Video compilation. Council member Janani Ramachandran, concert promoter Irving Azoff, and council member Kevin Jenkins hold a press conference after the council vote on the Coliseum deal; Ramachandran promotes her music career on the social media account she uses for council business; Ramachandran explains some of the basic terms of the Coliseum deal. (Video sources: Instagram / @janani4oakland)

Editors’ note: This open letter was posted by Oakland resident and retired Caltrans manager Chris Urkofsky on Nextdoor, objecting to the terms of the city’s sale of the Oakland Coliseum Complex to a group led by first-time developer Ray Bobbitt.1 We are republishing it here with Urkofsky’s permission, with citations added, for our readers to consider.

BY CHRIS URKOFSKY

Can’t support the process that produced the Coliseum deal

I voted for council member Janani Ramachandran because she promised a new standard of transparency, accountability and fiscal discipline.

This letter explains why I believe the revised Coliseum transaction falls short of those principles.

Council member Ramachandran, I am writing as one of your constituents—not as someone opposed to redevelopment of the Coliseum, but as someone who believes Oakland deserves transparent government and prudent stewardship of its public assets.

I support redeveloping the Coliseum. I support affordable housing. I support community benefits. I support transforming this long-neglected property into something that benefits East Oakland.

What I cannot support is the process that produced this deal.

The revised agreement asks Oakland taxpayers to accept seller financing, deferred payments extending years into the future, and substantial financial risk.23

Those terms may ultimately prove justified—but only if the city can demonstrate that they represent the best reasonably available outcome for Oakland.

To date, I have not seen that demonstrated.

Instead, I have watched the city repeatedly restructure this transaction to preserve the participation of the same purchaser after the original purchase and sale agreement failed to close under its negotiated terms.4

That agreement established payment deadlines, default provisions, and expressly stated that “time is of the essence.”5

When those obligations were not met, the City did not enforce the agreement or return the property to the marketplace.67

Instead, it renegotiated the transaction, granted additional opportunities to perform, and ultimately approved a substantially revised agreement.8

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That raises obvious questions:

• Why was preserving this particular purchaser considered preferable to reopening the process and inviting competitive bids?

• What financial analysis demonstrated that continued negotiations with Oakland Acquisition Company represented a better outcome than testing the market?

Those questions have never been adequately answered.

Councilmember Noel Gallo raised additional concerns during the Council’s deliberations regarding the City’s limited visibility into negotiations involving Alameda County’s interest and questioned whether Oakland negotiated an adequate share of future ticket revenues.9

Those concerns deserve substantive answers—not assurances.

Troubled by “handshake deal”

Equally troubling has been the lack of transparency.

Major revisions to the agreement appeared only after negotiations had concluded. Public explanations followed rather than preceded significant changes.

Taxpayers should not have to reconstruct the economics of a nine-figure public transaction by comparing multiple versions of contracts and staff reports.

Good government requires more than eventual disclosure. It requires transparency while decisions are still being made.

I was also troubled by Councilmember Ken Houston’s description of aspects of this transaction as a “handshake deal,” followed by Mr. Irving Azoff’s assurance that “my word is my bond.”

While personal trust has its place, public transactions involving more than $100 million in taxpayer-owned assets must rest on enforceable agreements, documented financial analysis, rigorous due diligence and transparent public oversight—not personal assurances or informal understandings.

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Standards should not change depending on who is sitting across the negotiating table

Perhaps most disappointing is how difficult I find it to reconcile your vote with the principles you have publicly championed.1011

You have written about fiscal responsibility, transparency, accountability and the need for Oakland to develop “a culture of enforcement.”12

You have criticized fiscal recklessness and argued that government must consistently enforce the standards it establishes.13

Those are principles with which I wholeheartedly agree. That is why I find your support for this transaction so difficult to understand.

If Oakland truly needs a culture of enforcement, shouldn’t that principle apply when the City is disposing of one of its largest public assets?

Oakland residents are expected to comply with deadlines. Contractors doing business with the City are expected to comply with deadlines. Developers seeking permits are expected to comply with deadlines.

It is reasonable to ask why those same expectations did not apply when the purchaser of one of Oakland’s largest public assets failed to close under the negotiated terms of the agreement. The standards should not change depending on who is sitting across the negotiating table.

Constituents deserve acknowledgment and engagement

I am equally disappointed by your office’s lack of responsiveness. Over the past several weeks I have contacted your constituent representative multiple times regarding this transaction and left several messages requesting a return call. None has been returned.

Whether you ultimately agree with my concerns or not, constituents deserve acknowledgment and engagement—particularly on one of the largest public real estate transactions in Oakland’s history.

Reasonable people can disagree about the future of the Coliseum. They should not disagree about the standards that govern the disposition of public property.

The burden is not on critics to propose an alternative redevelopment plan.

The burden is on the City to demonstrate that this transaction represents the best risk-adjusted outcome reasonably available to Oakland after a transparent process supported by sound financial analysis and full public accountability.

I do not believe that burden has been met.

If I have misunderstood the facts or overlooked analyses supporting this transaction, I invite you to respond publicly.

Oakland residents deserve to hear directly why you believe this was the best available deal for the City. I intend this letter to begin, not end, that discussion.

Respectfully,
Chris Urkofsky
Oakland resident
District 4

Editors’ note

Oakland Report is an experiment in a new form of media. Our nonprofit mission is to provide reasoned, fact-based, well-sourced reporting and analysis on local government issues, focused on observable and verifiable evidence free from implicit bias.

Our guiding principles are to present the facts and evidence and let the reader decide for themselves what to think. We achieve this by focusing on what people and organizations do, not what they say.

Another of our guiding principles is to always remain open to examining and questioning our own biases, and to keep an open forum for new information that may advance our understanding — and help Oaklanders better grasp the decision-making that affects our lives.

In that spirit, we invite Ramachandran to present her perspective on this article and report on her thought process behind her support for the Coliseum deal. If offered, we will publish her counterpoint as presented.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Urkofsky is a 35-year Oakland resident who recently retired after a 33-year career with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), where he served as a licensed land surveyor and manager overseeing the development of regional Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Throughout his career, Chris worked at the intersection of land records, mapping, information technology, public infrastructure and government administration—experience that reinforced his belief in transparency, accountability and the rule of law in public decision-making.

A lifelong student of political science, public policy and history, Chris has been active in California Democratic Party affairs, served as a public sector union officer, and written on governance, fiscal responsibility and the stewardship of public assets.

While he strongly supports redevelopment of the Coliseum property, Chris believes major public transactions must be conducted through transparent processes that protect taxpayers and preserve public trust. He and his wife have called Oakland home for more than three decades.

The views expressed in our Commentaries do not necessarily reflect the editorial views of Oakland Report or its contributing writers.

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Oakland Report is an experiment in a new form of media. We provide reasoned, deep-dive, data-driven reporting and analysis that you will find nowhere else. If you value our work, please donate. All contributions go directly to sustaining and growing our nonprofit work.

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Video clip 1. Mayor Barbara Lee promotes a “bulky trash block party”; a walk through West Oakland. July 2026. (Video sources: Instagram / @mayorbarbaralee; X / @senecaspeaks21)

Editors’ note: This essay was released by city of Oakland transportation director Josh Rowan on his personal Substack page with the subtitle, “A personal journey through Oakland’s illegal dumping crisis — from instinct to discovery to a four-step plan the city already has the tools to execute.” Oakland Report is republishing it with Rowan’s permission for our readers to consider.

BY JOSH ROWAN

Built to keep the garbage flowing

Oakland has a garbage problem. Everyone knows it. Almost everyone has the wrong solution.

This is the story of how I got it wrong, what the trash itself taught me, what history explains, what the math proves, and what four steps would end this — if anyone in authority has the will to take them.

Three independent oversight bodies — the Oakland City Auditor,1 the Alameda County Civil Grand Jury,2 and Oakland’s own employee survey3 — examined this problem separately in 2026 and reached identical conclusions.

They confirmed what I had been saying for over a year and what got me attacked for saying.

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The garbage is on the ground because of failed policy and because the trash is now a commodity that has value.

Not because Oakland residents are uniquely dirty. Not because enforcement is too weak. Because the system was built to keep the garbage coming — and keep the money flowing.

Trash is cash. Garbage is gold. Until Oakland dismantles the economics that make it profitable, the before-and-after photos will never stop.

Act 1

Oakland Scavenger — when it worked

Before Waste Management took over in 1986, Oakland’s trash was collected by the Oakland Scavenger Company — a worker-owned business founded by Italian immigrants more than a century ago.4

The scavengers knew their routes. They knew their customers. They had a direct ownership stake in the quality of their work. Retired third-generation garbage men remember a city that worked differently — a personal relationship between collector and community that corporate consolidation erased overnight.

When long-term Oakland residents say it wasn’t like this ten or fifteen years ago, they are not misremembering. They are describing a system that existed and functioned.

Two decisions destroyed it.

First: In 1986, Waste Management acquired the Oakland Scavenger Company. The worker-owned model ended. National corporate waste management began.

The personal accountability of ownership gave way to the efficiency calculations of a publicly traded company.

Waste Management is not a villain in this story. They just behave the way they behave.

We need them for now as a partner.

Second: In 2006, Oakland adopted a Zero Waste Strategic Plan. The intent was noble. Smaller cans would push residents to generate less waste.

In practice, it failed catastrophically. The plan pushed customers toward smaller garbage containers on the assumption that they would recycle more and need less trash can space.

Americans were entering an era of increasing packaging and disposable goods. Oakland imposed smaller trash cans on residents at exactly the moment residents were generating more waste.

The garbage had nowhere legal to go. It went to the street.

The Grand Jury named this directly as a cause of illegal dumping: the rate structure that resulted from the Zero Waste plan’s assumptions made larger containers cost nearly double, pushing residents toward the smallest can available.

The Davis Street Transfer Station in San Leandro — not even in Oakland — became the city’s primary legal drop-off option. One free visit per year. Residents had to drive to another city to use it.

The city ran popular bulky block parties — free neighborhood drop-off events that worked, drawing thousands of vehicles and hundreds of tons of waste — then ended them in 2024 due to budget constraints.

The policy hole grew. The trash filled it.5

This is why the long-term residents are right. It wasn’t like this before. Corporate consolidation coupled with a failed zero waste policy created a problem Oakland has been cleaning up ever since — and has never once addressed at its root.

Video clip 2. Encampment on 26th and Wood Street on May 15, 2026. (Source: Oakland Report)

Act 2

The flywheel — how I got it wrong and what the trash taught me

It was the fall of 2024. I drove into Oakland for the first time since the 1990s — the last time Chuck Cotter and I had come here together.

I spent a day behind the wheel. I ended up on East 14th headed east, turned left into the hills.

I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. We had a hill and a valley. The hill meant wealth, privilege, and whiteness. The valley did not.

Oakland had the same dynamic. I had found it without anyone telling me where to look.

As I came into West Oakland, I could not soften what I thought. What the hell is all this trash?

In February 2025, my family visited. Mrs. Rowan saw it immediately. What’s with all this trash on the ground?

Around that time I interviewed with Mayor [Sheng] Thao on Zoom. She asked what I thought of Oakland. I said it was a beautiful city with enormous potential.

Then I put my foot in my mouth. What’s with all the garbage on the ground? I knew I had struck a nerve. Better out than in.

For most of 2024, I was Oakland’s DOT [Department of Transportation] Director. I created office hours — every Thursday in East Oakland, meeting with residents.

I found suppressed frustration and trauma. The complaints were consistent: the city ignores us, the sideshows are ruining our quality of life, the illegal dumping is out of control.

I was relieved illegal dumping belonged to Public Works. How hard could it be? Just pick up the garbage.

Then it happened at Charlie May Coffee and Tea House

A woman I had met once before at office hours came back. Furious. The kind of furious that makes you wonder whether the table or you is about to get hit.

She had visited another city — not known for greatness — and found no trash. Oakland sits beside water and hills and is covered in garbage. She challenged me. Then she recruited friends. They challenged me too. Do something about it.

I agreed. I had no authority. I spent my Fridays standing next to piles of trash. I stared at what was in them. Diapers. Food containers. Furniture. Clothing. Somebody’s house. Not construction debris. Not industrial waste. Somebody’s house.

The dominant narrative was that Oakland was a helpless victim — nefarious actors driving in from other cities with truckloads of construction debris.

That happens. It is not the primary driver.

City officials involved in cleanup told the Grand Jury the same thing: based on examinations of the debris, a majority appears to be residential. Anecdotally, several officials told the Grand Jury that most waste appears to come from within Oakland.

I was looking at residential garbage. I was wrong about where it came from. I changed my mind.

At the end of 2024, I became Acting Public Works Director. The trash was mine. I assembled my managers with the largest crews and most equipment. All hands. Clean the city.

My managers spoke truth without softening it. Fine plan. What happens when the trash comes back?

Video clip 3. Oakland has long struggled to reduce the volume of trash dumped in its streets. (Sources: Instagram @KTVU2; X @senecaspeaks21; Oakland Report)

I spent time with the crews who pick it up — KOCB [Keep Oakland Clean and Beautiful]. Remarkable people. Their equipment is inadequate.

There is no clearer signal that a workforce’s work does not matter than providing poor tools to do it.

The Grand Jury confirmed this independently: KOCB crews frequently encounter broken vehicles and equipment, with repairs delayed — and the resulting slowdowns are a documented drag on the city’s cleanup capacity.

That became priority one: better staff, better equipment. Current capacity is approximately 20 million pounds per year — or 47 pounds for every Oakland resident. We needed 30 million.6

Then I ran an experiment. I picked specific locations and kept them clean. I believed visible effort would discourage dumping.

The opposite happened. The cleaner we kept a location, the more trash appeared. Hot spots became de facto transfer facilities. Cleaner meant more trash. And the new trash was residential and commercial.

The flywheel was spinning and I had just made it spin faster.

The New York Times called it Trashland

The New York Times reached out to cover Oakland’s trash. They called it Trashland.

I notified the PIO and City Administrator. They approved the interview. I followed every proper channel. Some high-profile trash advocates were unhappy I did the interview, that my photo ran in the Times, and that I said picking up the trash is not the solution.7

The most controversial thing I said was this: we are doing this to ourselves.

The trash is residential. It is commercial. It is not imported. Oaklanders dump in Oakland. No one agreed. Some took offense — an outsider blaming Oakland for its own problem. We are victims, I was told.

I kept staring at the piles. The piles kept telling the same story.

The zero waste failure and the equity hidden inside it

During office hours, roughly half the residents who came to see me said the same thing: it wasn’t like this ten or fifteen years ago.

That is when the Zero Waste Strategic Plan took effect and the solid waste market consolidated. Both decisions compounded on each other and produced the streets you see today.

The Grand Jury confirmed it: Oakland’s standard residential garbage container holds 32 gallons. A 64-gallon container costs $110.31 per month — nearly double the $62.83 charged for the 32-gallon standard.

Rates rise steeply with larger containers, exactly as the Zero Waste plan’s assumptions intended.

The result: to keep costs low, residents choose cans that are too small for their actual waste generation. The overflow goes to the street.

This is not speculation. This is Finding 26-4 of the Grand Jury report.

2025-2026 Alameda County Grand Jury Final Report

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The City of Oakland faces a massive illegal dumping problem. What was once a mere littering problem has become, as one city official told the Grand Jury, “Piles of dumped material on street corners.” These piles total about 20 million pounds of debris collected by the city, or about 47 pounds per resident! Given this overwhelming and persistent problem, the Grand Jury investigated illegal dumping in Oakland and the city’s response.

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Here is the equity dimension that nobody talks about. It costs more to collect trash in the Oakland hills.

The terrain requires smaller trucks and two-person crews. Under Oakland’s current flat rate structure, flatlands residents pay the same rate as hills residents — even though hills collection costs more to deliver.

The flatlands subsidize the hills. The people with the least financial resources pay more than their share of the city’s collection costs. So they choose the smallest can to cut their monthly bill.

The overflow goes to the street. The flatlands bear both the subsidy and the dumping.

Berkeley already prices collection by actual cost of service — a structure mandated under California’s Proposition 218. When Berkeley realigned its rates to actual costs in 2023, it acknowledged years of cross-subsidy. 89

Oakland has the same legal framework available. It has not used it. The flatlands pay for the hills. That is institutional inequity hiding inside a garbage bill.

The math

Oakland has roughly 80,000 single-family homes. The standard residential trash container holds 32 gallons. Public Works removes approximately 20 million pounds per year — 47 pounds per resident.

At a conservative density of half a pound per gallon for residential household waste, that is 40 million gallons annually — roughly 61 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of illegal dumping removed from Oakland streets every year.10

Move the can to 64 gallons. The gap between the current 32-gallon standard and a 64-gallon standard — from single-family homes alone — adds 166 million gallons of legal annual capacity. That is more than four times the volume currently removed from the streets.

Instead of circling the block looking for a median, a commercial dumpster, or one of the city’s public street bins — the green cans placed throughout neighborhoods that attract bags of overflow trash the night before collection, and that some neighborhoods have actually petitioned to have removed for this reason — residents could ask a neighbor if they have extra space.

That is not a policy failure. That is a neighborhood functioning. The Waste Management pilot showed exactly that dynamic — when capacity exists, people use it.

This is fifth-grade arithmetic. Multiply two numbers. Subtract. Compare. The answer has been here since 2006.

Oakland collects more than $30 million per year in franchise fees from Waste Management for the exclusive right to collect garbage from Oakland residents. Those fees are baked into the rates residents pay.

Oakland’s rates run 23 to 40 percent above neighboring cities served by the same hauler. The franchise fee may be a direct driver of the high prices that push residents toward smaller cans and overflow onto streets.

That connection deserves scrutiny. A forensic audit of the Waste Management franchise fee is not a fishing expedition. It is due diligence on a $30 million annual revenue stream that may represent another layer of failed policy.

What this actually costs

The Grand Jury found that the Public Works Department budget includes approximately $28.2 million for the divisions directly responsible for abating and enforcing illegal dumping — including:

• $10 million directly for dumping cleanup

• $2.6 million for environmental enforcement

• $750,000 for stewardship and volunteer coordination

• $11.1 million for street sweeping, which the department views as a first line of defense.

Meanwhile, the city collected just over $16,000 in citation revenue in FY 2024-25, against $2 million in enforcement spending.

The Environmental Enforcement Unit issued citations consistently in the six figures annually — and collected a fraction. Of 3,293 citations issued since 2020, the city conducted 588 internal reviews and dismissed 566 of them.

Only 14 proceeded to appeal hearings.

Act 3

Trash is cash — no one in charge and everyone getting paid

In 2014, a city council member announced a candidacy for mayor at an illegal dumping site in East Oakland. She posed for photos. She left the trash where it was.

That was the moment garbage became a political platform in Oakland.

More than a decade later, the same politician is still in the middle of the action, still proposing solutions, still collecting a city paycheck to address a problem she has never solved.

Picking up garbage became a social media platform. Before-and-after photos built audiences. Community cleanup events built political brands.

Cameras showed up. Politicians showed up. Nonprofits showed up. For-profits showed up. Everyone wanted a piece of the action. The before photo is worth more than the after photo. The before photo is the fundraiser. As long as there are before photos, the money flows.

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One nonprofit led the way — securing no-bid contracts and change orders, receiving waivers of the small and local business ordinance, and operating without competitive procurement for years after the emergency justification that created the arrangement had ended.

The result was predictable.

Other organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit, saw the model and lined up for the same treatment. I could not go anywhere in public without someone seeking a no-bid contract to pick up trash. Everyone wanted to get paid without competition, without small business requirements, without accountability for results.

I have done a financial analysis of that nonprofit’s contracts, change orders, and invoice records. The findings are significant and will be released separately.

A special thanks to @pengweather— not an Oakland resident, but someone who genuinely cared about this city’s garbage problem and sought to make a difference without seeking anything in return. He represents what civic engagement is supposed to look like.

