Tonight, at a special meeting of the City Council, the Council will receive the recommended amendments to the Mayor's proposed budget from City Council President Rebecca Kaplan.
(This is a post in our Budget Bits series, following Oakland's mid-cycle budget policy and process. Read our previous updates here and here.) The Oakland City Budget is now in…
Mayor Libby Schaaf announced that Anne Kirkpatrick will be the new Oakland Police Department and Venus D. Johnson as Director of Public Safety.
In our last post we analyzed Mayor Libby Schaaf’s strategy for “holistic community safety” outlined in her State of the City address. Today, we’ll continue our discussion, looking at her other three stated top priorities: responsive, trustworthy government, sustainable infrastructure, and equitable jobs and housing.
Responsive, trustworthy government
The Mayor’s total policy discussion on accountability was as follows:
“I could tell you about our transparency and ‘gov 2.0’ projects—like our Digital Front Door website redesign, our employee civic lab or plans for a 3-1-1 call center, but it really starts with the people.”
She then praised top staff members, the City Administrator, and other recent additions to her team.
Our take:
We don’t criticize the Mayor for publicly and openly supporting her people—that’s an important part of leadership. But we call for more emphasis on policy. A starting point might be these initiatives from her campaign white paper on how to “bring Oakland government into the 21st Century”:
What I Will Do
Implement 311 System for better service delivery:
Do you know what number to call to report illegal dumping or a pothole? Most big cities use a 3-1-1 system to make it easy for residents to request help from their government. As Mayor I will implement a world-class 311 customer service center that transitions the City to a new generation of technology that centralizes citizen requests and makes the process and resolution of each request accessible to the public 24/7 on our website.CityStat and the Office of Strategic Performance:
I will link the 311 service request system with a CityStat performance accountability system led by a newly established Office of Strategic Performance (see Louisville, Kentucky for a good model). I will work with department heads to establish clear performance measures and nurture a culture of continuous improvement within City Hall. In pursuit of this goal, OSP will help City departments and agencies deliver high quality services to citizens in a cost-efficient and transparent manner. Three core efforts include strategic planning, performance management, continuous improvement consulting and training. We can save on technology procurement dollars by conducting internal and external user research to scope projects more efficiently, determine what the needs are and design a scope of work to fulfill those needs. Too often contracts are signed without a clear understanding of the pain points, and key opportunities to solve actual problems are missed.
Sometime soon, Oaklanders should hear about where we stand on these efforts.
More after the break. (more…)
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf gave her first State of the City address and outlined her plan for "holistic community safety." Make Oakland Better Now! weighs in on strengthening OPD, the city's Comprehensive Public Safety Plan, and more.
This is the sixth installment in our series on the 2015-17 budget process. Council will be considering the Mayor's budget, the Council President's proposed changes, and other changes offered by…
We strongly support the efforts by Mayor Schaaf to accommodate and facilitate the exercise of free speech while at the same time protecting persons and property from attack by vandals…
Mayor Libby Schaaf says she supports freedom of expression and the right of Oaklanders and Oakland businesses to be free of violence caused by individuals who embed themselves in otherwise peaceful demonstrations. While we support her efforts to change strategies to eliminate violence at demonstrations, Make Oakland Better Now! encourages her to approach this somewhat differently.
Both #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName are important local and national movements. Our communitymleaders play a critical role in affirming to the nation that we will not tolerate the injustices we have seen in Ferguson, in Cleveland, in New York and throughout the country, including, much too recently, in Oakland.
Having said that, we are proud of what OPD has done in the past two years to improve its relationship with the community, and most especially with people of color. Far too little of this change has been acknowledged in our public dialogue. It is no accident that OPD has experienced only one officer-involved shooting (resulting in no injury) in the past two years, and that no OPD gunfire has resulted in death for more than three years. Indeed, OPD, working with the faith-based community and outside consultants, leads the country in police legitimacy and procedural justice training. While there is much more to do, no fair-minded person can ignore these recent improvements.
It is now time for Oakland to lead the country in developing a model that balances protection of First Amendment rights for demonstrators with protecting the rights of adjacent business owners. (more…)
Yesterday, Mayor Schaaf released her proposed budget with a televised press conference and a “Budget Beer Bash” at Oakland’s Linden Street Brewery. The budget will be presented to City Council on Tuesday, May 5 at 5:00 p.m. It must ultimately be passed by Council, and will be the subject of much debate, and almost certainly significant amendment over the next two months. Make Oakland Better Now! will be diving deeply into its almost 400 pages and publishing a good deal of analysis in the coming weeks. But here are some of our first impressions: (more…)
This is the fifth installment in our series on the 2015-17 budget process, and the last one before the mayor’s budget is released today. Once the proposed budget is released, we will start discussing that document, first with a general summary, then a deeper look. For now, we take a brief look at the oft-discussed subject of pensions.
In any budget process there are many competing interests. Resolving these conflicts and arriving at a balanced budget is more art than science, involves trade-offs, and in the end, always involves prioritization. So what are some of the biggest priorities, aside from police, fire and other core city functions? Pension and retiree health care shortfalls have been the subject of much public attention. They were the subject of a City Auditor’s report about a year ago, a detailed report by the administration to Council in January of last year, and State legislation (the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act of 2013, or “PEPRA”, more discussion here) in 2012.
The general sense of the discussion in Oakland has been that
