Make Oakland Better Now! Begins Its 2013 Guide to the Oakland City Budget Process
Tuesday, April 2 at 5:45 p.m., Oakland City Council begins its budget process for fiscal years 2013-15 with a budget workshop. Today, Make Oakland Better Now! begins a series of posts to help Oaklanders understand the budget and the budget process.
Earlier this year, the Make Oakland Better Now! board agreed our primary focus for now will be public safety. One thing we learned long ago is that budget facts drive just about everything. If you don’t understand the city budget, you can’t understand public safety policy. And if don’t fix what’s wrong with the city’s budget, you can’t fix what’s wrong with public safety, either. Put simply: this budget process is going to be a critical element in determining if, how and when Oakland can restore it police department.
With that in mind, we are publishing a series of blog posts on the upcoming Oakland budget process. We will start with some simple introductory facts about the process. Some readers will already know these, but we want everybody to have the same baseline knowledge.
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