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Nobody is in charge — the Grand Jury said so directly

The Grand Jury documented a city where officials gave conflicting accounts of their own programs, were unaware of Council actions taken months earlier, and could not agree on basic facts about their approach.

The report described officials who ‘seemed unaware of recent developments or what other parts of the city government were doing.’ They provided ‘different descriptions of Oakland’s current approach to illegal dumping.’

They ‘either could not explain or provided unclear information about the status of Oaktown PROUD.’ [Prevent and Report Our Unlawful Dumping program.]

Officials were unaware that the city council had authorized the use of Community Safety camera footage for illegal dumping enforcement — an action taken months before the Grand Jury’s investigation.

The Grand Jury’s conclusion: ‘Oakland’s efforts have suffered from a lack of clarity and consistency, with many officials involved, conflicting descriptions of the city’s current approach, limited awareness of current developments, and no one clearly in charge.’

Finding 26-24 states it plainly: the City of Oakland does not have a single point person responsible for overseeing and coordinating its illegal dumping efforts. Recommendation 26-7 calls for designating one within 90 days.

In the past several years, Oakland has not referred a single case to the Alameda County District Attorney for criminal prosecution of illegal dumping. It has filed one civil action. 11

The Grand Jury asked the Finance Department for basic citation collection data. It asked multiple times. People promised to deliver the information. It never came. A county oversight body asked a city for its own math and the city could not produce it.

The Acting City Administrator’s official response to the Grand Jury report said the city was ‘pleased to be in alignment with the recommendations’ and that they ‘have already been authorized, funded, and launched.’ The response mentioned cameras, drones, handheld technology for enforcement officers, overtime funding, and cleanup events.

It did not mention the Waste Management contract renegotiation — the City Auditor’s top recommendation — once.12

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The enforcement collapse

The Grand Jury called illegal dumping enforcement in Oakland ‘inadequate and abysmal.’ The numbers back that up. The Environmental Enforcement Unit — seven budgeted positions, one still frozen — issued a few hundred citations per year against roughly 24,000 to 25,000 cleanup requests annually.

Of citations issued since 2020, the city dismissed 566 of 588 that received internal administrative review. Only 14 reached appeal hearings.

Cameras captured dumping incidents and yielded 17.9 percent of citations over several years — while violators routinely covered or removed license plates to avoid identification.

The District Attorney has been direct: she cannot prosecute a license plate. She needs a positive identification of the person committing the crime.

We are flying drones over East Oakland searching for piles of garbage after the fact. East Oakland is already one of the most surveilled communities in the region.

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The idea that the answer is more surveillance of Black and immigrant communities — communities that bear the brunt of the zero waste policy failure — while the policy itself goes unchanged is not an equity position. It is the opposite.

Most people dumping illegally are not criminals. They are struggling to survive in a city that jammed them up with a failed policy. If we believe what we say about equity, we stop talking and fix the policy.

A message to every candidate running this year

It is an election year. Candidates are making promises. Some do not understand the problem they are promising to solve.

Here is my message to all of them: the first one of you who poses for a photo in front of a pile of garbage loses my support. I encourage you to join a neighborhood adopt-a-spot cleanup. I will personally take you on a citywide trash tour — after hours, when the cameras are off.

Go educate yourself before you make another promise.

And if you skip that step and come into office waving your arms demanding all-hands solutions — I understand. I know exactly how that feels. That is what I did.

The trash always comes back, often more.

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The mayor has a ten-point plan. Two of those points speak directly to this crisis — investing in illegal dumping solutions and auditing city finances.

We are watching. Honor those commitments.

Start the financial audit with the Waste Management franchise fee. Oakland residents deserve to know where that $30 million goes annually and whether it is contributing to the rates that drive residents toward undersized cans and streets full of overflow.

Act 4

Stop the flywheel — the four-step plan

Stop with the before-and-after photos of garbage piles. The before photo goes away through prevention. Stop providing cover for policy failure by spending your own weekend picking up the garbage of others. This is a map problem — the garbage lands where policy failure meets economic incentive. Fix the map.

Four steps. All achievable within twelve months. All supported by the data, the math, and three independent oversight reports. All focused on prevention, not cleanup.

Step 1: Better staff and better equip public works

The crews who pick up trash are remarkable people doing difficult work with inadequate equipment.

Invest in them. Current capacity is approximately 20 million pounds per year. We need 30 million. The only way to get there is to staff and equip the teams who do the actual work.

City crews and Waste Management are the only two groups that should be paid to pick up Oakland’s trash. Every dollar spent on no-bid nonprofit contracts is a dollar not invested in the people and equipment that will still be here in ten years.

Step 2: Get back to the negotiating table with Waste Management

We had a deal. Then we did not have a deal. Oakland residents pay 23 to 40 percent more than neighboring cities served by the same hauler.

The City Auditor named contract renegotiation as the top recommendation. The Grand Jury’s Recommendation 26-8 called for completing amendments to the franchise agreement that will change the rate structure to make larger containers more affordable, enable increased use of free bulky waste services, and reduce scheduling delays.

Waste Management has already piloted larger bins and documented immediate reductions in street overflow. More gallons at the curb. Lower prices.

Finish the negotiation. And while at the table, conduct a forensic audit of the franchise fee to determine whether that fee structure is itself a driver of the rates pushing residents toward illegal dumping.

Step 3: Collapse the private junk hauler economy

Stop paying cash up front for results you cannot verify. Require proof of legal disposal — a receipt or photo from a licensed transfer station — before electronic payment releases.

The Grand Jury’s own report noted that KOCB’s website already urges customers to ‘Request dump receipts from haulers before paying’ — then acknowledged that this almost never happens because it is not practical for a customer to withhold payment until the hauler returns with a receipt.

Flip that dynamic. Pay after proof, via a digital app. The hauler who dumps illegally does not get paid. The hauler who disposes properly gets paid within seconds. No permits required. No new regulations required.

One payment rule change ends the economic incentive for illegal dumping by unlicensed haulers.

Step 4: Pass the commercial special assessment

It is already written. The Grand Jury estimated thousands of Oakland businesses operate without mandatory trash service — with some estimates as high as one in six.

When commercial customers stop paying, service stops and the trash goes to the street.

Oakland’s ordinance currently does not allow the city to take the same property lien actions against delinquent businesses that it can take against residential owners. The commercial special assessment closes this gap. Pass it now.

The bottom line

The City Auditor issued 17 recommendations in April 2026. Only four were marked complete as of the Grand Jury’s report in June. The city approved the IDEA Plan in May 2026 — $1.1 million in new contracts, drones, and equipment — without the auditor’s primary recommendation to renegotiate the Waste Management contract.

Performance Audit of Illegal Dumping

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Illegal dumping has long been a problem in Oakland, negatively affecting health, safety, the environment, property, and economic well-being. We completed this audit of illegal dumping based in part on concerns of Oakland residents.

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The Acting City Administrator’s response to the Grand Jury praised the IDEA Plan and made no mention of the contract renegotiation the auditor and Grand Jury both called for.

One city employee, responding to the 2026 Ethical Climate Survey, wrote that the City Council is blatantly corrupt. The Auditor’s office printed it without comment.

Employees with ten or more years of service rated their elected officials 62 out of 100. The longest-serving employees trust their leaders least.

I have been attacked for eighteen months for saying what three independent bodies have now confirmed. I know what I am. I am the biggest threat to the trash grift. I promised my East Oakland friends I would play every card I have. I am playing them.

I cannot live in this garbage. I will not raise my son in filth. I have the resources to leave Oakland. That solves my family’s problem. It does not solve Oakland’s problem. Oakland has two years to show me it means what it says about equity, about services, about being a city that works for everyone who lives in it.

Change the policy. Fix the zero waste failure. Audit the franchise fee. Staff and equip public works. Collapse the private hauler economics. Pass the commercial assessment. Get back to the table with Waste Management and close the deal.

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Even dogs don’t soil where they eat. Oakland can do better. It has to.

I’m from the flats, I walk these streets
Every morning, just to reach
School ain’t far, but the walk’s a mess
Stepping over your couch, your old mattress

We walk with pride, heads held high
Don’t trash the Town, that’s my reply
One day we’ll walk these streets and see
The Town for me, the Town for me

— from Josh Rowan, “I Walk This Town” [12]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Josh Rowan is the director of transportation for the city of Oakland. A resident of Oakland, he joined the city of Oakland in that role in April 2024, then also served as the city of Oakland’s public works director for several months in 2025.

Josh served as interim oversight director of Oakland public works during the period covered by the city auditor’s April 2026 performance audit, which acknowledged his cooperation in its cover letter and cited his November 2025 memorandum to the privacy advisory commission as a source.

Prior to working for Oakland, he served as commissioner of the city of Atlanta’s department of transportation. His career in the public sector includes work as a program manager for transportation, transit, education, healthcare, and law enforcement capital construction. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

The views expressed in our Commentaries do not necessarily reflect the editorial views of Oakland Report or its contributing writers.

WE ARE 100% SUPPORTED BY YOU

Oakland Report is an experiment in a new form of media. We provide reasoned, deep-dive, data-driven reporting and analysis that you will find nowhere else. If you value our work, please donate. All contributions go directly to sustaining and growing our nonprofit work.

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Learn more

BY EMMET GARDNER

OUSD’s district-run schools lost more enrollment than other nearby school districts

Over the past two-and-a-half decades, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) has lost more students than any nearby district.

OUSD enrolled around 43,500 public school students in 2025-26 — approximately 11,400 fewer than in 2000-01.

Most of that 25-year loss happened in Oakland’s district-run (non-charter) public schools. Excluding charter schools, enrollment at OUSD-run schools fell 35%.

OUSD officials blame falling birth rates, families moving away, and competition from charter and private schools.12

To test the effects of falling birth rates — a nationwide trend — Oakland Report examined 25 years of California Department of Education (CDE) enrollment records.3

We also examined U.S. Census Bureau population data for OUSD and six nearby districts: Alameda, Berkeley, Castro Valley, Emery, Piedmont City and San Leandro.45

The bottom line: District-run enrollment in Oakland fell far more than the number of school-age children living here — pointing to forces beyond demographics.

Key findings

• OUSD’s district-run schools lost over 35% of their students since 2000.

• Oakland’s population of school-aged children fell only an estimated 23%.

• Statewide, California’s kids ages 5-17 fell just 2.8% (2000-2020).

• Charter schools now enroll 22% of Oakland’s public school students.

• Roughly 1 in 5 school-age Oakland kids do not attend Oakland public schools.

• No nearby district lost more students than OUSD.

Oakland’s school-age population fell an estimated 23% from 2000 to 2024 — far more than the statewide decline

Birth rates and population are not the same: population also changes as families move in or out, so we compared enrollment against both.

The population measure we used for school-age children is residents ages 5 to 17 — the closest Census age range to K-12 school age.

Birth rate: Statewide, California recorded 531,285 live births in 2000. After a peak in the late 2000s, the annual total has fallen to under 420,000 — a drop of more than 111,000 births, or about 21%.67

School-age population: California’s ages 5-17 population fell just 2.8% between the 2000 and 2020 Censuses (6,762,848 to 6,573,679).

Even with continued statewide decline since, Oakland’s decline in ages 5-17 population was far greater: an estimated 23% from 2000 (73,030) to the 2024 estimate of 56,350.89

The 2000 figure is a Census-derived estimate using OUSD’s 2001-02 boundaries; 2010 and 2020 are direct counts, so the 2000 number is a benchmark rather than an exact match.

Since 2020, annual estimates suggest the school-age population is falling again: 61,503 (2021), 55,464 (2022), 54,187 (2023), 56,350 (2024), each with a margin of about ±4,000. The margins are wide, but the three most recent estimates — including the top of each range — all fall below the 2020 count of 60,884.

Oakland lost school-age population at a faster rate than neighboring districts

Comparing the 2000 benchmarks with the newest five-year estimates (ACS 2020-24), Oakland’s child population fell furthest: down 19.3% (73,030 to 58,941).

Piedmont fell 16.6% and Castro Valley and Emery each fell about 10% — though estimates for these small districts carry wide margins.

Berkeley (+6.0%), Alameda (+4.5%) and San Leandro (+2.4%) all ended above their 2000 levels.

Charter and district-run public school enrollment moved in opposite directions

OUSD’s total public school enrollment fell 21% — from 54,863 in 2000-01 to 43,484 in 2025-26.

Within that total, charter and district-run public school enrollment moved in opposite directions.

• District-run (non-charter) enrollment fell 35% — from 52,372 to 33,891.

• Charters were 1.4% of Oakland’s public enrollment in 2000-01; today they are 22%.

Of the 11,379-student total decline, district-run schools account for 18,481 lost students, partly offset by 8,811 added charter seats, with the balance in unmatched historical records.

OUSD’s enrollment decline is even steeper when excluding transitional kindergarten

California created transitional kindergarten (TK) in 2012-13, bringing new cohorts of younger, pre-kindergarten aged students into the public school system.

Recent enrollment data includes TK students while earlier data covers K-12 only. This article uses CDE’s official TK/K-12 totals, the conservative measure.

Oakland’s 2025-26 enrollment figures include 1,723 TK students.

Excluding TK students, OUSD’s enrollment decline is even steeper: a 24% decline in total enrollment and a 38% decline for district-run schools since 2000-01.

Oakland lost the most students of any nearby district; only much smaller Emery declined more proportionally

Comparing 2000-01 with 2025-26, the most recent school year: OUSD’s 21% decline (11,379 students) was the largest in absolute terms, and second-largest in percentage terms behind Emery’s 37%.

Piedmont fell 7.5% and Berkeley 2.2%.

Alameda (+1.3%), San Leandro (+8.2%) and Castro Valley (+22%) ended above their 2000-01 levels.

One in five school-age Oaklanders is outside local public schools

To see how many school-age children are not in their district’s public schools, we compared each district’s Census population estimate with its average public enrollment for the same years — the difference is the gap.

Oakland’s gap was the largest in every period measured: 14% to 22% of its school-age population.

A large gap fits with more children in private schools, homeschooling, other districts, or not enrolled at all.

But this is a net estimate, not a head count: OUSD also enrolls students from outside its boundaries, which shrinks the gap. A few districts enroll more students than the estimated children living there.

These are survey-based estimates whose ranges cover only survey error; read them as broad indicators.

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Other considerations and counterpoints

Points for readers to consider, largely without rebuttal:

• In percentage terms, much smaller Emery declined more than OUSD (37% versus 21%).

• OUSD enrollment grew 4.6% in the 2010s while Berkeley, Piedmont and Emery declined.

• The population and enrollment series end in different years and use different methods, so headline percentages are not perfectly synchronized.

• The gap estimate’s ranges overlap with several neighbors’, and nonresident enrollment would shrink Oakland’s gap.

• Part of the district-run decline is classification, not departure: converted schools count as charters throughout (see methodology notes).

• Charter schools are public schools too: charter growth stays within Oakland’s public system, so the district-run decline does not mean those students left public education.

• Additional methodology notes are presented in the endnotes.10

A compounding loss

Oakland’s school-age population fell sharply in the 2000s, partly rebounded by 2020, and appears to be falling again — an estimated 23% below its 2000 benchmark.

Total enrollment followed a similar arc, ending 21% down — now roughly comparable to the population’s decline.

The sharpest split is within the total: district-run enrollment fell 35% — far beyond both the total decline and the population decline — while charter enrollment grew more than twelvefold before peaking in 2019-20.

The comprehensive reading: Oakland’s district-run schools lost more than a third of their students to three forces — a shrinking school-age population, a net shift of children out of local public schools, and a shift within public enrollment toward charters.

What the data does not explain is why any family left, or where each student went.

Read these related articles:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emmet Gardner is a student-leader at Bishop O’Dowd High School with a strong focus on youth STEM education and peer mentorship. Over the past three years, he has worked closely with Kids Teach Tech, an organization dedicated to providing technology and engineering education to underserved youth, and is a teacher at their UC Berkeley Programming Summer Camps. Emmet is a participant in Oakland Report’s inaugural summer internship program.

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Oakland Report is an experiment in a new form of media. Our mission is to provide accurate, deep-dive, data-driven reporting and analysis that you will find nowhere else. If you value our work, please donate. All contributions go directly to sustaining and growing our 501(c)(3) nonprofit work.

Donate to Oakland Report

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Editors’ note: The original version of this article displayed Figure 2 with population figures only through the year 2020. The figure has been updated to also include population estimates from 2024 to align with the article narrative. Our thanks to an alert reader for bringing the missing data to our attention.

10

FLASHBACK 2024 — Former mayor Sheng Thao, former city administrator Jestin Johnson, and developer Ray Bobbitt hold a signing ceremony and press conference heralding the first iteration of the Oakland Coliseum Complex sale agreement on July 30, 2024. Bobbitt’s company ultimately missed scheduled payments on the original deal, triggering a multimillion-dollar city budget shortfall and contingency cuts. (Video sources: Instagram / @mayorshengthao; Adobe Stock; Oakland Report)

Oakland Agenda Watch provides summaries of key items on upcoming public meeting agendas that catch our attention. In this installment, we examine today’s Oakland city council meeting to vote on final passage of the restructured Oakland Coliseum sale. Also: a refined estimate of the avoided interest for the buyer and foregone potential revenue to the city; and a response to city officials’ claims that the deal is not a loan.

A loan by any other word would smell as sweet

Today the Oakland city council takes up its final vote on the sale and “seller financing” of the city’s share of the Oakland Coliseum Complex property to a group led by Ray Bobbitt’s company — a developer with no prior large-scale projects under his belt.

Up for votes are the second reading and council approval of a new sale agreement, and a resolution directing $50 million of sale proceeds toward the city’s roughly $2 billion in pension debt.12

The city is set to convey its 50 percent share to a group led by Bobbitt’s company, Oakland Acquisition Company (OAC), while financing roughly half the price with a deferred payment schedule at a below-market interest rate — in other words, a loan.

Notably, Bobbitt’s company intends to immediately resell the Oakland Arena portion of the complex to another buyer — apparently to raise needed cash that OAC has not secured, and has not shown it can secure, from other lenders.34

Additionally, according to eyewitness accounts shared with Oakland Report, some Oakland officials have been telling constituents the proposed deal is not a “loan.”

When is a loan not a “loan”? We checked the city’s own documents to examine the question — and will leave it to our readers to decide for themselves.

Why the Coliseum deal is being voted on again

The latest iteration of the deal requires two public readings at city council meetings. City council held the first reading at a special meeting on July 13, and voted 6-1 to approve it. Council member Noel Gallo opposed it and council president Kevin Jenkins was absent from the vote.5

In 2024, then-mayor Sheng Thao’s administration struck the original deal to sell the city’s half of the Coliseum to Bobbitt’s company, then known primarily as the African American Sports and Entertainment Group (AASEG) for $105 million.6

The city then built that money into its budget before the payments had been secured — counting on roughly $63 million in sale revenue to avoid cuts.

Bobbitt’s company missed its scheduled payments that fall, the promised money never came, and the city imposed contingency budget cuts to close the gap.7 The city then revised the deal to give Bobbitt’s company more time to pay.

Today’s vote comes three weeks after the revised agreement’s own closing deadline — June 30, 2026 — passed without a closing.8 OAC never made the payments scheduled under the prior versions of the deal; the initial $5 million deposit remains its only payment made to date. The council removed the interim payment deadline entirely in May 2025.9

The proposed new deal has moved on an expedited track because officials want to close the deal by January. The deal was reviewed in closed session July 7, forwarded to the council’s scheduling committee July 9, and heard at the full council four days later.10

At a celebratory pre-vote press conference on July 13, mayor Barbara Lee called the proposed new deal “a step forward,” and Oak View Group co-founder Irving Azoff — whose company is reported to be set to buy the Oakland Arena portion of the property from Bobbitt’s company after the deal is signed — appeared alongside council members celebrating the deal.11

When a loan is not a ‘loan’: city officials offer bespoke definitions

According to eyewitness accounts shared with Oakland Report, council member Charlene Wang (District 2) told a recent neighborhood meeting that the proposed new Coliseum deal is not a loan.

