection is correct, then as of June, 2015 we will be at 674 officers, not 701. And if the yield per academy is 37 (the number from the most recent police academy) or fewer, the number of sworn officers would be even lower.

Our third concern is ensuring that once the officers are hired, the city can afford to retain them over the long-term. After Measure Y passed, some litigation and an immense amount of community pressure, the Dellums administration increased the size of the police force to 837 officers in 2008 – the most in the departments’s history.  That number, a few more than Measure Y required, didn’t last long, tumbling down to fewer than 650 by the end of Dellums’ tenure.

Police staffing and budget graph

A March 22 administration report tells us that the five-year cost of getting to 833 officers will be  $178 million, or an average of more than $35 million per year:

Police sworn staff increase to 833

On top of that, the city projects a total of about $50 million over the same period (or another $10 million per year) for civilian support and supervisory control.

To get to 923 sworn officers,  the projected cost over five years is $225 million, or $45 million per year:

Police sworn staff increase to 933

And the additional cost for support and supervisors is projected to be another $58 million, or an average of about $11.5 million per year.

Clearly Oakland can’t take these numbers at face value. A big part of the discussion needs to be about the cost of policing and what can be done to reduce expenses.  Moreover, in the five year forecast, the administration has listed some 35 examples of possible budget balancing strategies. City government has to look hard at these and many others.

And there are questions that in some ways are bigger than the dollars and cents. Why are these costs so high? Why does Oakland spend so much digging itself out of a hole? Why has the police department attrition rate been so high and what can be done to reduce it? How does the department attrition rate differ from that in other departments and why?  We repeatedly hear that after decades of poor police/ community relations, a decade of the NSA, and years of department shrinkage, morale in the department is terrible. What is the fix? Can it be accomplished?  We look forward to hearing Chief Jordan and our other speakers address this and related questions at the MOBN! forum on April 28.

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Posted in City Administrator, City Budget, City Council, Mayor, Public Safety, Uncategorized

Can Oakland Afford To Be Safe?

Posted on April 16, 2013 by | 2 Comments

With the pending release of the new Oakland city budget this week, we are about to see how the Mayor and the City Council set their priorities.  Make Oakland Better Now! believes that the top priority should be restoring, and growing, the Oakland Police Department in order to make Oaklanders safe.   In this light, we are proud to present this panel on Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 1:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, featuring City Administrator Deanna Santana, Oakland Chief of Police Howard Jordan and key budget and police staff.  Please plan to join us.

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Posted in City Budget, Public Safety