At the same meeting, council member Zac Unger (District 1) reportedly offered an explanation to the effect that “loan” was not the right term to describe the city’s seller financing of the sale.

Similar arguments by supporters of the deal have circulated in some venues, describing the arrangement instead as an “installment sale” or a “land write-down.”

We stand behind our reporting — and our accurate use of the common English word “loan” to describe the deal — and the city’s own documents show why.

A loan, in the simplest terms, is an arrangement in which one party (lender) provides money or an asset to another party (borrower), to be repaid over time, usually with interest.

In this case, the asset being loaned is the Oakland Coliseum Complex.

“Seller financing” — the terminology used by the city to describe the deal — refers to a type of loan in which the seller also acts as the lender, extending credit to the buyer/borrower instead of receiving the price up front.12

The ordinance before the council today authorizes the sale of the stadium parcel “for $60 million with seller financing from the City.” The city’s own staff report calls it “a seller financed sale of the City’s interest in the stadium parcel.”

An “installment sale” is the tax law term — Internal Revenue Code section 453 — for precisely the arrangement currently proposed: a sale in which the seller receives payments over time (in this case, the payments would be deferred up to five years) and reports interest on the deferred balance.13

Calling the deal an installment sale concedes that it is seller financed.

Similarly, a “land write-down” describes how a property is valued, not how it is paid for. A city can discount a price for public benefit conditions and still finance the discounted price. One is valuation; the other is lending. Both can be true at once.

To be clear, this is not a criticism of this form of loan as a financial practice. It is, however, an observation — supported by the public record — that city officials appear to be using deceptive wordplay to elide the truth about the Coliseum deal and their financial decision-making around it.

Then there is the city’s arithmetic. The staff report projects $125 million in total receipts from the sale: $5 million already received, $50 million at closing, and “the remaining balance of $70 million... in future years.”

The city’s own term sheet and staff report define what “future years” means: a $55 million “stadium parcel closing purchase price” repaid in three installments — the first due on “the first anniversary of issuance of planned development approval” or five years from closing, whichever comes first.

In other words, the first payment could be deferred to as late as 2032.

The remaining $15 million consists of “additional payments” if OAC secures building permits for future development — these are conditional payments, memorialized as deed covenants, that arrive only if development advances.

The city’s stated $125 million total leaves out the interest itself: roughly $18 million per the new payment schedule.

The sale ordinance’s operative text authorizes the city administrator to “negotiate and execute a loan agreement, promissory note, and deed of trust for the seller financing from the City of the Stadium Parcel sale, with five percent (5%) interest.”

This backstop is weaker than some summaries suggest: the term sheet requires only “best efforts” to obtain a guaranty or payment bond, due by the later of January 1, 2027, or four months after closing — after the deal closes, not as a condition of it.

If the assurance doesn’t materialize, the city retains the outstanding half of the prorated subsidy payment, and the stadium price rises $100,000 for each month it remains outstanding.

The city’s own celebratory materials assert that payments will arrive “on a prescribed schedule without lending any funds to OAC.”14

The city’s statement relies on an unusually narrow definition under which a “loan” means only wiring cash to the borrower.

In fact, the proposed new “seller financed” sale advances the asset to the buyer/borrower before full payment is completed — and what the city ends up holding is the buyer’s debt.

A loan agreement, deferred payments, stated interest rate, a deed of trust, a promissory note, a foreclosure right: whatever officials prefer to call it, the city’s own documents describe a loan.

The facts of the Coliseum Complex deal, according to the city’s own documents

The latest version of the Coliseum transaction has confused many Oaklanders — including, it appears, some of its supporters. City officials have repeatedly stated that the deal is extraordinarily complicated, and it is.

We agree that the documents — and the deal itself — are difficult to understand, which may have contributed to the differing interpretations. To help unwind the confusion, here is each step of the deal, grounded in the language of the public record.

The estimated public subsidy to Ray Bobbitt’s OAC, revised

Earlier this month, we estimated how much OAC saves by borrowing from the city and county at 5 percent instead of paying higher interest rates on the commercial lending market. Our first estimate was $45 million to $114 million.15 New documents and information enabled us to refine those numbers downward.

The city’s loan is about $55 million, not $60 million, because OAC’s $5 million deposit counts toward the price.

The county’s loan is about $65 million, not $115 million, because the county gets at least $50 million from the Arena sale right away and credits it against OAC’s bill. The county, in turn, pays the Athletics sports team affiliate that bought the county’s share of the property $115 million plus accrued interest to buy back its half.

The two governments also protect themselves differently. The county keeps its deed until it is fully paid — a protection stronger than collateral — and collects half of any operating profits toward the balance.

The city does the opposite: it hands over its deed at closing and takes back a promissory note, secured by a deed of trust that lets the city foreclose if OAC defaults on the payments.

Both loans work the same way. Interest builds at 5 percent per year until the first payment, which can wait until as late as year five. The last payment can come as late as year seven.

Running the numbers on those terms: if a bank would charge 8 percent for a loan like this, OAC saves about $27 million in interest. If a private lender would charge 12 percent, OAC saves about $67 million.

In today’s dollars — what the discount is worth on the day the deal closes — the total public subsidy comes to roughly $18 million to $37 million, with the city’s share about $8 million to $17 million.

One more payment sits outside the interest math: the city pays OAC about $1.5 million of its stadium operating subsidy — half at closing, and half only after OAC provides a third-party payment guarantee.

The financial realities of the proposed Coliseum deal

Stripped of labels, Tuesday’s two votes, if affirmative, would produce the following:

• The city receives $50 million at closing and uses it to pay against a roughly $2 billion unfunded pension liability, per the city’s fiscal policy for the use of one-time revenue.

• The city then waits, up to five to seven years, for $70 million more from a buyer whose only payment in the past two years was the $5 million deposit.

• The 5 percent the city will earn on that waiting is less than CalPERS’ own assumed rate of return of 6.8 percent — meaning that even by the city’s investment benchmark, every year of deferral loses ground.16

• The city also pays the buyer roughly $1.5 million at closing, sheds an annualized $6 million stadium operating subsidy, and gains a 6 percent share of ticket sales that the city estimates at about $3 million per year.

• The risk that the $70 million never fully arrives — the risk every lender carries — rests with the city, which is why the word “loan” matters.

There was also an alternative buyer on the table. As we previously reported, Legends Global — the Arena’s longtime operator — made an offer of roughly $102 million for the Arena, which officials turned down. Interested parties were referred to OAC under the city’s exclusive negotiating arrangement with Bobbitt’s company.17

The structure leaves questions the council, as a public agency selling a public asset, ideally will answer before the final vote.

The county term sheet entitles the county to the greater of $50 million or half the Arena sale’s net proceeds, and provides for equal city-county sharing of component sales — yet the city’s staff report describes Oakland’s Arena proceeds as exactly $50 million.

If Bobbitt’s company flips (resells) the Arena to another buyer (reportedly Azoff’s Oak View Group) for more than the $100 million floor, who keeps the difference? The Arena passes through OAC’s hands in a back-to-back escrow on its way to the new buyer. The public documents appear not to commit to what the Arena buyer is actually paying, what expenses come off the top, or whether OAC or its affiliates receive any fee or spread on that leg.

Caveats

The terms reported here are drawn from the ordinance text and the city term sheet attached to the July 13 agenda report.

The term sheet is expressly non-binding, and the final executed version of the agreement may differ — we will update this analysis if they do.

We report the subsidy both as nominal avoided interest and as present value at closing; the former answers how many future dollars the buyer avoids, the latter what the concession is worth today.

Per the city term sheet, the $70 million balance consists of the $55 million note principal and the $15 million in conditional permit milestone payments; the note’s 5 percent interest is in addition to — and not counted in — the $125 million total.

Our estimate remains illustrative: market-rate ranges are national; and the closing payment depends on the closing date.

Our estimate also assumes the county’s Arena share is exactly $50 million (a higher Arena price would shrink the financed balance further) and the latest installment timing (an earlier Planned Development Approval would start payments sooner and shrink the subsidy on both sides).

None of this measures OAC’s ultimate profit for the deal, which by one estimate is potentially in the “billions of dollars.”18

Words matter because the risks matter

The council may well conclude on Tuesday that this deal, loans and all, beats the alternatives and is in the best interest of the city and the public it serves. That is the council’s judgment to make — and ideally the council’s deliberations today will lay out the council’s judgment for the public to hear.

But it is not accurate for city officials to deny that the proposed deal is a loan.

The city’s own ordinance says “seller financing” — by definition, a form of loan. The city’s own staff report counts the interest — the financial hallmark of a loan.

Words matter because financial risks do: Oaklanders cannot weigh a risk their elected officials will not name.

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BY JOSH ROWAN

Editors’ note: This statement was released by city of Oakland transportation director Josh Rowan on his Substack page in response to a July 8 article published in local media outlet The Oaklandside.1

The article, which appears to have been written based on records the city provided through a Public Records Act request, named Rowan as a city whistleblower who has “filed several complaints about new City Administrator Betsy Lake and other officials.”

In his statement, Rowan alludes to “two media hit pieces,” possibly also referring to an earlier article in The Oaklandside about an ethics complaint Rowan filed against council member Ken Houston.2

Rowan provided Oakland Report with emails he sent to The Oaklandside requesting corrections to the July 8 article. His emails also alleged that the records the city provided the media outlet violated the city’s whistleblower protection rules and state law.

Rowan also claimed that he searched past articles and “could not find another example where Oaklandside named a whistleblower.” (We could not independently verify this claim.)

We offer Rowan’s statement and emails here, with citations to relevant research added, for our readers to consider.

Response to Oaklandside ‘hit piece’

STATEMENT OF JOSH ROWAN

Director, Oakland Department of Transportation (OakDOT)

A Resident of Oakland

The facts are not in dispute.

In 2025, deadly crashes in Oakland fell to 23 — down from a high of 36. That is a 36 percent reduction.3 OakDOT paved more miles and delivered more capital infrastructure than this city has seen in years. When other city officials were publicly stating that Oakland could not sell Measure U bonds,4 OakDOT stood firm. The bonds were sold. We are paving again in 2026. The Civil Grand Jury and the City Auditor independently validated concerns about illegal dumping that I raised and reported through proper channels.56 I did not write those reports. Two independent bodies with subpoena power did.

I have filed formal complaints through every channel the law provides. I did so because public employees are required to report misconduct. Those complaints say exactly what I intended them to say. It is now up to the City Administrator to investigate.

The complaints do not fully capture what preceded them. I was pressured to change parking meter repair vendors. I was pressured to change the outcome of a $45 million building security contract procurement. I was pressured to award a construction contract under the false premise of a vendor being most responsive. I refused every time. These are not isolated events — they reflect a pattern that began in early 2025 and has not stopped.

The former city administrator gave me a glowing performance review when he removed me from Public Works. Council President Jenkins has stated publicly that I am the best director at the city and OakDOT is the best run department. I was the subject of a fraudulent ethics complaint that was dismissed for lack of evidence, and I have now been the subject of two media “hit pieces.”

In June 2026, the City Auditor published an Ethical Climate Survey of 555 Oakland city employees.7 The single lowest-scoring indicator in the entire survey was whether employees feel encouraged to report questionable ethical behavior. Whistleblower protection and fear of retaliation were among the most common themes in written responses. The survey was not about me. It describes the institution I have been working inside for the past 18 months.

A former mayor of Oakland has been indicted. A federal investigation is active. The Civil Grand Jury has documented a decade of failed illegal dumping contracts that cost millions and solved nothing. The people who benefited from that arrangement have a clear interest in discrediting the person who reported it, conducted his own investigation, and submitted his report to the city administrator and mayor’s chief of staff over the weekend.

I have not resigned. I will not resign. I have not compromised my professional ethics under 18 months of sustained pressure to do so. I do not intend to start.

OakDOT will continue to deliver. The record will continue to speak.

Josh Rowan

Director, Oakland Department of Transportation

Emails: Formal Demand for Correction — Josh Rowan Coverage, July 8, 2026

1.05MB ∙ PDF file

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I submitted my complaints through confidential official channels pursuant to the Oakland Whistleblower Protection Ordinance, which states explicitly that retaliation reports are confidential and not subject to disclosure. California Government Code Section 7927.700 exempts personnel records from Public Records Act disclosure. Your reporter Darwin BondGraham confirmed in writing — in an email copied to my attorney — that the documents were provided by the City of Oakland in response to a Public Records Act request. The City chose not to invoke the personnel records exemption. That was a deliberate choice.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Josh Rowan is the director of transportation for the city of Oakland. A resident of Oakland, he joined the city as transportation director in April 2024 during the tenure of former mayor Sheng Thao. He then served as the city of Oakland’s public works director for several months before returning to the transportation director role in 2025.

Prior to working for Oakland, Rowan served as commissioner of the city of Atlanta’s department of transportation. His career in the public sector includes work as a program manager for transportation, transit, education, healthcare, and law enforcement capital construction. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

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Oakland Report provides accurate, deep-dive, data-driven reporting and analysis that you will find nowhere else. If you value our work, please donate. All contributions go directly to sustaining and growing our 501(c)(3) nonprofit work:

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Oakland Report continues its coverage of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) board as it works to close a long-term budget gap and avoid returning to state receivership only one year after exiting it. In this installment, we examine how OUSD handled one-time pandemic relief and attendance-based funding reductions, compared with Hayward Unified and Berkeley Unified.

‘Those funds are now gone’

The basic reason for Oakland Unified School District’s (OUSD’s) financial distress is no enigma. Like virtually all other public budget deficits, OUSD’s basic problem stems from spending more than comes in.

Many factors created the over $100 million structural budget gap OUSD has struggled to fix.1 But the board’s promise of a “transparent” budgeting process for closing that gap is not supported by its actual record of poor financial disclosure and lack of follow-through.

In this article, we examine two specific factors which illustrate the overall problem at OUSD: poor financial management practices, combined with lack of transparency to the public about how the district is handling the public money with which it has been entrusted to educate Oakland’s children.

We also compare Oakland’s financial management of these two factors with that of other nearby school districts in Berkeley and Hayward.

On its budget webpage about the COVID-19 grants it received during the pandemic, OUSD tells families to “think of one-time funds like an inheritance. Money that was always going to run out.”

While that may be true in some cases, in other cases an “inheritance” — especially a large one like the pandemic relief grants — can be managed in a way that stabilizes or even elevates one’s financial position.

On its webpage about the COVID-19 relief grants, the district states flatly: “Those funds are now gone.”2 Yet the webpage offers no detailed accounting of where the “inheritance” went.

When journalists and state reviewers asked where the money went, the district’s answers were incomplete at best.

Similarly, OUSD’s budget woes are driven in part by steadily declining enrollment, which results in less funding from the state of California, which distributes school funding based on school attendance.

Yet the enrollment decline was neither sudden nor unforeseeable. Statewide enrollment has fallen for a decade, and OUSD’s superintendent’s reports have warned against budgeting on hoped-for attendance gains.

Sound financial management dictates that when income is expected to go down — especially due to a significant, long-term income reduction like a pay cut or job loss — then expenses should be reduced to stay within budget.

Yet OUSD has not made or sustained the difficult decisions needed to reduce its long-term spending — instead repeatedly choosing short-term cuts while increasing its ongoing regular expenses like payroll.

Key findings

• OUSD was allocated $129.9 million in final-round federal COVID-19 pandemic relief funding — nearly four times Hayward Unified’s $33.5 million and about 25 times Berkeley Unified’s $5.3 million, in part because the money followed federal poverty formulas.34

• OUSD refused public records requests about its COVID-19 grant expenses, and ended up having to repay nearly $1 million in relief money spending the state flagged as questionable.5678

• The money appears to have been spent, not forfeited — largely on staffing and one-time pay the district could not sustain once the funds expired.910

• Many districts have lost enrollment, but not all have gone broke. California funds districts on average daily attendance (ADA), so when enrollment goes down, so does a major source of school funding. Yet as of March 2025, Oakland and Hayward held “negative” budget certifications, the state’s most severe warning, while Berkeley reports itself solvent. (Oakland more recently self-certified its budget as “positive” based on $30 million in budget cuts it has yet to specify.)11121314

The ‘inheritance’: what OUSD got, and what it hasn’t revealed

The pandemic brought a series of one-time federal aid packages: over $2 billion to California’s K-12 system under the CARES Act alone, and over $23 billion in total financial aid across three rounds. The final and largest round gave OUSD $129.9 million.1516

This temporary federal funding (also referred to as “stimulus” funding) was a sliver of hope for Oakland’s school district, educators, and families during a uniquely unstable period.17

What happened next is harder for the public to see than it should be — and that lack of public transparency by OUSD is telling.

In 2022, the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters asked more than 30 school districts for their stimulus spending records. Most districts complied — but Oakland Unified refused multiple times. “Unfortunately, The District is unable to locate any document responsive to your request,” a district legal assistant wrote at the time.

It is reasonable to consider that a district confident in its financial record would have answered the requests, especially with such a high-profile, large-dollar grant.

CalMatters also reported that OUSD repaid nearly $1 million in relief money that state reviewers flagged as questionable — including roughly $360,000 for three commercial trucks. OUSD disputed the finding, saying the trucks delivered food, protective equipment, and technology.

According to EdSource’s database of quarterly reports, as of March 31, 2023, OUSD had reported spending only 40.2% of its largest relief grant, the third round of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding (ESSER III) — $52,257,010 of the $129.9 million. Hayward had reported 73.6% and Berkeley over 90%.18

Note: that 40.2% was a mid-period reading, not a final tally. Districts had until September 30, 2024 to commit the funds, and reports captured only money already spent.19

We found no public record that OUSD forfeited (gave up) a material share of the money — aside from the $1 million it paid back — and considerable evidence it ultimately spent the money.

The district put about $16 million of relief funds toward one-time teacher payments in 2023, and its post-2024 deficit traces to relief-funded hiring — hundreds of teachers, social workers, aides, and tutors — that it could not afford once the money expired.20

The record shows that the problem is not that OUSD let the money expire unused. Rather, it appears that the district spent the one-time money on ongoing obligations, declined to show the receipts, and then described the shortfall as an outside event — an “inheritance” that ran out — rather than the more complicated reality that the shortfall appears to be a result of OUSD’s own poor financial choices.

The attendance problem: fewer students equals less money, every year

California is one of a handful of states that fund districts on the number of students actually in school each day (absences for illness, truancy and other reasons count as “not in school”) through a formula known as Average Daily Attendance (ADA). OUSD’s enrollment decline leads to lower attendance and, with it, less state revenue.

Federal data reports enrollment across Oakland Unified at 53,118 students in 2018-19, falling to 47,022 by 2024-25 — a decline of 11.5%. Those totals include OUSD-authorized charter schools; district-run school enrollment — about 34,000 — is what drives ADA revenue.

Officials attribute the decline to falling birth rates, families moving away, and competition from charter, private, and neighboring districts that accept transfers of Oakland students.

OUSD’s enrollment decline was neither sudden nor unexpected. Statewide enrollment has fallen for a decade, multiple expert forecasts indicate that the trend will continue, and OUSD’s superintendent’s reports have warned against budgeting on hoped-for attendance gains “not supported by historical and demographic enrollment data.”21

Still, as Oakland Report has reported, the district’s spending kept rising even as enrollment steadily – and predictably – fell.22

Hayward: spent the money, still went negative

Hayward Unified School District (HUSD) spent its relief money far faster than Oakland — showing that spending the funds is not the same as accounting for them, nor is it the same as fiscal health.

A 2021 state audit found that Hayward, at the time of review, was “unable to provide documentation to support the allowability of more than $4 million” of its first-round ESSER pandemic relief spending — findings HUSD said it was working to resolve.

The same audit noted that HUSD spent nearly all of that award on laptops, distance-learning training, and protective equipment — while offering no optional in-person instruction until May 2021. The audit framed this as a spending-pattern observation, not dishonesty.

By Hayward’s own accounting, its pandemic relief funds — $87 million in all — were spent by the September 2024 expiration. But the spending did not prevent a budget reckoning. In December 2024, HUSD reported a $55 million shortfall, triggering a “negative” budget self-certification — meaning the district may not meet its financial obligations — and state fiscal advisers were assigned to monitor it.23

Like OUSD, Hayward blames expired COVID-19 grant funding, enrollment decline, and enrollment-driven state budget pressures. Michael Fine, head of the state’s fiscal crisis team, offered a kinder read than he gave Oakland: Hayward’s new leaders “inherited some issues and did the right thing” by self-certifying negative.

Berkeley: financially solvent — with caveats Oakland should note

In contrast to OUSD and HUSD, Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) appears to have spent nearly all of its federal award — 93.4% per its audited FY 2021-22 financial statements — with documented spending on preschool, meals, and expanded learning.24

BUSD today states that it “is fiscally solvent and meets the 3% reserve required by the State of California.”

In fairness to OUSD, Berkeley’s award was $5.3 million — about 4% of Oakland’s — so it had a far smaller windfall to absorb.

Also, Berkeley Unified received significant revenue from voter-approved local school taxes funding smaller classes, libraries, technology, and arts — a cushion against the same roughly 10.5% enrollment decline that OUSD absorbed with a somewhat smaller special-tax cushion.25

In June 2026, BUSD adopted $11.2 million in cuts to balance its 2026-27 budget, and it still projects over $7 million in deficits for 2027-29.26

Berkeley’s solvency through a proportionate drop suggests disciplined budgeting can keep these pressures from becoming a crisis.

Read this related article:

‘New commitments without a clear plan to pay for them’

The COVID-19 stimulus grant funding story at OUSD fits a pattern Oakland Report has documented in past articles.

Alameda County superintendent of schools Alysse Castro, approving OUSD’s 2025-26 budget as meeting only “absolute minimum requirements,” described the district’s history: “requesting plans, then disregarding them; rejecting staff recommendations; ... and, when difficult decisions are finally made, rescinding them shortly thereafter.”27

In April she issued a formal “Going Concern” notice, warning that OUSD was “continuing to make new commitments without a clear plan to pay for them.”28

In June she notified the public that the new Oakland Education Association (OEA) teachers union contract “endangers the district’s fiscal stability” absent roughly $30 million a year in cuts the board has not identified.

The spending commitments have kept coming. In February 2026 the board approved laying off roughly 400 workers, but weeks later it agreed to a teachers’ contract adding $32 million in new 2026-27 costs, rising to $60 million in new costs per year by 2027-28.

As Oakland Report documented in April, four board members worked for or received campaign support from the OEA, and the interim superintendent is a past OEA president.29

That said, there has been some encouraging financial movement in recent weeks. In May 2026, the board self-certified its budget outlook as “positive” — its first in over two decades — and in June it adopted a $1.205 billion budget for 2026-27.30

But the “positive” self-certification rests on a concerning budget maneuver Castro has repeatedly criticized: about $30 million per year in future cuts the board has not publicly specified.31

Read this related article:

Methodology and caveats

• The three districts we compared in this article differ significantly in size, relief received, and local tax structure.

• Correlation is not causation: fiscal outcomes reflect many factors beyond COVID-19 pandemic relief fund management and enrollment declines.

• Quarterly spending reports lag actual commitments, so mid-period “percent spent” figures understate final spending.

• No public tally of final ESSER III spending versus forfeiture exists, and we could not confirm OUSD’s final total — precisely because the district has declined to release detailed records.

• This analysis draws on EdSource’s compilation of quarterly COVID-relief spending reports; State Auditor reports; CalMatters’ 2022 public records investigation; district budget documents; federal enrollment data; and local media coverage.

Other considerations and counterpoints

In fairness to OUSD and its defenders, we note the following, largely without rebuttal:

• The forces squeezing OUSD’s budget — expiring one-time funds, falling enrollment, inflation, and attendance-based funding — are real, statewide, and hit high-poverty urban districts like Oakland hardest.

• Spending relief funds on people was widely urged in 2021-23 to address learning loss and student mental health; many districts did the same and face the same financial cliff.

• OUSD structured its 2023 teacher payments as one-time, to avoid building raises into the base budget.

• OUSD’s May 2026 “positive” budget self-certification and the 2026-27 budget, with about $99 million in reductions, are genuine, if fragile, progress.

• OUSD did file the state-required quarterly ESSER expenditure reports, which is how third-party analysts were able to track its spending pace at all.32

• Berkeley’s health owes much to advantages Oakland could not precisely replicate: a far smaller windfall and substantial voter-approved special taxes.

Unsolved: exactly where OUSD’s ‘inheritance’ went

The evidence supports a narrower — and in some ways more troubling — conclusion than “OUSD wasted its COVID-19 money.”

The district received a nine-figure financial windfall, spent it in ways it has declined to fully document, absorbed one-time money into ongoing commitments, and framed the predictable expiration of the funding as a cause of its deficit.

Its neighboring districts faced the same pandemic relief expiration and enrollment declines. Hayward at least confronted its numbers honestly, by its regulators’ account; Berkeley stayed solvent while still cutting.

The data suggests OUSD’s crisis is less a story about money that disappeared than about a district that has yet to show the public — or perhaps itself — exactly where its money goes.

[Editor’s note: After this article was published, we added a parenthetical clarification explaining that Average Daily Attendance (ADA) includes absences, meaning that school districts receive less funding when enrolled students are absent due to illness, truancy, and other reasons. Our thanks to an alert reader who requested the clarification.]

About the author

Tarini Kakkar is a student journalist majoring in Cognitive Science and English at University of California, Berkeley. She is particularly interested in community and data-driven reporting across print, audio, and video platforms.

Growing up in Delhi NCR, India instilled her appreciation for arts and culture and her interest in political multimedia. Attending UC Berkeley gave her an expanded platform to engage with various student media, and she now spends much of her time juggling meetings with academics and coffee runs.

Tarini is a steadfast advocate for transparency and fairness in journalism, aiming to build a career in reporting in confident defiance of the claim that news is “a dying industry.” She is participating in Oakland Report’s inaugural summer internship program.

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PART THREE OF A SERIES

Oakland Report is examining Oakland’s First Friday festivals and the neighboring Uptown arts and entertainment district. In our first installment, we found late-night crime increases an average 44% near the Fox Theater on festival nights. In our second installment, we tested the effectiveness of the city’s new safety plan at the June 5 festival. In this installment, we look at the economic and cultural engine at the center of it all: the Fox Theater.

Uptown Oakland’s cultural and economic engine

Standing inside The Den, the bar that sits just to the north side of the Fox Theater in Uptown Oakland, general manager Tony Leong spoke candidly about the state of the Uptown neighborhood — and about what he and neighboring businesses see as an opportunity to revitalize the district.

“We are Oakland’s greeting card and doorstep, and often people’s first impression of Oakland. Why is solving this [late-night street takeover] problem not a priority? The city deserves this to be the area of culture, especially with the venue already here.”

— Tony Leong, Fox Theater general manager, June 2026

The “problem” is the one Oakland Report documented in the first two installments of this series: reported crime increases an average 44% in the late-night hours near the Fox Theater on the nights of First Friday festivals, driven largely by chaotic street takeovers that have routinely converged in front of the venue after the festivals.1

Video clip 1. Warning: graphic content. Compilation of chaotic after-hours street takeover scenes in the streets near the official First Friday event. (Source: Instagram / various accounts)

Social media posts suggest these unsanctioned gatherings have become more organized over time — and their effect reaches beyond the incidents themselves, into the public perception of Oakland and the revenue of every business in the district.

“It’s a death by a thousand cuts,” the venue’s manager said. “If [theater patrons] drive down here and their car gets broken into, it shatters their peace of mind and becomes a night out that wasn’t fun. Then, they’ll start going to neighboring cities for events.”

The data suggests that the stakes are considerable. The Fox Theater is not merely a bystander to the neighborhood’s late-night troubles — it is, by most available measures, the economic and cultural engine of the Uptown arts and entertainment district.

Key findings

• The Fox Theater hosts more than 300,000 attendees a year and has held over 1,700 events since reopening in 2009, according to figures provided by the venue. Its $75 million restoration is widely credited with catalyzing the revival of the Uptown arts and entertainment district.23

• The venue reports paying more than $150,000 a year into neighborhood safety and operations. These costs include $80,000 to subsidize two full-time Uptown/Downtown street ambassadors, $65,000 to keep the Franklin Plaza Garage open on show nights, and $12,500 in city parking purchases — plus a $50,000 contribution of security cameras to the Downtown Safe City Network.

• Independent venues across the nation are under rising cost pressure. Per the National Independent Venue Association’s (NIVA’s) 2025 State of Live study, 64% of independent stages were unprofitable in 2024, and a majority expect artist fees (60%) and staffing costs (58%) to rise further.4

• The city’s new late-night safety plan showed partial success in its first test. As Oakland Report reported this month, late-night crime near the Fox on the June 5 festival night was still roughly 60% above a typical non-festival Friday — but the street takeovers in front of the theater were noticeably reduced.5

The Fox anchored Uptown’s revival — and catalyzed Oakland’s live music ecosystem

The Fox Theater opened in 1928 as one of Oakland’s grand movie palaces. It went dark in 1966, and remained shuttered for more than four decades.

Its restoration and reopening in 2009 became a centerpiece of then-mayor Jerry Brown’s strategy to revive Uptown Oakland. The city’s redevelopment agency, the nonprofit Friends of the Oakland Fox, and developer Phil Tagami assembled a $75 million restoration, in a shared-use plan that placed the Oakland School for the Arts (OSA), the charter school Brown founded, in the building.6

The theater reopened on Feb. 5, 2009 as a 2,800-seat concert hall operated by Another Planet Entertainment (APE), and was explicitly envisioned as the hub of an Uptown Arts and Entertainment District.7

The move appears to have paid off. By 2015, the district manager of Oakland’s Uptown and Downtown community benefit districts credited the Fox’s reopening with helping drive roughly 200 ground-floor storefront openings in the core downtown area, many clustering around the arts and entertainment district.

The venue’s own figures tell a similar story at closer range. When the Fox opened, it says, only three night-time businesses operated in the immediate neighborhood; within five years, more than 50 bars and restaurants had opened within a few blocks — many of which now base their staffing on the Fox’s event calendar.

Since 2009, the Fox Theater has hosted world-famous performers from Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Van Morrison to East Bay heroes Green Day and Metallica to current stars like Lorde and Billie Eilish — along with then-president Barack Obama, who spoke at the venue during his 2012 re-election campaign.8

On October 2 of this year — a First Friday festival night — The Daily Show alumni Hasan Minhaj and Ronny Chieng will perform two shows at the Fox Theater on their “Hasan Hates Ronny” tour, which the venue says the comedians plan to film for an upcoming special.9

The venue also functions as civic infrastructure. It shares its building with OSA, donates $25,000 a year to the school, hosts its spring concerts and graduations, and runs an internship program with its students, according to the venue. It has hosted community events for organizations including Oakland Promise, Children’s Hospital Oakland, and the East Oakland Black Culture Zone.

The Fox Theater generates an estimated $17 million per year in economic benefit to Uptown Oakland

The scale of the Fox’s operation translates into significant economic activity for the surrounding district.

According to figures provided by the venue, the Fox employs more than 100 people on any given show night, including security, bar staff, ushers, union stagehands (IATSE Local 107), engineers, and production and janitorial staff — and its operational costs run well over $50,000 per show.

Since reopening after the pandemic, the venue says it has spent over $2 million on building overhead and $1.8 million on utilities. Since its grand reopening in 2009, it has spent more than $2.5 million upgrading its lighting and audio systems three times to remain competitive with other regional concert halls.

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National data suggest how that economic investment ripples outward to the city’s benefit. NIVA’s 2025 State of Live study — the first national economic analysis of the independent live entertainment sector — found that fan spending tied to independent venues generated $10.62 billion in off-site spending nationwide in 2024, including $1.34 billion at restaurants and bars, and that the sector generated an estimated $3.14 billion in local tax revenue.

Applying NIVA’s Music Venue Economic Impact Calculator, a modeling tool built by a Colorado State University researcher, a venue of the Fox Theater’s size generates an estimated $17 million per year in regional economic impact — roughly $57 per attendee across 300,000 annual visitors.10

These modeled figures represent total economic activity — including the venue’s own operations and multiplier effects — not simply cash spent at neighboring businesses. While they are an estimate, not an audit of economic impact, they offer insight into the value of the Fox Theater to Oakland’s vibrancy and success.

Even discounted heavily, the direction of the numbers is consistent with what the surrounding district reports anecdotally: bars and restaurants near the Fox Theater staff up on show nights, and prior to the pandemic, the venue says, most of its patrons visited neighborhood restaurants before or after shows.

The Fox Theater pays over $157,000 per year into the Uptown district’s safety and operations

Beyond its programming, the Fox reports directly funding the district’s public-safety and operations infrastructure:

• $80,000 per year to the Uptown Downtown Business Improvement District to subsidize two full-time community ambassadors, who provide hospitality, safety escorts, and street beautification;

• $65,000 per year to help keep the Franklin Plaza Garage open on show nights;

• $12,500 per year purchasing street parking from the City of Oakland; and

• $50,000 contribution of security cameras to the Downtown Safe City Network, the public-private camera system that feeds a central monitoring hub.

Independent venues like the Fox Theater face rising costs — with little cushion

The Fox’s investments come as independent venues nationally operate on thin or negative margins.

NIVA’s State of Live study found that 64% of independent stages were not profitable in 2024, that 31% of all venue expenses went directly to artist and booking fees, and that a majority of venues expected their largest costs to keep climbing in 2025 — led by artist fees (60% of venues) and staffing (58%), with insurance, beverages, rent, maintenance, and government taxes and fees close behind.

The Fox’s own recent history illustrates the fragility. The venue was closed for 18 months during the pandemic — from March 2020 to September 2021 — with zero show income. The venue says the city provided no rent relief during the closure, though a federal grant and APE’s decision to retain its full-time staff allowed it to restart quickly after pandemic restrictions were finally lifted.

By the venue’s account, its strongest year was 2019, at roughly 130 shows — a level of activity it is working to rebuild as concerns about late-night safety in the district have weighed on attendance in recent years.

It is reasonable to consider the possibility that a venue operating in this cost environment has limited capacity to absorb further losses from a deteriorating neighborhood reputation — which may explain why the Fox and its neighbors have pressed the city so publicly for a sustained response to the late-night chaos and overall crime in the neighborhood.

The city’s response: a new safety plan, and a first partial success

On June 4, days before last month’s First Fridays festival, the city announced a coordinated set of community safety and operations improvements for the Downtown, Uptown, and Koreatown-Northgate neighborhoods on Friday and Saturday evenings.11

The city’s new safety plan included enhanced Oakland Police Department staffing into the late-night hours, reinforced by the California Highway Patrol and Alameda County Sheriff’s Office; violence-prevention and MACRO (“Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland”) patrols; code and vendor enforcement; post-event street cleaning; and road closures with ‘no parking’ zones on Broadway and Telegraph Avenue from 15th to 20th Streets, with four intersections closed to through traffic.

“Violence is not an option in Oakland,” mayor Barbara Lee said in announcing the effort. (Oakland currently has the highest violent crime rate in the state.)12

Council member Carroll Fife framed the challenge as broader than one event: “We need public safety infrastructure every single night of the week.”1314 (Council member Fife has strongly advocated and voted to ‘defund’ the Oakland Police Department.)15

As Oakland Report reported in the second installment of this series, the safety plan’s first test on June 5 produced mixed results. Reported crime within a quarter-mile of the Fox from 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. still spiked — six incidents, roughly 60% above the average non-festival Friday, and slightly above the average for June festival nights — and the incidents again skewed violent.

But the street takeovers in front of the theater were noticeably reduced: by eyewitness estimates, the night saw crowds of roughly 1,000 people rather than the typical 3,000, with vehicles prevented from blocking the street out front of the Fox.

Leaders at the Fox Theater told Oakland Report they were encouraged by the June effort — the most visible and coordinated city response they have seen in many years — while emphasizing that what the district needs is not a one-time show of force but a clear plan, communicated publicly and executed consistently.

The city’s plan, notably, defines no benchmarks or metrics for measuring its own success, and no set duration beyond individual festival dates. Whether the June 5 improvement becomes a trend, the data suggests, will depend on that consistency.

Caveats and limitations

Several limits apply to the figures in this analysis.

• The Fox’s attendance, employment, spending, and contribution figures were provided by the venue and its operator, Another Planet Entertainment, and could not be independently audited; we present them as the venue’s reported figures.

• NIVA is a trade association whose State of Live study — built from member surveys and IMPLAN (“Impact Analysis for Planning”) economic modeling — exists in part to support advocacy for the sector; NIVA describes its estimates as conservative, but they are estimates.

• Modeled economic impact figures measure total economic activity, not just money spent at neighboring businesses.

• As we have emphasized throughout this series, correlation is not causation: a single festival night’s crime data does not establish whether the city’s safety plan is working, and the Fox Theater’s role in Uptown’s revival, while widely credited, cannot be isolated from the broader redevelopment investments made in the district over the same period.

Other considerations and counterpoints

We present the strongest opposing considerations, largely without further rebuttal, for readers to consider:

• First Fridays organizers maintain that the late-night crime and street takeovers are separate from the official festival, which is a family-oriented event held in Koreatown-Northgate, a few blocks from Uptown, and which ends in the early evening. Organizers have argued — contrary to evidence — that media coverage unfairly conflates the two, and that the late-night crowds are “a City of Oakland problem” requiring citywide strategies rather than a festival problem.16

• The city’s own plan asserts that the festivals themselves are “safe, successful, and invaluable,” attributing community concerns to “unrelated incidents” occurring hours after the official events end.

• The Fox Theater has a direct commercial stake in the city’s enforcement posture. Its operator, APE, is one of the largest independent concert promoters in Northern California, and figures the venue provides in support of greater city action serve its business interests as well as the city’s.

• The city’s June effort produced real, observable improvement in the street conditions in front of the theater on its first attempt — an outcome that, whatever its limits, is undeniably better news than had the takeovers continued unabated.

The Fox Theater is an economic anchor worth protecting — if the city’s follow-through holds

The Fox Theater is, by the available data and by wide consensus, the economic and cultural anchor of Oakland’s Uptown arts and entertainment district — a restored landmark that draws more than 300,000 people a year, sustains a neighborhood ecosystem of bars and restaurants, and pays directly into the Uptown district’s safety and operations.

That anchor sits at the center of a persistent late-night public safety problem that the city has only just begun to seriously address, with a first effort that reduced the street takeovers but not the crime.

The venue’s manager put the stakes in terms any Oaklander can recognize: the Fox Theater is the city’s greeting card. Whether the city treats the district that way — with the consistency, coordination, and communication its businesses have asked for — is the question the rest of this summer’s festivals will answer.

Read these related articles:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Urbach is a lifelong Bay Area resident and recent graduate of University of California, Berkeley. He is inspired by journalism’s ability to connect communities and shine a light on the powerful.

Eric has covered a range of topics including technology, telecom and AI policy in the halls of the U.S. Congress; as well as city government, local business, and arts and culture for the San Francisco Examiner, Bay City News, Broadband Breakfast and The Daily Californian.

Prior to his work as a reporter, Eric worked in the music industry as a signed touring musician, recording and live sound engineer, and quality control and public relations for a vinyl record manufacturing company, among other roles.

Eric continues to build his reporting skills by participating in Oakland Report’s inaugural summer internship program before beginning his graduate studies at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism this fall.

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Video clip 1: Former mayor Sheng Thao’s farewell address on her last day in office after being recalled by Oakland voters following her indictment on federal corruption charges. Thao was instrumental in steering the Coliseum deal to first-time developer Ray Bobbitt. (Source: Instagram @mayorshengthao)

Oakland Agenda Watch provides summaries of key items on upcoming public meeting agendas that catch our attention. In this installment, we look at the “Second Amendment to Coliseum Complex Sale Agreement” — the sole agenda item at today’s special Oakland city council meeting — and put a number on what the proposed public financing would be worth to first-time developer Ray Bobbitt’s company.

Tens of millions in public subsidy through low-interest loans

Today the Oakland city council will consider a proposal to sell the city’s 50 percent share of the Oakland Coliseum Complex to first-time developer Ray Bobbitt’s company, Oakland Acquisition Company (OAC), the affiliate of African American Sports and Entertainment Group (AASEG).1

As Oakland Report reported last week, the new deal would sell the city’s share of the indoor Oakland Arena parcel for a $50 million lump sum, and the outdoor Coliseum stadium parcel for $60 million “with seller financing from the City” — meaning, a loan.

The deal would include a $5 million credit for a deposit Bobbitt’s company previously paid, a 6 percent share of gross ticket sales to the city, and a closing payment to the buyer of $16,438.36 per day for the remainder of 2026.2

The other 50 percent share of the property is currently held by Coliseum Way Partners (CWP), an affiliate of the Athletics baseball franchise, which bought it from Alameda County in 2019 for $85 million. CWP has made all required payments since.345

To put the whole complex in Bobbitt’s hands, two transactions must close, and under the proposed terms, both governments would finance their own buyer:

• The city’s half: OAC would pay $50 million cash for the Arena parcel and receive a $60 million city loan for the stadium parcel at 5 percent interest, with the first payment potentially not due until 2032.

• The county’s half: Alameda County would pay CWP $115 million in cash to buy back the 50 percent share of the property it sold in 2019 — $30 million (35 percent) more than it received — then convey it to OAC in exchange for repayment of $115 million over five to seven years at 5 percent compounding interest. The county’s term sheet requires no collateral and no letter of credit, only that OAC maintain $30 million in “enterprise value” during repayment.

Key findings

• The city’s and county’s 5 percent interest loan rates are lower than every benchmark we could identify — consumer or commercial. It is below the national average 30-year home mortgage (6.49 percent), below the prime rate banks charge their most creditworthy business customers (6.75 percent), and below even the cheapest fully-secured commercial mortgages. The proposed interest rate is 0.44 points above the yield on a risk-free 10-year U.S. Treasury note.678910

• Under our illustrative estimate, the below-market financing would subsidize roughly $45 million to $114 million to OAC over the repayment period, depending on what market rate interest the company would otherwise pay — before counting any development profit.

• OAC’s demonstrated cash to date — the $5 million deposit — equals 2.2 percent of the $225 million combined purchase price of the property it would come to control.11

How Bobbitt got the deal: from negotiating rights to a budget crisis sale

Bobbitt’s path to the deal ran through fan activism rather than real estate experience.

An East Oakland native and Marine Corps veteran, Bobbitt spent years as a lead organizer of efforts to keep professional sports in Oakland — heading the Oakland Coliseum Economic Impact and Legal Action Committee, which pressed local officials to fight the Raiders’ Las Vegas move — and served on civic bodies including Oakland’s Parks and Recreation Commission.1213

On Juneteenth 2020, Bobbitt announced a proposal to bring the NFL back to Oakland under the league’s first majority-Black ownership group; AASEG grew out of that campaign.

Neither AASEG’s published biography of its founder nor contemporaneous profiles describe prior experience developing large-scale real estate — within AASEG, that track record belongs to partners such as developer Alan Dones, and the capital to Loop Capital.14

The proposal before the council is the latest turn in a six-year arc:

• 2020: Bobbitt forms AASEG with former city manager Robert Bobb, developer Alan Dones, consultant Shonda Scott, and sports agent Bill Duffy, with financial backing from Chicago-based investment firm Loop Capital.

• 2021: Oakland city council unanimously grants AASEG exclusive rights to negotiate buying or leasing the city’s half of the Coliseum — over the city administration’s request for more time to vet AASEG and a competing group — on a resolution authored by then-vice mayor Rebecca Kaplan. AASEG pitches a WNBA franchise and a development it prices at more than $5 billion.

• 2022–2023: The WNBA bid does not materialize, and the A’s rebuff AASEG’s offer to buy their half of the site.15

• 2023: Two AASEG co-founders — Brien Dixon and Karim Muhammad, who each claim a quarter share of the company they say was founded with Bobbitt and a fourth member-manager in September 2020 — sue Bobbitt, alleging breach of fiduciary duty, side deals over equity in the project, and that Bobbitt substituted his own entity, AASEG Land, for the original company in the negotiating agreement with the city. Their complaint asserts the move “could also be considered as an act of fraud committed against the City of Oakland.” The allegations are still being litigated in court; Bobbitt declined at the time to respond to the complaint.16

• May 2024: Mayor Sheng Thao’s administration announces a deal to sell the city’s 50 percent to AASEG for $105 million — presented as the path to balancing a deficit-ridden budget, with $63 million of hoped-for proceeds built into that year’s spending plan. Thao’s office acknowledges the unusually fast transaction “is not without risks.”17

• June 2024: On June 20, FBI agents raid Thao’s home and properties of the Duong family, owners of the city’s curbside recycling contractor. Six days later, the council approves the $105 million sale ordinance.18

• Late 2024: The sale agreement is finalized in September 2024; a first amendment raises the price to $110 million, due in full by May 30, 2025 — a deadline the buyer does not meet. In November 2024, Thao is recalled by 60 percent of voters, the first successful mayoral recall in Oakland’s history.

• January 2025: Federal prosecutors indict Thao, her partner Andre Jones, and the two Duongs on conspiracy, bribery, and honest-services fraud charges in an alleged “pay-to-play” scheme involving the recycling contractor. All four plead not guilty; trial is tentatively set for October 2026.19

Thao’s federal indictment makes no allegation concerning the Coliseum transaction, AASEG, or Bobbitt — and Thao, like every defendant, is presumed innocent.

But the sale’s central terms were negotiated and approved in the months between the raid and the recall, by an administration whose chief executive now stands accused of trading official acts for bribes in an unrelated matter.

That is the context the current council inherits as it weighs extending the same buyer $60 million in low-interest public financing.

What would a market lender charge?

The proposed county loan is, in commercial terms, unusual on three counts at once: the rate, the security, and the borrower’s record.

As of this week, an Oakland homeowner with strong credit and a house pledged as collateral pays a national average of 6.49 percent on a 30-year mortgage.

The prime rate — the benchmark banks reserve for their most creditworthy business customers — stands at 6.75 percent.

The cheapest fully-secured commercial real estate money starts around 5.6 percent, and loans to acquire and develop land — the closest analog to the Coliseum transaction — typically run 7 to 10 percent from banks and 9 to 14 percent or more from private lenders.

The proposed public financing proposes 5 percent interest — 1.49 points below the homeowner’s rate and 1.75 points below the prime rate — with no collateral, no letter of credit, and a borrower that, in its original contract with the city, has paid only $5 million of $110 million that came due in full on May 30, 2025. (The city extended the deadline when it became clear that Bobbitt’s company would not timely come through with the agreed-upon payments.)

What the financing is worth to Bobbitt’s company: an illustrative estimate

We cannot calculate OAC’s ultimate profit from the Coliseum deal — that depends on development costs, land values, and entitlements that do not yet exist, on remediation costs that have never been publicly priced, and on a city loan whose terms have not been finalized.

AASEG has described a multi-billion-dollar development vision for the site; supervisor Elisa Márquez put it more bluntly in May: “People are going to make billions of dollars off this transaction.”

Video clip 2: “Oakland deserves better.” Supervisor Elisa Márquez calls developer Ray Bobbitt’s eleventh-hour proposal to avoid liability for environmental issues “unconscionable” ahead of the board rejecting his proposal. The board approved the term sheet as originally proposed. May 28, 2026. (Source: County of Alameda.)

What we can estimate is the value of the below-market financing itself — the interest OAC would avoid paying by borrowing from the two governments instead of the market.

Our method: We modeled the county’s published repayment schedule — the full $115 million outstanding for five years, then three equal installments in years five through seven — and assumed that the city’s $60 million loan mirrors that structure.

We then calculated the interest difference between the proposed 5 percent and two market scenarios: a conservative 8 percent (mid-range bank land-development pricing) and an upper 12 percent (private-credit pricing, arguably the realistic comparable for an uncollateralized borrower with missed payments).

We used compounding interest on the outstanding balance, and added the closing payment of $16,438.36 per day, roughly $1.5 million for an October 1 closing.

The result: roughly $45 million under the conservative scenario, and roughly $114 million under the upper scenario — value that flows to OAC in the form of avoided interest, plus the closing payment, before any redevelopment occurs.

These are estimates, not precise figures, and we state the assumptions so readers — and the parties — can check them and decide for themselves what to think about them.

Two cents on the dollar

The structure’s other notable feature is how little of OAC’s own cash it appears to require.

The combined price of both halves of the property is $225 million. Of that, $115 million would be a county loan and $60 million a city loan.

The $50 million Arena lump sum payment coincides with a third-party Arena sale — the county term sheet anticipates an unnamed buyer, reported to be Oak View Group, paying at least $100 million for the eight-acre Arena, with at least $50 million flowing to the county.20

It stands to reason that the Arena buyer’s money, not OAC’s, would fund the cash portions of both government deals — though the final deal terms ultimately may require more from OAC than the record shows.

On the published record, OAC’s own demonstrated cash remains limited to the $5 million deposit paid in August 2024 — 2.2 percent of the purchase price of a 112-acre complex it would come to control.

When a buyer contributes little equity, percentage returns on that equity become extraordinarily large if the project succeeds — and the losses, if it fails, fall mostly on the lenders. Here, the lenders would be the city and the county, meaning the public.

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Other considerations and counterpoints

There are fair arguments made by the deal’s supporters, which we present for readers to consider:

• OAC takes on real costs and liabilities. It would accept the county’s interest “as is,” waiving the right to sue over environmental conditions at a site with documented solvent contamination. It would assume operating costs the governments now carry; pay the city 6 percent of gross ticket sales at both parcels; and remain bound by affordable-housing conditions on the stadium parcel. It also would remain bound by the terms of a settlement of a lawsuit filed by Communities for a Better Environment over environmental issues at the property.

• Below-market public lending is a legal, commonly used tool when a government concludes a project’s public benefits — here, the redevelopment of a major East Oakland property — sufficiently justifies the subsidy. The question is whether that judgment is being made openly, with the subsidy’s size acknowledged.

• Closing delivers real money and ends real costs to the city: roughly $50 million or more in near-term cash to the city, the end of the city’s stadium subsidy (around $6 million per year), and the simultaneous two-government closing that has been the stated obstacle since 2024.

Caveats

Our estimate of the public loan’s value to Bobbitt’s company is illustrative, not an audit. Market-rate ranges are national averages, not a quote for this specific borrower. (Neither the city nor the county have indicated that they conducted an in-depth assessment of Bobbitt’s company’s creditworthiness to arrive at the proposed 5 percent interest rate.)

Our model assumes each loan is repaid in three equal principal installments at years five through seven, with interest compounding annually until repayment; a different amortization schedule would change the totals on both sides.

The closing payment depends on the actual closing date. (Last week, a city staff person told a council committee they estimated the deal would close by September.)

None of these figures is a profit estimate — they measure the public financing subsidy only. This remains a proposal; terms may change before or on July 14.

The record supports this much: to close a sale first approved in 2024 under the leadership of a federally indicted and then recalled mayor, two governments now propose to lend the buyer $175 million at a rate below what any lender we can identify would charge — below a homeowner’s mortgage, below the prime rate — a subsidy we estimate at $45 million to $114 million, while the buyer’s own cash in the deal stands at two cents on the dollar.

Whether the promised redevelopment of East Oakland justifies that public subsidy is a policy judgment for the council and the board of supervisors.

Making the size of the public subsidy visible seems like a reasonable step which neither board has voluntarily taken as far as we can tell.

Read these related articles:

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Video clip 1. Oakland has long struggled to reduce the volume of trash dumped in its streets. (Sources: Instagram @KTVU2; X @senecaspeaks21; Oakland Report)

Oakland Report examines the data behind the headlines. In this installment, we take a look at how five local media outlets covered Oakland’s $9.2 million Crankstart illegal dumping grant — and compare it to the city audit questioning its main strategy.

Comparing media coverage in Oakland

When news breaks in Oakland, a single event can be told from many different angles across many outlets.

In many media outlets, selective details and unchallenged quotes from interested parties often take the forefront, while other relevant details of an issue are glossed over or even left out entirely.

This fragmentation is partly a function of media outlets’ limited capacity — and readers’ limited attention — to dive deeply into a given issue.

The different angles also can be attributed at least partly to traditional journalists’ heavy reliance on quotes from interested parties, official press releases, and press conferences to relay information and tell a story.

Many media outlets’ business models rely on advertising, “sponsored content”, and maintaining access to officials — any of which could quietly influence the resulting story angles.

In some cases, the outlet itself may have a prevailing ideological or political viewpoint that further shapes story selection, word choices, and how information is presented and an issue is framed.

The result is that media coverage of a given issue can be technically and factually true — and still fail to capture the whole picture.

Last month’s announcement of a three-year, $9.2 million grant from Crankstart (billionaire Michael Moritz’s foundation) to fight illegal dumping primarily through enforcement after dumping happens, offers a test case.

The grant announcement1 came one week after voters rejected Measure E, the parcel tax whose supporters, including mayor Barbara Lee, claimed would help fund illegal dumping enforcement, among other expenses.

The San Francisco Chronicle, CBS News, KTVU, SFGate, and The Oaklandside all covered the city’s announcement and press conference.23456

We examined each article and compared it to the data and findings in the Oakland city auditor’s performance audit of illegal dumping, released seven weeks earlier.7

Key findings:

• Media coverage led with enforcement; the audit leads with affordability. All five articles foreground the growth of the camera network from 35 to 85 units. The audit’s first finding is that legal disposal costs too much, with Oakland’s curbside rates 23 to 40 percent above the average of neighboring cities served by the same hauler.

• The audit’s main finding was mostly unaddressed. Four of the five articles mentioned the city audit, but none held up Oakland’s high waste removal fees — or the audit’s main recommendation to renegotiate the Waste Management contract — against the enforcement-heavy plan announced at the press conference.

• The city audit found camera-based citations were not cost-effective. Five months of monitoring the city’s illegal dumping cameras found that they produced only 10 citations (tickets/fines). In fiscal year 2024–25, Oakland spent more than $2 million on enforcement; but citations returned only around $16,000 in paid fines.

These aren’t the drones you’re looking for: what the five media outlets shared

As each outlet covered, the grant money will help grow Oakland’s network of illegal dumping cameras from 35 to 85, fly more drones around the city to spot illegal dumping sites, test larger trash containers, and raise awareness of free bulky-item pickup.

Nearly all the articles rely heavily on quotes from mayor Barbara Lee, public works director Liam Garland, and Crankstart CEO Missy Narula to convey key information about the grant and the issue it intends to help address.

To be clear, the media outlets’ coverage was factually correct, for the most part — the press conference they covered was focused on enforcement, and reporters faithfully quoted the officials who spoke. But the stagecraft of a press conference and the reality in the official public data are different things.

The public data on illegal dumping is the most authoritative benchmark, so we examine it first.

[Editors’ note: We chose the Crankstart press conference for this analysis precisely because we did not report about it. One of our guiding principles is to focus on what people and organizations do, not what they say. It’s not for us to compare ourselves to other outlets, whose work we recognize and appreciate — and refer to often. People can read Oakland Report’s articles and decide for themselves how our work compares to other media outlets.]

What the city audit of Oakland’s illegal dumping efforts said

Cameras and citations are mostly ineffective. The audit calls the city’s illegal dumping camera program “still developing” rather than failed, but its findings and the underlying data complicate that framing.

The auditor monitored all the city’s camera locations from November 2024 through March 2025, and found that they produced only 10 citations to illegal dumpers. Some cameras sit where they capture no dumping; multiple images have come back too dark or too blurry to identify dumpers; and moving a camera requires a bucket truck and staff time.

Furthermore, the audit found that if a citation is appealed and not easily resolved, the city must provide an independent hearing officer, who often costs more than the citation itself.

But the audit also found that it rarely comes to that, because an estimated 73 percent of 2024 citations weren’t responded to at all.

In fiscal year 2024–25, paid citations brought in just over $16,000, compared to over $2 million spent on enforcement, and nearly $12 million spent on cleanup.

Poor record-keeping between departments also let over $4,000 in citations expire before they could be filed.

Disposal costs and access are significant barriers. The finding the auditor placed first is about incentives, not enforcement. The audit found that legal disposal (trash pickup and dropoff) in Oakland is expensive.

The audit’s first recommendation is to renegotiate the Waste Management contract or assess other options through a “competitive selection process.”

Minimum monthly service costs $53.36 in Oakland versus $38.68 in Hayward and $15.80 in Emeryville — and Oakland renters don’t have the option of a discounted rate at all.

It is true that Oakland offers free bulky pickup, which the public has received well — but it is limited and remarkably underused by apartment dwellers. Single-family homes get two free pickups a year; multi-family (apartment) units get one.

In 2025, about 72 percent of single-family units used a free pickup, but less than 2 percent of multi-family units did — even though they make up 84 percent of residential accounts, and field staff report the largest dump piles near big apartment complexes.

The San Francisco Chronicle: enforcement-first — and the most skeptical of enforcement’s effectiveness

The Chronicle’s article described the Crankstart grant money as funding “tech-focused enforcement initiatives and a few prevention programs.”

It is the only media outlet of the five we examined that quantified what the grant won’t do: fill in for Measure E’s hoped-for $2.1 million for eleven staff positions and $1.8 million for dump trucks, after voters rejected the measure.

Garland, the city’s public works director, supplies the article’s marquee quote: dumpers will “start feeling the pain.”

The Chronicle did briefly mention the audit — reporting that monitoring technology has “provided mixed results” and noting the low number of 10 citations. That skeptical note is where its enforcement discussion ends; the affordability findings aren’t mentioned. (The outlet previously covered the audit in an April story.)8

CBS News: closest to the audit’s focus

CBS News quoted junk hauler Kevin Torrey on renters who can’t afford legal disposal, credits “a recent city audit” for the bulky-pickup gap, and reports a fix others skip — multi-family tenants can now schedule their own pickups.

It also aired a March segment on the city’s use of drones to fly over Oakland and spot illegal dumping sites.9 Its coverage lands closest to the audit’s main focus: cost and access.

KTVU: focused on enforcement to match the press conference’s theme — and a funder’s hedge

The KTVU story leans hardest into deterrence through enforcement — deputy police chief Anthony Tedesco vows to “end your anonymity” — even as Crankstart’s Eli Bildner conceded that “success isn’t guaranteed.”

KTVU’s story does not mention the audit or Measure E.

But KTVU has an enforcement beat: its 2024 investigation reported that the city collected just 11 percent of fines issued, and days after the grant it covered a county grand jury calling Oakland’s approach “abysmal.”10

SFGate: the announcement, lightly examined

SFGate’s article, which was drawn from the Bay City News wire service, hews closest to the press conference: the precise grant figure ($9.275 million), the camera and drone plans, and quotes from deputy police chief Tedesco and Aerbits (the drone company) CEO Brian Johnson.

The SFGATE version does reference Measure E and the audit, naming high disposal costs and enforcement gaps in one early paragraph. It gives the outreach plan real space: Garland says free bulky pickup “gets utilized by between 9 to 20% of our residents,” a number the city wants to increase.

The Bay City News service also had previously covered the audit in April.11

The Oaklandside: the loudest cheer, and the political context

The Oaklandside carries the press conference’s most quotable moment: deputy police chief Tedesco telling dumpers “You should be nervous,” which drew the biggest cheer.

It also does the most to frame the grant politically, against Measure E’s failure and mayor Lee’s promise of bringing in revenue from private funders.

It cites the audit’s finding that the city failed to stop millions of pounds of trash, partly because free “bulky block party” drop-offs ended in 2024.

The rate gap and citation costs don’t appear in its June story — but they had appeared elsewhere. The Oaklandside published an article about the audit in April, and earlier reported that just 25 of the roughly 270 people cited in 2025 paid.12

Its record of coverage on illegal dumping is the deepest of the four; the audit’s thin presence in its announcement story appeared to be a choice, not a gap in knowledge.

Media coverage at-a-glance

Every outlet focused on the cameras, which is understandable because it was a focus of the press conference. The audit’s next two themes — citation costs and affordability — received far less attention, despite their being natural topics for follow-up questions or fact-checking.

The Crankstart grant itself is broader than the coverage suggests: the city lists container upsizing, outreach, and independent evaluation among its five components.

However, we could find no public announcement or official document that breaks down the $9.2 million grant into specific expenses.

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Counterpoints and other considerations

• The city says license plate reader upgrades made it four times more likely a dumper caught on camera is cited.

• Cameras produced 134 citations from April 2024 to March 2025 — though 54 percent came from a single illegal transfer station.

• In April the council doubled the first-offense fine to $1,500, consistent with the audit’s recommendations.

• Independent evaluation is a named grant component, answering the audit’s finding that enforcement was never formally measured.

• Two of the media outlets had already given readers dedicated audit stories in April; a press conference story is not the same as a program evaluation story.

Information gaps result in a partial picture of a serious issue

Nothing here shows any outlet reported falsely, and this was not ignorance: every June article mentioned the audit, and two outlets had previously covered it in depth.

The gap is in connection and proportion. The city audit puts affordability first and treats cameras as a developing strategy with a poor cost record; the local media coverage — prompted by the city’s press release and press conference — did the reverse.

With how fast the media environment moves, readers should be able to grasp the bigger picture — or at least its most important parts — in any one article. At the very least, a healthy news ecosystem offers diversity among outlets rather than the same framing again and again.

These issues play a significant role in people’s understanding of the government decisions that affect our lives, for better or for worse.

A reader who encounters this story only through these articles would reasonably conclude that catching dumpers is the plan — with little way of knowing that the city’s own auditor had concluded, seven weeks earlier, that the cheaper and likely more effective path to cleaner streets actually runs through the price of a garbage bin.

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About the authors

Phoebe Vo is an incoming second year student at University of California, Berkeley, where she works as a reporter for the Daily Californian university newspaper. She has more than five years of experience in journalism. Her goal is to continue her career covering issues important to the Bay Area. Phoebe is a participant in Oakland Report’s inaugural summer internship program.

Sean S. Reinhart is a former library director, now retired after 26 years in local government. He served as library and community services director for the cities of Hayward and Menlo Park for a combined 16 years, where he helped build Hayward’s new main library and Menlo Park’s new multi-service community center. His post-retirement endeavors include serving as the managing editor of Oakland Report.

Sean and his family have lived in Oakland for 15 years. He grew up in nearby Hayward. Sean enjoys exploring California’s world-renowned coastline, valleys, deserts and mountains. His creative pursuits include writing, printmaking, carpentry, music and visual arts. He enjoys meeting new people, reading, hiking, gardening, and spending time with his family.

Video clip 1. Developer Ray Bobbitt defends his proposal to avoid environmental liability at the site by stating, “We have people that I was in middle school with that are living in tents and feces with no running water, with no electricity. We drive through East Oakland and we should all be ashamed of ourselves.” Alameda County Board of Supervisors meeting, May 28, 2026. (Source: County of Alameda)

A sweetheart deal

Council rules and legislation committee, July 9, 2026, agenda item #3.1

Oakland city council is considering a proposal to sell Oakland’s 50 percent interest in the 112-acre Oakland Coliseum Complex to Oakland Acquisition Company (OAC), the affiliate of developer Ray Bobbitt’s African American Sports and Entertainment Group (AASEG).

The city is considering extending Bobbitt’s company a $60 million loan to buy the property from the city and close the sale.12

Under the as-yet undisclosed terms of the deal, the Coliseum Complex would be split in two: the indoor Oakland Arena parcel for a $50 million lump-sum payment, and the outdoor Oakland Coliseum stadium parcel for $60 million, “with seller financing from the City.”

In plain terms: the city would loan its own buyer more than half the purchase price.

Key findings:

• The city would become the lender for $60 million — 55 percent — of the $110 million price. The published agenda does not state the loan’s interest rate, repayment schedule, or collateral.

• The buyer has paid only $5 million of the $110 million owed since 2024. The full amount was due “in immediately available funds” by May 30, 2025. Only the initial deposit has been paid. The city has restructures the terms and extended deadlines multiple times to keep the sale to Bobbitt’s company viable.

• The city would also pay the buyer to close. At closing, Bobbitt’s company would receive the city’s remaining 2026 share of its Stadium parcel subsidy — an annualized rate of $6 million.

• Affordable housing conditions would be lifted from the Arena parcel. Ordinance No. 13801 C.M.S., which conditioned the 2024 sale on on-site affordable housing and other benefits, would be amended so those conditions attach solely to the outdoor Oakland Coliseum parcel, not the indoor Arena parcel.

Ray Bobbitt’s payment record: $5 million paid of $110 million owed

The council approved the original $105 million sale of its 50 percent ownership in June 2024. A September 2024 amendment raised the price to $110 million and required payment in full by May 30, 2025.34

That deadline passed more than a year ago.

As Oakland Report has documented, Bobbitt’s company (AASEG, now OAC) has missed or delayed nearly every major payment owed to the city, and the $5 million non-refundable deposit remains the only money received.

It is reasonable to consider the possibility that the city offering a loan is a response to that record of missed payments: restructuring the debt of a buyer who has not paid, rather than extending credit to one who has demonstrated it can.

Alameda County is considering a loan of its own

Oakland would not be the only government extending credit to Bobbitt’s company.

Under the non-binding term sheet the Alameda County Board of Supervisors approved on May 28, the county would pay $115 million in cash to the Athletics baseball franchise (which holds the county’s former 50 percent stake in the property), then be repaid the same $115 million by OAC over five to seven years at 5 percent compounding interest.56

Combined, the two governments would carry roughly $175 million in new credit risk.

The county’s term sheet also anticipates an unnamed third party paying at least $100 million for the Oakland Arena, with at least $50 million flowing to the county. The San Francisco Chronicle has reported the prospective buyer is the Oak View Group.7

(A second potential Arena buyer, Legends Entertainment, stepped forward shortly afterwards to offer $102 million for the Oakland Arena. Legends Entertainment currently manages events at the Arena. But city officials claimed that the offer would not be considered.)8

It stands to reason that the city’s $50 million Arena lump sum would be funded by the same transaction — which may also explain why the ordinance lifts the affordable-housing conditions from the Arena parcel.

But today’s committee item does not specify what the sale and loan terms would be — the item has no published report or other information.

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Other considerations and counterpoints

Some arguments for the deal restructuring — and for Ray Bobbitt’s continued involvement in the Coliseum Complex sale — include:

• Closing would end the city’s Coliseum subsidy obligation — estimated at $6 million per year — and the new 6 percent share of gross ticket sales at both parcels is revenue the current agreement does not provide.

• Fifty-five million dollars in near-term cash is more than the city has collected in two years of waiting.

• The simultaneous city-county closing this structure enables has been the stated obstacle to the deal — and to the East Oakland redevelopment supporters describe as generational — since 2024.

• Sunken-cost considerations: The city and county have been working with Bobbitt’s company for years on the deal, and multiple observers have described it as extraordinarily complex and convoluted.

Read these related articles:

Oakland Coliseum sale terms remain a mystery

This is a proposal, not a signed deal yet, and terms may change before July 14.

The details of the proposed new deal were not made public as of the time of this article’s publication — the loan’s terms, the security behind it, and the allocation of the $5 million deposit credit are unknown.

The record to date suggests this: a buyer that has paid only $5 million against $110 million owed would receive a $60 million loan from the seller it has not paid — on terms the public has not yet seen.

Whether that is fiscally responsible restructuring, or the city compounding its already significant legal and financial exposure, is the question the council will take up on July 14.

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Oakland Agenda Watch provides summaries of upcoming public meeting agenda items that catch our attention. In this installment, we take a closer look at councilmember Charlene Wang’s proposal to close streets to disrupt International Boulevard sex trafficking, on the agenda for today’s meeting of Oakland city council.

Oakland’s proposed street closures off International Boulevard

Oakland city council meeting, Jul. 7, 2026, agenda item #4.6

Oakland city council will hold a public hearing on council member Charlene Wang’s proposal to close portions of 9^th, 10^th, and 11^th Avenues to through traffic for six months, between International Boulevard and East 15^th Street, “to disrupt persistent activity associated with sex trafficking.”12

Traffic barriers would block the three avenues where they meet International Boulevard, in the stretch of East Oakland known as ‘The Blade.’3 Wang’s proposal says the side streets give sex buyers “concealed access points.”

Key findings

Oakland Report analyzed Wang’s proposal and nine years of Oakland Police Department (OPD) data on reported prostitution-related crimes.4

• Council member Wang’s proposal has no cost estimates. Its fiscal section lists cost types but no estimates. If council approves the proposal, an undisclosed amount of funding would come from the District 2 (council member Wang’s) discretionary fund.

• The proposal has no baseline data and no definition of success. It promises that OPD and Oakland Department of Transportation (OakDOT) will “jointly evaluate” the project, but does not say how it will be evaluated or what will be measured.

• Oakland’s 2023 barricades on East 15^th Street worked on the blocks they closed. Recorded prostitution-related incidents on those blocks fell from dozens per year to one or two.

• But the recorded sex trafficking activity moved into the exact blocks now proposed for closure. The center of recorded activity shifted a quarter mile west to the area now proposed for another closure, and incidents in that area rose 29 percent.

• Outside the barricade area, the data shows no real change. In the two years after the East 15^th Street barriers went in during 2023, the rest of Oakland — everywhere beyond a half mile of the site — recorded an average of 6.4 prostitution-related incidents per month, compared with 5.5 per month in the two years before.

The intent of the proposed street closures is obviously and rightly to reduce sex trafficking and the harms it causes. There is no dispute that human trafficking is extremely harmful to individuals and society, and efforts to reduce it should continue.

However, the lack of cost estimates or measures of success, combined with the lessons learned from past street closures that appeared to mostly just move the activity elsewhere, suggest that this proposal is not informed by empirical data or evidence, and even its sponsor appears not to have full confidence that it will work.

How the street closure would work, legally

The California Vehicle Code allows a city to temporarily close streets where “serious and continual criminal activity” exists, after a public hearing.5

Wang’s proposal is for a “pilot” street closure of six months. The council can extend it up to eight times, for up to 18 months each time. In theory, the “temporary” closure could last for years.

The avenues are not major streets, and the fire department found the barriers should not slow emergency response. Eastbound detours add no distance because 8^th Avenue stays open; westbound detours average three blocks.

Disrupting sex trafficking — or concentrating it elsewhere on International Boulevard?

Council member Wang’s report lists three goals: disrupting sex buyer access, improving police sight lines, and “specifically decreasing the incidents of shootings and robberies.”

Yet in media interviews, Wang has described a somewhat different goal: “In some ways, it’s to force it [prostitution-related activity] onto International Boulevard. That way it makes it easier for the police to do their job.”67

“It’s an experiment. Honestly, I think it’s a 50/50 chance that it’ll be successful.”

— Council member Charlene Wang, in an interview with KTVU on April 29

Forcing activity into a defined area is a form of disruption. But the two goals imply different tests of success. If the plan works as Wang describes, activity on International Boulevard could be reduced, or as past efforts have shown, displaced to other areas.

Which outcome will the follow-up report count as success? Wang’s proposal does not say.

To her credit, Wang has not oversold her proposal: “It’s an experiment. Honestly, I think it’s a 50/50 chance that it’ll be successful.”

This gives rise to a question: does a “50/50 chance” of success meet the city’s criteria for investing time and resources into a proposal? Wang’s proposal appears to have no metrics for evaluating the question.

What happened the last time Oakland — and San Francisco — tried street closures to disrupt sex trafficking in the streets

This is not Oakland’s first attempt at street closures to disrupt prostitution in the streets along “The Blade.”

In February 2023, the city installed traffic barriers on East 15^th Street near San Antonio Park.8

It appeared to work for a time: in May of that year, a neighborhood organizer told a local television outlet the number of women working East 15^th had gone “from 30… to zero.” However, residents a few blocks away said the activity had moved to their streets.9

In 2024, another television outlet reported some neighbors’ view that the barriers worked in the closed streets, but pushed the activity back onto International Boulevard.10

Wang herself said “the problem simply shifted elsewhere.”11

Read this related article:

In the two years after the East 15^th Street barricades were installed in 2023, the rest of Oakland — everywhere beyond a half mile of the site — recorded an average of 6.4 prostitution-related incidents per month, compared with 5.5 per month in the two years before.

That small rise is within the range of chance, but it does not confirm any meaningful reduction in sex trafficking overall.

Recorded incidents were reduced only where the barricades were installed. Everywhere else, they held steady or ticked up, including at spots miles away like the Hegenberger Road motel corridor. That pattern is consistent with activity relocating rather than being reduced.

Notably, because these incidents enter police data mainly through enforcement — that is, reported crimes — the numbers measure where police found and enforced activity, not necessarily the full extent of it.

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San Francisco saw the same pattern on Capp Street: relief on the closed blocks, then displacement to Shotwell Street — then barricades were installed there, too.

Last month, that city extended both closures 18 more months in response to a neighbor’s testimony about “the displacement that your infrastructure has created.”12

One set of San Francisco’s Capp Street bollards cost more than $250,000.13

Oakland’s proposal gives no cost estimate at all — meaning that the council must find that funding is “available” without disclosing the potential cost to the public.

What Oakland police department crime data shows about the 2023 barricades

We could find no published city review of the 2023 barricades’ effectiveness. So, we analyzed nine years of Oakland crime records to assess whether prostitution-related crimes were reduced after the barricades went up.

The barricades worked in the locations where they were installed. On the closed blocks of East 15^th Avenue, recorded prostitution incidents fell from 20–55 per year to one or two. Within a half mile of the barricades, recorded incidents fell 57 percent — from 15.6 incidents per month to 6.8.

That drop is too large to be chance; however, recorded incidents in the rest of Oakland rose slightly over the same period.

After the 2023 barricades were installed, the hotspot blocks where the barricades were installed — the 1400–2000 blocks of East 15^th and 19^th Avenues — recorded 115 incidents in the two years before the barricades, and just five incidents after.

Meanwhile, the blocks now being proposed for closure rose from 65 incidents to 84, an increase of 29 percent. The center of prostitution-related reported crimes shifted a quarter-mile west.

In other words, the city blocks Wang now wants to barricade appear to be, in part, where the displaced activity moved to after the previous 2023 barricades.

The most recent 12 months of crime data show the focus of sex trafficking activity has remained focused where they moved in 2023. Today’s busiest blocks are the 700 and 800 blocks of International Boulevard — a few blocks west of the proposed closures — plus side-street segments north of East 15^th, beyond the new barriers’ reach. Even a successful pilot would leave both untouched.

One notable caveat: the data show where police found and reported criminal activity, not a full census of it. Police reports are themselves a function of where police focus their crime prevention and enforcement efforts — and their capacity to carry out those efforts.

Crime data shows where police focus their attention, not necessarily how much crime is actually taking place

The data show where police focused their efforts, and cannot be construed as a complete accounting of all the sex trafficking activity taking place.

Sex trafficking crimes enter police reports when police act, so the counts track police capacity and priorities as much as the rate of crime.

OPD fielded 747 sworn officers in 2018, and 625 officers by late 2025. There are about 545 officers on active duty today.

From 2018 to 2025, recorded prostitution-related crimes citywide fell 75 percent — in part because a 2022 state law repealed the loitering offense. However, they then tripled in early 2026.

Over the past year, 77 percent of Oakland’s recorded incidents occurred within a half mile of the proposed street closures.

Oakland’s wider crackdown on sex buyers and traffickers

The proposed barricades would be part of a larger push to disrupt visible sex trafficking in the side streets off International Boulevard.

On Feb. 3, the council adopted Wang’s ordinance — covered in our January Agenda Watch column — increasing fines on sex buyers up to $4,000–$8,000, traffickers up to $10,000–$20,000 per victim per day, and nuisance properties up to $2,500, tripled when minors are involved.1415

Staff projected $250,000–$450,000 a year in citation revenue; OPD reported 71 trafficking arrests in the first two months of 2026.16

Counterpoint: the case for the anti-sex-trafficking barricades

There are a number of counterpoints in the proposal’s favor.

• The barricades are less expensive than police overtime. They’re also reversible and time-limited; and fire and transit review have been already completed.

• Some residents of the affected blocks — near an elementary school and a health clinic — asked for the barricades, after years of rampant sex trafficking activities in the streets.

• Pushing activity to where officers can see it is a coherent theory, backed by weekly OPD operations.

• The crime data supports the proposal’s premise that the area needs help: in 2025, police Beat 19 (the target area for the proposed barricades) ranked first citywide in recorded robberies.

• The proposal’s sponsor, council member Wang has been honest about the odds, and promises a follow-up report.

As stated above, human trafficking is extremely harmful to individuals and society, and efforts to reduce it should continue.

Proponents of the proposed pilot are right to assert that something needs to be done to reduce sex trafficking in the streets of Oakland, and to offer some relief to residents and businesses in the area where it is currently most visibly concentrated.

Read this related article:

Correlation is not causation

Any change in the crime rate after installation of the barricades could also reflect the new local fines, changes to state law, stepped-up police operations, or seasonal patterns — not just the barricades.

This analysis relies on OPD’s crime data, and recent months may be under-counted because Oakland’s crime data portal takes up to 90 days to update with the most recent data.

The July 7 proposal’s claim that police Beat 19 had “the highest number of shootings and robberies citywide in 2025” is accurate for robberies; but for shootings, the staff report’s “some of the highest” is more precise.

The intent is laudable; but the proposal lacks cost estimates and measures for success

Our review of crime data suggests that barricades reliably bring relief to the specific blocks they close: down 95 percent on the barricaded blocks, down 57 percent within a half mile. But just as reliably, some activity moves nearby — in 2023, onto the very blocks now slated for barriers. Whether that trade is worth making is for the council to decide today.

What the council could address and request before voting is what the proposal still lacks: a public cost figure, a baseline, and a definition of success.

Ideally six months from now at the conclusion of the pilot period, the question “did it work?” will have an answer grounded in data — not in whichever block the activity lands on next.

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This article originally appeared in Rajni Mandal’s Public Safety Updates on July 3. Subscribe to receive Rajni’s updates directly.

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Selective sourcing

Oaklandside’s July 2 article on police overtime presents one side of a long-running debate over police overtime, labor negotiations, and civilian oversight. It relies heavily on statements from advocacy organizations and labor representatives while giving comparatively little attention to publicly available reports, city documents, and recent developments that provide important context.

‘Residents’ quoted are members of activist organizations

The Oaklandside article interviews and quotes “community advocates and labor leaders” and frames them as “residents,” implying their views broadly represent Oakland residents.

Many of those quoted are members of the Coalition for Police Accountability (CPA), an advocacy organization that has been the driving force behind establishing the Oakland Police Commission, expanding its oversight powers, and promoting structural changes to the Oakland Police Department (OPD).

Readers should know that these are organized advocates for specific policy positions, not simply randomly selected residents.

The article also quotes representatives of city employee unions without disclosing that those unions are currently negotiating their own labor contracts with the City and are advocating for proposals that would affect police staffing and civilian positions.

‘Rampant use of overtime’

This heavily loaded headline is a quote from CPA activist Rashidah Grinage. The article references a CPA memo to the Police Commission stating that “approval to work overtime is not always required and is a big driver in OPD overtime exceeding the budgeted amount.”

OPD’s overtime is publicly discussed by the city council’s finance and management committee, with its most recent report released last March. According to the report, overtime is primarily driven by staffing shortages and operational demands.

Read this related article:

As of last week, OPD had 618 sworn officers instead of the 678 budgeted positions, with 72 unavailable for full duty because of medical leave, military leave, administrative leave, or modified duty — leaving an operational strength of 546 officers. The report identifies this staffing shortage as a direct driver of overtime.

The report also notes that OPD implemented a 20 percent reduction in overtime spending beginning in late 2024 and remained more than $2 million below its revised quarterly spending target during the second quarter.

The largest overtime categories were patrol backfill, shift extensions, special enforcement, violent crime investigations, Internal Affairs workload, Ceasefire operations, and major events—not unauthorized overtime.

Although there have been reports of individual officers working unusually large amounts of overtime (which are currently being investigated by the city), those cases should not be confused with the police department’s overall overtime picture.

Read this related article:

Interim police chief James Beere has also explained that overtime is often less expensive than hiring additional officers because vacant sworn positions generate salary savings that offset overtime costs.

Beere has also stated that overtime paid by third parties, such as the Oakland Coliseum and special events, is reimbursed to the city’s General Fund rather than OPD’s operating budget, making overtime accounts appear more overspent than their actual net fiscal impact.

None of this context—including OPD’s own explanation for overtime spending—is discussed in the article.

‘Many residents complain that OPD’s overspending on overtime eats into other city departments’ budgets’

The Oaklandside article references this quote with an Oaklandside report from 2020. That article did not cite complaints from residents about overtime. Rather, it discussed an internal city report warning of broader fiscal challenges and overspending across multiple departments, including the police department.

The article also quotes Julian Ware, vice-president of IFPTE Local 21, who states that civilian workers have moved out of Oakland because of “OPD going over its overtime budget.”

What readers are not told is that International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 21 is currently negotiating its own labor contract with the city. Those negotiations include wages, benefits, telework, staffing levels, and proposals to convert additional sworn police positions into civilian positions.

Video Clip 1: "I stood in a photo with you before I knocked doors for Measure E." IFPTE Local 21 reminds council members that the union "worked really hard to help elect" them. (Source: Oakland Report’s June 1 article, “Oakland city union warns of a strike if city council does not approve pay raises, other demands.”)

During recent city council budget meetings, representatives of IFPTE reminded councilmembers that the union had helped elect many of them, referenced their support for Measure E, and urged the council to support their bargaining proposals. The union also publicly discussed the possibility of a strike if negotiations were unsuccessful.

There is nothing improper about labor unions advocating for their members. However, readers should understand that the city worker unions quoted throughout the article also have their own institutional interests in how city resources and positions are allocated. That context is missing from the article.

‘Civilianizing’ police positions

As I have written previously, there has been a push to “civilianize” positions within OPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau by transferring work currently performed by sworn officers to the Community Police Review Agency (CPRA), the investigative branch of the police commission.

The Oaklandside article presents civilianizing Internal Affairs primarily as a cost-saving measure but does not discuss the significant implementation challenges identified in the consultant’s report. The report found that transferring these responsibilities would require more than $2 million per year in additional CPRA staffing, plus expanded training, infrastructure, and administrative support, with any savings likely limited to reduced OPD overtime rather than lower overall City costs.

Most recently, CPRA Director Antonio Lawson acknowledged that CPRA is not currently able to assume the full Internal Affairs workload and instead proposed a much more limited transfer.

GPS in police vehicles

The Oaklandside article cites CPA when discussing the impasse over implementation of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology in police vehicles, but does not explain how it developed.

In fact, GPS had already been installed as part of Oakland’s upgraded dispatch system and was scheduled to be activated in 2024 to improve emergency response times.

During review by the city’s Privacy Advisory Commission, then-CPRA Director Mac Muir urged commissioners to expand the policy so GPS data could also be retained for police misconduct investigations. The commission amended the proposed policy, creating differences between the police and fire department policies, which is important as both departments use the same technology and must have the same data retention times. The item was later withdrawn and has not returned for approval.

As a result, technology intended to improve emergency response times has remained unimplemented for more than two years.

Union influence

The Oaklandside article repeatedly discusses the influence of the police union, describing it as “a well-funded opposition.” However, it gives little attention to the political activity and institutional interests of other public employee unions.

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021 and IFPTE Local 21 actively supported Measure E (providing $1 million in campaign funding) and are currently negotiating contracts with the city involving wages, benefits, telework, staffing levels, and civilianization proposals. During recent budget hearings, representatives reminded elected officials that they had campaigned for Measure E and helped elect many current councilmembers while urging approval of their bargaining proposals.

Read this related article:

The article also references a study authored by IFPTE Local 21 that recommends changes to OPD spending and staffing. Those recommendations closely align with those promoted by CPA and later forwarded by the police commission to the city administration.

There is nothing improper about labor unions advocating for their members. But readers should know that the organizations quoted throughout the article are not neutral observers. They are active participants in ongoing labor negotiations and policy debates involving the city’s budget and police staffing.

A pattern of selective sourcing

One of the more striking aspects of the Oaklandside article is that many of its principal sources come from the same network of organizations that have promoted these policy positions for years.

CPA members, police commission recommendations, CPRA leadership, IFPTE representatives, and studies commissioned or authored by those organizations all advocate many of the same goals: reducing police overtime, civilianizing police positions, expanding civilian oversight, and reallocating resources from sworn to civilian positions.

The article gives comparatively little attention to OPD’s publicly available overtime reports, operational explanations from department leadership, or competing viewpoints contained in city reports.

Readers can reasonably disagree about police staffing, overtime, civilian oversight, and labor negotiations. But those debates are best served by presenting the full range of publicly available facts and perspectives.

Instead, this article largely presents one side of those debates while omitting significant information that would allow readers to evaluate the issues more completely.

Postscript

Oaklandside contacted me before publication and invited me to interview for this article. I declined and instead sent them my two public comments to the police commission regarding the Oakland Police Officers Association (OPOA) union contract negotiations.

I made that decision because of my experience with a previous Oaklandside articles, which I believe inaccurately characterized my views on police oversight. I support constitutional policing, accountability, and strong civilian oversight. My position has always been that oversight agencies should be held to the same standards of transparency, performance, and accountability that they expect of the police department. After asking Oaklandside to clarify an earlier article without success, I chose not to participate in this one.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rajni Mandal is an Oakland resident and physician who uses public records to share independent, unpaid analysis on public safety and police oversight, helping neighbors understand and participate in the process. She is not affiliated with any union, advocacy or political organization. Learn more:

Rajni Mandal: public safety oversight background

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My involvement with public safety and police oversight began in 2024 after a shooting occurred in my neighborhood. Neighbors organized to pool resources for private security and cameras. While that helped in the short term, it did not answer basic questions about why police response was inconsistent or how public safety decisions were being made.

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PART TWO OF A SERIES

Oakland Report examines the data behind the headlines. In our first installment in this series, we found that late-night crime in the immediate area of First Friday festivals increases an average 44% on festival nights compared to non-festival Fridays. In this installment, we tested whether the city’s new safety plan had a measurable effect at last month’s festival. We also reviewed late-night crime data for comparable evening street festivals in other cities.

The city stepped up its safety efforts after First Friday festivals — with partial success

Days before last month’s First Friday festival was held on June 5, the city of Oakland announced its most visible response yet to the late-night street takeovers and crime that have followed the festival for years.

As Oakland Report reported last month, the late-night crime and street takeovers have been focused in the area around the Fox Theater, a prominent landmark located a few blocks away and within sight of the First Fridays official event footprint.

The city of Oakland has long struggled to contain these unsanctioned gatherings, and in early June, before last month’s festival, announced a new plan to curb them.1

The city’s new safety plan included additional street closures around the Fox Theater, increased police and city staff presence across Downtown, Uptown, and Koreatown-Northgate, more code and vendor enforcement, and post-event cleanup.

The city’s plan did not include any benchmarks for measuring whether or not the city’s efforts are successful.

Oakland Report reviewed crime data from the night of the June 5 festival — the first test of the city’s new safety plan — and compared it across 19 years of crime data using the same methodology from our first installment in this series.2

Key findings

• Crime during and after the June 5 First Friday festival remained significantly higher compared to other, non-festival Friday nights. Within a quarter-mile of the Fox Theater, from 5 p.m. Friday to 6 a.m. Saturday, June 5, there were six reported crimes — triple the crime levels of the previous and following non-festival Friday nights, and about 60 percent higher than the average non-festival Friday night.3

• The June 5 crime increase also was slightly above average for First Friday festival nights in June. The six crimes reported in the immediate area of the festival on the night of June 5, 2026 was higher than the average 4.25 crimes reported on other June First Friday festival nights.

• The June 5 reported crimes again skewed violent. They included two after-midnight assaults — one involving a “caustic chemical” (such as pepper spray), and one with a gun.

• However, the street takeovers in front of the Fox Theater on festival nights were noticeably reduced on June 5. The city’s new effort to close streets and show a strong city presence out front of the Fox Theater appeared to have some success at reducing the chaotic late-night street takeovers in that location.

• Oakland’s post-festival, late-night crime increases are larger than most other festivals we studied. Most comparable evening street festivals show a milder increase. Only San Francisco’s Valencia Live! event, which serves and allows open containers of alcohol in the street, matches Oakland’s increase.

Crime on the June 5 festival night remained significantly higher than on non-festival Friday nights

On the night of June 5, from Friday 5 p.m. to Saturday 6 a.m., six crimes were reported within a quarter-mile of the Fox Theater.

That is roughly 60 percent higher than a typical non-festival Friday, which averaged about 3.7 crime incidents per night in the same area.

The June 5 crime increase, relative to non-festival Fridays, was somewhat higher than the average crime increase on the nights of First Friday festivals held in June of previous years, which averaged 4.25 incidents per night.

The six reported crimes on the festival night of June 5 were a decrease from the seven crimes reported the festival nights in May 1 and the twelve crimes reported the festival night of April 3. The March 6 festival night saw six reported crimes, the same as June 5.

Chaotic street takeovers in front of the Fox Theater were noticeably reduced on June 5

Based on multiple eyewitness reports, the city’s new effort to prevent large, unsanctioned gatherings from taking over the street in front of the Fox Theater appears to have been somewhat effective.

On typical First Friday festival nights, especially in recent years, thousands of people and cars routinely filled the street in front of the theater for several hours.

These unsanctioned gatherings then routinely devolved into chaos as people fought and took videos of the street fights, drank open containers of alcohol, vandalized property, and clashed with police attempting to clear the street and restore order.

Video clip 1: Warning: graphic content. Compilation of unsanctioned after-hours party scenes in the streets near the official First Friday event. (Source: Instagram / various accounts)

On June 5, the city’s street closures and strong on-street presence of city personnel appeared to have some success at preventing a critical mass of people from taking over the street in front of the Fox Theater.

According to eyewitness reports, the size of the crowds congregating in the area after the festival was noticeably lower than usual — by some estimates around 1,000 people instead of the typical 3,000 or so people — and vehicles were prevented from parking in and blocking the street.

Late-night crime at comparable evening street festivals in other cities

Crime tends to increase around festivals, which is not uncommon when large crowds of people gather in the streets.

What sets Oakland’s crime increases apart from comparable evening street festivals in other cities is the scale, severity, and consistency of the crime increase.

We examined recurring evening street festivals that resemble First Fridays’ format and timing in San Francisco and San Jose — cities that also publish detailed crime data going back many years.45

Oakland’s late-night crime increase after First Friday festivals — about 44 percent on average over 19 years of data — sits well above that of other, comparable evening street festivals like San Jose’s South First Fridays festival, with one exception.

• San Francisco’s Chinatown Night Market, a family-oriented event that closes at 9 p.m., had a more modest late-night crime increase, about 17 percent on average.

• San Jose’s recurring South First Fridays festival nights had a similarly modest late-night crime increase, around 16 percent.

• San Francisco’s recurring Valencia Live festival night had a much higher late-night crime increase of approximately 56 percent, similar to the crime increase on Oakland’s First Friday festival nights.

Notably, San Francisco’s Valencia Live street festival allows alcohol and open-container drinking in the street, which likely contributes to its relatively higher crime increase.

Oakland’s First Fridays festivals, in their earliest years, also allowed and prominently featured alcohol consumption. Back then, the festival included official beer gardens, and bars in the area reported double their usual business on festival nights.

A February 2013 fatal shooting prompted a brief pause in the festival, which returned with a new ban on open containers of alcohol that remains in effect.67

Daytime mega-festivals: larger scale, more crime

We also examined massive daytime mega-festivals including Carnaval San Francisco, with its estimated 400,000 attendees, and the Folsom Street Fair, estimated at 250,000 attendees. Crime increased significantly around those mega-festivals, even higher than it did around Oakland’s First Friday festivals.

However, there are several key differences between those mega-festivals and Oakland’s First Fridays.

The mega-festivals were held in the daytime, prominently featured alcohol consumption, and drew crowds ten to twenty times larger than First Fridays’ estimated 15,000 to 30,000 attendees.

Correlation is not causation

While the increased late-night crime in the immediate area is clearly correlated to Oakland’s First Friday festivals, no causal link is established by the data itself.

As we emphasized in our previous analysis, there are likely other factors at play, aside from the festivals, that contribute to the statistical increases shown in the crime data.

A single night of crime increasing, in isolation of the data over a longer period of time, is not indicative of a trend. The spike in late-night crime that followed the June 5 festival does not, in and of itself, mean that the city’s safety plan had no effect.

As noted above, the city’s efforts did appear to have an immediate effect at reducing the street takeovers in front of the Fox Theater.

Time – and consistency — will tell if the city’s efforts prove successful

Oakland’s First Fridays is a cherished event that celebrates Oakland’s vibrant culture, art, and business communities, and introduces thousands of people across the Bay Area region to the extraordinary and unique city of Oakland.

This author, like many Oaklanders, appreciates and enjoys street festivals like First Fridays and wants well-run festivals like it — and the many positive benefits they bring to the city — to be successful and continue.

The first test of the city of Oakland’s new First Fridays safety plan showed partial success upon its first implementation at last month’s festival.

While late-night crime in the immediate area on the night of June 5 still spiked compared to non-festival Fridays, the city’s efforts did appear to reduce the intensity of the street takeovers in front of the Fox Theater.

Time — and consistency — will tell if the city’s efforts are fully successful over the long term.

A look ahead

The next installment in this series will focus on the history and business operations of the Fox Theater and the central role it plays in the economic growth and vitality of the Uptown arts and entertainment district. Future installments will focus on other notable venues and businesses in the area as well.

We also will continue to follow the First Friday festivals, the unsanctioned after-hours street gatherings, and the city’s efforts to contain them throughout the summer, and will update our crime dashboard as new data arrives.

We also plan to take a closer look at the Oakland Arena, the city’s largest and arguably best-known sports and entertainment venue.

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Oakland Report examines the data behind the headlines. In this installment, we test the claim that Oakland spends too much on police by reviewing six years of data across 14 neighboring and comparable cities: what cities actually spent on policing, and how much crime their officers actually faced.

Oakland’s police department was the leanest among comparison cities, across six years of data

Oakland’s police spending is a frequent target of criticism. Like most other cities, Oakland’s police department is its largest general fund expense.1

As with every city expenditure, it is reasonable and responsible to ask the question: is the city paying too much for its police?

Oakland Report set out to answer that question by examining six years of data: police expenditures, budgeted sworn officers, city populations, and reported crimes across 14 neighboring and comparable cities.23

This analysis is primarily focused on data from 2024, the most recent year for which authoritative, comparable data are available across all cities and metrics.

We also examined and compared the five previous years of data — which confirmed that the 2024 data are strongly representative of the overall trends and rankings.

We recognize that Oakland is an extraordinary and unique city, and it is virtually impossible to find another city exactly like it in every way. However, even with all the variations, a comparison of these fundamental data across multiple cities and several years offers new insight.

The comparison cities included several of Oakland’s neighbors, as well as other populous, complex, big-budget California cities.

Each city has its own unique factors and there is no perfect comparison to Oakland. But in aggregate, the data from all these cities across multiple years sketch a clear picture.

Key findings

• Oakland spent the most per capita on police among the comparison cities. Oakland spent about $809 per resident in 2024, ahead of next-highest Berkeley at $703 per resident and every other comparison city.

• Oakland also had the highest crime rate, by far. Its 2024 violent crime rate of 1,961 crimes per 100,000 residents was the highest of the 14 cities, as was its homicide rate. Its property crime rate of 7,364 crimes per 100,000 residents was also the highest — 50 percent higher than the next city’s rate.

• Adjusted for workload, Oakland’s police department spending was lowest on nearly every measure. Oakland spent about $41,000 of police budget per violent crime in 2024 — the least among the comparison cities, and a fraction of the $100,000 in Long Beach or the $118,000 in Berkeley. On property crime, Oakland spent about $11,000 per crime, again the least of the comparison cities.

• Oakland’s cost was not driven by expensive officers, nor by too many officers. Oakland’s total police spending equated to about $510,000 per budgeted sworn officer — roughly average among the comparison cities. But Oakland experiences far more crime per officer, especially violent crime: 4.5 robberies or homicides per officer, roughly nine times the rate in Piedmont — a city that is surrounded on all sides by Oakland — and well above every other comparison city.

• The multi-year data are consistent and representative. Across every year from 2019 through 2024, Oakland ranked first among the 14 comparison cities on property and violent crime rates, including the narrower categories of robbery and homicide.

• Oakland had the leanest police department when measured by workload. Using each year’s actual police spending, Oakland ranked the leanest of the 14 comparison cities on cost per robberies and homicides in all six years, first or second leanest on cost per violent crime every year — and the highest per-resident cost in five of six years.

The data confirm that Oakland was both a high-spending police city and an extraordinarily high-crime city — and the two facts are connected.

Oakland spent the most per resident on police

Dividing each city’s 2024 reported police expenditures by its 2024 population,4 Oakland spent the most per capita on policing.

Oakland’s roughly $345.5 million in police spending for approximately 427,000 residents in 2024 equates to around $809 per resident.

Berkeley was second-highest at $703 per resident, then Piedmont at $726 — both smaller cities in which fixed costs are spread across fewer people.

Among larger cities comparable to Oakland’s scale and complexity, none comes close: Long Beach spent $652 per resident, San Jose $494, Sacramento $468, and San Diego $446.

Oakland’s per-resident police spending was close to twice Riverside’s, the least among the comparison cities at $430 per resident.

When taking the per capita spending metric in isolation, the critics of Oakland’s police spending have a valid point. Oakland did spend more per resident on policing than any of the comparison cities.

Read this related article:

However, focusing only on per capita spending tells only part of the story. It shows what each resident theoretically paid for policing, but it does not factor in how much work that money was expected to do.

Oakland had the highest crime rate — by a wide margin

Oakland’s notably high police workload — compounded by a severely understaffed police force — was a significant factor in its police spending.

According to crime data from all the comparison cities, Oakland’s police department consistently had the highest workload in every serious crime measure across all six years, by far.

Violent crime, as the California Department of Justice defines it, comprises four offenses: homicide, robbery, forcible rape, and aggravated assault.

Oakland led the comparison cities on the most serious of these crimes: it reported 81 homicides in 2024, more than San Diego and San Jose combined, despite Oakland having roughly a third of San Diego’s population and less than half of San Jose’s population.

Oakland’s 2,960 robberies were the most of any comparison city — more than San Diego, San Jose, Long Beach, or Sacramento, each of which have larger populations than Oakland.

Oakland’s 2024 violent crime rate of 1,961 crimes per 100,000 residents was more than double second-highest Richmond’s 916 crimes per 100,000 residents, and over three times the rate of San Jose’s 593 and San Diego’s 411.

The same held for the category Oaklanders encountered most often: property crime.

Oakland had the highest property crime rate of the 14 comparison cities: 7,364 crimes per 100,000 residents — roughly 50 percent higher than the next-highest city, Berkeley, at 4,894 property crimes per 100,000 residents.

Oakland reported 31,455 property crimes in 2024 — including 9,914 motor vehicle thefts and 18,118 larcenies — trailing only San Diego and San Jose, both far larger cities.

Whether the measure is violence or property crime, Oakland’s officers consistently faced the heaviest and most severe crime environment among the comparison cities.

Read this related article:

None of this is to minimize the toll these crimes took on Oakland residents, which is the real story behind these numbers.

But for the purpose of evaluating the police budget, it offers important context that the per capita spending figures omit: Oakland’s police department consistently operated in the highest-crime environment of any city we examined.

Adjusted for workload, Oakland was the leanest spender per crime

When police spending was measured against the volume and severity of crime it responded to, Oakland was nowhere near the most expensive department among comparison cities — it was the least expensive.

The California Department of Justice defines violent crime as the sum of four offenses: homicide, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

Oakland spent about $41,000 in police budget per violent crime in 2024, the lowest figure of all 14 cities. Sacramento, the next-lowest, spent about $62,000 per violent crime, and Richmond $66,000.

By comparison, the more affluent, lower-crime comparison cities spent orders of magnitude more per violent crime than Oakland: Fremont spent $238,000 per violent crime, Santa Clara $354,000, and Piedmont $1.1 million.

Note: These figures are not intended to say that each individual crime generated these specific dollar amount costs. However, they provide a consistent data point across cities for comparison purposes.

The comparison holds true regardless of which specific violent crimes were counted or how crimes were defined as violent.

Focusing on the two violent offenses defined most consistently over time, Oakland experienced 4.49 robberies or homicides and 12.4 violent crimes overall per budgeted officer.

On this metric, Oakland again spent the least of the 14 comparison cities — about $114,000 per robbery or homicide, compared to $178,000 in second-least San Leandro and $1.97 million in the highest-spending city, Piedmont.

Furthermore, when measured by all reported violent and property offenses combined, Oakland spent $8,674 per crime, again the least in the group.

Property crime data tells the same story

Because Oakland reports so many property crimes, its total police budget spread across them equated to about $10,984 per property crime — the least of the 14 cities, just below Alameda at $12,269 per property crime and San Leandro at $12,913.

At the higher end are the lower-crime cities: San Diego at $26,828 per property crime, Santa Clara at $25,752, and Piedmont at $22,219 each spent more than double what Oakland spends per property crime — likely because those cities experience far fewer crimes compared to their police budgets.

The property crime burden on Oakland police officers is also far higher than in the comparison cities: 46.4 property crimes per authorized officer, again the highest, compared to 11.4 property crimes per officer in San Diego and 17.4 in Sacramento.

No matter the crime denominator used — robbery and homicide, all violent crime, all property crime, or every crime combined — Oakland lands at or near the bottom of the spending-per-crime ranking.

Notably, Oakland’s current number of officers actually on duty is substantially less than its 678 budgeted officers — only around 510 sworn officers were on active duty as of early 2026.5

Measured against officers on active duty rather than against budgeted officers, Oakland’s per-officer caseload — and its cost efficiency per crime — were more extreme still.

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Oakland’s police costs were driven by workload, not by expensive officers

A frequent criticism of Oakland’s police spending is that it reflects an unusually expensive police force — high salaries, rich overtime, generous benefits — rather than a high volume of work. But the data appear not to support that criticism.

Dividing each city’s total police spending by its number of budgeted sworn officers put Oakland’s total spending per officer at about $510,000 — roughly average among the comparison cities.

Two cities spent more per officer, including the lower-crime cities of Santa Clara at $555,000 per officer and Alameda at $511,000.

Oakland’s per-officer cost was within a few thousand dollars of Fremont’s $506,000 per officer — a city with roughly a tenth of Oakland’s violent crime rate.

It is reasonable to conclude that if Oakland’s per-officer spending was roughly average among other cities’ per-officer spending, then its higher per-resident spending likely was driven by other factors. The data suggest that Oakland spent more on policing relative to its population because Oakland experienced far more, and more serious, crime.

Methodology

This analysis compared six years of data from 14 neighboring or comparable cities: Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, Fremont, Hayward, Long Beach, Piedmont, Richmond, Riverside, Sacramento, San Diego, San Jose, San Leandro, and Santa Clara.

Police expenditures were sourced from the California State Controller’s office, which annually compiles and publishes police expenditures.6

Crime data were sourced from the California Department of Justice, which compiles annual crime data reported by cities.

Populations were sourced from the California Department of Finance, which compiles annual population counts per city based on U.S. Census data.

Budgeted sworn officer counts were sourced from each comparison city’s adopted budget documents.

Per-capita figures were calculated by dividing total police spending by population; per-crime figures divided total police spending by reported crimes; and per-officer figures divided total police spending by budgeted sworn officers.

One timing note: the spending and budget data were reported by fiscal year (July 1 to June 30), whereas the crime data were reported by calendar year (January 1 to December 31). However, this timing overlap was consistent across all the comparison cities and all six years of data.

Correlation is not causation

The data indicate a strong correlation between Oakland’s crime workload and its police spending. However, this neither proves nor disproves whether every dollar Oakland spent on policing is efficiently spent.

A police department can face heavy crime and operate inefficiently. Low spending-per-crime can indicate lean efficiency, or it can indicate a department stretched too thin to respond effectively to a heavy caseload.

Oakland’s high overtime spending — which was at least partly driven by a significantly understaffed police force — is a real efficiency question these data do not resolve.

Cost-per-crime calculations measure spending against crime volume, not against outcomes such as clearance rates or response times, which are beyond the scope of this analysis. (Oakland Report will examine those outcomes in a future analysis.)

One of the six years of California crime data used in this analysis, 2023, was affected by a change in the state’s reporting methodology. As a result, Oakland’s reported aggravated assault data jumped from 3,329 in 2022 to 11,169 in 2023, then fell to 5,039 in 2024. Oakland’s 2023 data anomaly has been attributed to data-entry or reporting errors.7 We adjusted for this in our analysis by examining six years of data across all 14 comparison cities and metrics.

The charts in this analysis are focused on 2024, the most recent year for which data is available across all cities and metrics. This was cross-checked against robbery and homicide data — offenses unaffected by the state’s 2023 methodology change — to confirm the consistency of the data across all six years.

The spending data were self-reported by cities to the state controller’s office, and pension, capital, and internal-service costs are treated somewhat differently across cities. To account for these differences, the spending comparisons in this analysis have an aggregate margin of error of plus or minus six percent. Even within that margin of error, Oakland still stood out across every spending metric.

Other considerations

• Efficiency per crime is not the only test. This analysis examined the question, “what does Oakland spend per crime?” But another important question this analysis did not examine is, “why is there so much crime to begin with?” Oakland’s high crime rate partly explained its high per-capita spending, but it didn’t address why crime in Oakland was far higher and more severe than in the other comparison cities.

• Oakland’s crime fell sharply in 2024. Homicides dropped 32 percent from 2023 (119 to 81), robbery fell 23 percent, and motor vehicle theft fell 40 percent — welcome declines that are consistent with a nationwide trend. If crime continues to fall in future years while police spending remains flat or increases, the spending-per-crime calculation will increase in tandem.

• Deployment, not just headcount, drives outcomes. The current gap between Oakland’s 678 budgeted officers and its roughly 510 active duty officers are management and operational question that the per-budgeted-officer calculations do not fully capture.

Oakland’s per-capita police spending was higher because its crime rate was far higher and more severe than other cities

The claim that Oakland spends too much on policing, when measured only on a per-resident basis, is partly true. But the implication of that claim — that Oakland is an outlier in its overall spending on policing — is not supported by the crime and workload data.

Across 14 comparison cities and six years of data, Oakland spent the least per violent crime overall, including in the narrower categories of robberies and homicides, and it spent the least per property crime overall.

Oakland’s police officers carried the heaviest and most severe per-officer caseload among all the comparison cities. At the same time, Oakland’s total police department spending per officer was roughly average.

Based on all the above, a more complete, data-driven assertion is this: Oakland’s police spending was high because its crime was high, not because its policing was too expensive.

Whether that spending resulted in the best outcomes — cases cleared, crimes prevented, response times met — is a separate question. This analysis does not attempt to answer that question, but the question is worthy of study in a future article.

What this analysis does strongly indicate is that on a per-crime basis, Oakland’s police department was among the least expensive in the state — not the most.

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Become a supporting member today and you will receive our new Oakland Beat newsletter — a monthly roundup of exclusive reports, commentaries, deep-dive data and inside information on issues that matter, grounded in the evidence and facts that you have come to expect from Oakland Report.

Here are just a few of the items we have in store for you this summer:

• Look out, Oakland! Public employee unions are coming to your door — and reaching into your wallet (again).

• Oakland Unified School District is on the brink of disaster. Why does it matter? Oakland public schools are instrumental to Oakland’s success whether one has children or not.

• The real reason why CalTrans wants to open Interstate 580 to heavy trucks.

• Data deep-dive: Oakland’s many, many nonprofit contractors — where is all that money going, and what is it doing?

• Why are so many downtown businesses still boarded up, and what can we do about it?

• What is up with paying for sidewalk repairs in front of my property — isn’t that the city’s job?

• Oakland ‘leaders’ scrapbook: portraits of our elected officials and candidates — with no touchups.

• …and much more.

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Oakland Report is an experiment in a new form of media.

Our mission is to provide reasoned, fact-based, well-sourced reporting and analysis on local government issues in Oakland, California and the surrounding region.

We achieve our mission through producing our nonprofit, independent, citizen-led media outlet, Oakland Report, focused on observable and verifiable evidence free from implicit bias.

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We don’t expect everyone to agree with everything that we publish, but we do expect that the articles are grounded in verifiable evidence and logic so that all observations and conclusions may be rationally challenged.

We started Oakland Report as a volunteer endeavor in 2023 to fill a critical gap in local independent media by producing high-quality, unbiased, unflinching articles by and for the citizens of Oakland and neighboring communities.

A year later, we formed Citizens Oakland, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization to support and continue our work to publish Oakland Report.

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Video Clip 1. Oakland Report managing editor Sean Reinhart talks with local television station KTVU about Oakland’s many taxes on April 17, 2026. Our thanks and appreciation to news anchor Andre Senior and KTVU for having us on their Take 2 in the Morning show. Video courtesy of KTVU.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Sean S. Reinhart is a former library director, now retired after 26 years in local government. He served as library and community services director for the cities of Hayward and Menlo Park for a combined 16 years, where he helped build Hayward’s new main library and Menlo Park’s new multi-service community center. His post-retirement endeavors include serving as the managing editor of Oakland Report.

Sean and his family have lived in Oakland for 15 years. He grew up in nearby Hayward. Sean enjoys exploring California’s world-renowned coastline, valleys, deserts and mountains. His creative pursuits include writing, printmaking, carpentry, music and visual arts. He enjoys meeting new people, reading, hiking, gardening, and spending time with his family.

The views expressed in our Letters column do not necessarily reflect the views of Oakland Report or its contributing authors. Letters may be edited for clarity, length, and conciseness.

The homeless industrial complex

Re: Oakland is beautiful, but encampments – and the city’s inequitable response – are holding it back, May 27, 2026

As long as the homelessness industrial complex is funded by millions and billions of taxpayer dollars, the problem will only get worse. I hate seeing this portrayed as a race and equity issue — it is not.

The perverse incentive of paying growing bureaucratic non-governmental organizations to “solve” the problem just means the staff get six-figure paychecks while enabling the substance abuse practiced by a large majority of the homeless.

Humans respond to incentives. The current incentives are malignant. Allowing people to wallow in filth — which breeds diseases — while encouraging their addictions is corrupt.

Not all homeless people are in this category, but the ones who aren’t would be much better served if the addicts were put in rehab or jail if they refuse treatment.

Boedicca (via Substack)
Oakland

Video clip 1: Encampment on 26th and Wood Street on May 15, 2026. (Source: Oakland Report)

The entire city is “high sensitivity” to homelessness

Re: Oakland is beautiful, but encampments – and the city’s inequitable response – are holding it back, May 27

When I first started working for the city, I thought, “This is easy. Just move folks to ‘low sensitivity’ areas.”

Then I had trouble determining “low sensitivity” from “high sensitivity.” So, I asked my team to map it. I’m a visual person and needed to see a map.

My conclusion after first seeing the map was that the entire city is “high sensitivity.” When everything is high sensitivity, nothing is high sensitivity. This is not a statement of city policy or position. It’s just something I’ve observed and struggled with.

We have human beings living on our streets in deplorable conditions. How do we get these folks some help? I don’t have an answer.

One of my favorite books about Oakland is American Babylon. I agree with the author that the East Bay’s post-World War II era was focused on “containing” the problems of poverty in Oakland — code for redlining. The inequity isn’t just an Oakland thing; it’s an Alameda County thing.

What is the best help, support, treatment we can provide to the humans living on the street? I don’t know, but I do know that Alameda County has the space for it. The days of dumping issues — literal and figurative — in Oakland need to come to an end.

Josh Rowan
Oakland

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The city government exists to serve Oaklanders, not the other way around

Re: Oakland is beautiful, but encampments – and the city’s inequitable response – are holding it back, May 27

It’s wildly disappointing to see the city’s map of “high sensitivity” areas that covers 95% of the city and largely constitutes a race/income map trace. If everything’s “high sensitivity,” you’re really labeling the remaining areas as “who cares.”

My problem with the article is the lack of solutions and solution evaluation. It lists one program that was effective, but not the scale, cost, or scalability of the program. Its criticism of the programs comes with loose references to crime and the Oakland Police Department — is the answer simply criminalizing homeless people so they’re in jail instead of on the street?

Its criticism of “housing first” also discounts clear examples of it working, and encourages scrapping programs in lieu of running them more intentionally and effectively, as modeled elsewhere.

Kyle (via Substack)
Oakland

Kyle — Thank you for your comment. It’s not our job to come up with solutions for the city’s (often self-inflicted) problems. That’s the city’s job. The city government exists to serve Oaklanders, not the other way around. And as this article’s author asserts — with receipts — the city is failing to do its job, again.

The city shouldn’t be in the sports business

Re: Alameda County is back in the Oakland Coliseum business — set to buy back from A’s, sell to developer, May. 28

Unless the local government has an ownership stake in the teams, they shouldn’t be in the sports business.

I look at that huge chunk of land that already has a BART stop and all I can think is that development would solve the Oakland housing shortage.

We could put a park, a school, and shopping there. Put the shopping closet to the freeway to help with the noise. It could be fabulous.

Elizabeth (via Substack)
Oakland

Oakland Coliseum ground contamination was well-known

Re: ‘Oakland deserves better’ — Alameda County approves Coliseum buyback term sheet, May. 29

Anyone familiar with the Oakland Coliseum knows that ground contamination was always one of the elephants in the living room. Why is it just coming up now publicly?

Len Raphael
Oakland

Economics don’t matter to ideologues

Re: ‘Oakland deserves better’ — Alameda County approves Coliseum buyback term sheet, May. 29

I appreciate that District 7 council member Ken Houston wants to transform the Hegenberger Road corridor into a world-class destination. Former council member Larry Reid spent decades attracting businesses to the area only to see the Sheng Thao bloc (Rebecca Kaplan, Carroll Fife, Nikki Fortunato Bas) trash it by not voting for more resources to the area.

Later, Reid’s daughter, Treva pleaded with the council to vote in favor when she was District 7 council member because crime was pervasive and the businesses were starting to suffer.

When the In-N-Out Burger off Hegenberger decided to close, Rebecca Kaplan tweeted of an Oakland cafe (in another neighborhood) that served good burgers — as if she didn’t give a fig about In-N-Out.

That location had at least 95 employees, was profitable, and paid tons in taxes to the city. I guess the economics didn’t matter to Rebecca because her ideology doesn’t accept businesses like In-N-Out.

County supervisor Nate Miley mentions the return of the Raiders to Oakland but he doesn’t elaborate further.

While the return of the Raiders was a boost for the fans and city pride, the deal was terrible because it kept Oakland on the hook, to the Raider’s advantage. That is one reason why former mayor Libby Schaaf made sure to not accept another bad deal for Oakland when Mark Davis wanted a new stadium.

Pissed off Oaklander (via Substack)
Oakland

The next round of pay raises

Re: ‘Death and taxes’: Oakland City Council is the one who knocks. (Flashback), May 30

At the council finance committee this week, council members noted that several departments were over budget, and finance director Bradley Johnson said that this was due to a one time unbudgeted expense of $3,000 raises for city employees that came out of the general fund.

With regards to the next cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) pay raises tied to revenue:

“The next opportunity is at the end of the closing of the current fiscal year. And so should we between now and then find that either our projections are off, or that we receive unanticipated revenue in one of the eligible categories at the end of the fiscal year, we would see COLAs triggered in January at the beginning of the next calendar year for that same period.”

— Bradley Johnson, city of Oakland finance director

At the council public safety committee meeting, Johnson described how the council passed the “extreme fiscal necessity and unanticipated financial event” waiver which allowed access to Measure NN funds without meeting the requirement to maintain 700 police officers. There was a discussion at this meeting about the need to reach 700 officers and current budget, attrition and staffing issues.

Rajni Mandal
Oakland

Rajni — Thank you for your comments and for providing your excellent updates from council and committee meetings.

Video Clip 2. “I stood in a photo with you before I knocked doors for Measure E.” IFPTE Local 21 reminds council members that the union “worked really hard to help elect” them. (Source: City of Oakland)

Who’s actually in charge of the city

Re: Oakland city union warns of a strike if city council does not approve pay raises, other demands, Jun. 1

Wow! That’s quite a statement. I guess we know who’s actually in charge of the city and it isn’t anyone we elected.

I don’t know why the union thinks it deserves better benefits and pay than the private sector. Lots of people don’t get raises. Why does the union deserve a pension?

As for a strike, what do any of these people actually do? Trash is everywhere, graffiti is everywhere, apparently taxes don’t get collected. I see cars in my neighborhood that have piles of tickets on them that never get towed.

I want to be pro-labor. Workers deserve to be protected and paid decent wages and benefits. But workers do not deserve extravagant salaries and benefits.

Elizabeth (via Substack)
Oakland

Almost pure thuggery

Re: Oakland city union warns of a strike if city council does not approve pay raises, other demands, Jun. 1

Amazing how this guy said the quiet part out loud. Technically elected officials are supposed to vote for what is in the public’s best interest — not for the special interests that spread money and resources around for the purpose of influence.

It’s almost pure thuggery. Quite unbelievable really.

Solomon Ets-Hokin
Clayton

Adding staff to a system that isn’t working is not a solution

Re: Oakland city union warns of a strike if city council does not approve pay raises, other demands, Jun. 1

Union members have advocated for “civilianizing” certain sworn officer positions, including transferring Internal Affairs functions to the Community Police Review Agency (CPRA).

I wrote about this nearly a year ago.

Read this related article:

Since then, CPRA has acknowledged significant infrastructure challenges, including the lack of written operating procedures, training manuals, and modern case-management systems.

The Police Commission, which oversees CPRA, also has not publicly released performance evaluations of the agency’s leadership.

Before transferring additional responsibilities, Oakland should first ensure the underlying oversight infrastructure is functioning effectively and sustainably. Council should step in and have more of an oversight role over both CPRA and OIG (Office of Inspector General), because right now, adding staff to a system that isn’t working is not a solution.

Rajni Mandal
Oakland

Forever emergency

Re: Oakland’s ‘unanticipated’ financial emergency set to enter its fourth year, Jun. 2

Thank you for educating voters on how the city manages the funds it collects from them. Maybe outcomes will change when more voters become cognizant of the rip-off.

A perennial state of unanticipated emergency is a sign of willful mismanagement of collected tax revenue. The problem is that Oaklanders keep electing an abusive government.

Ilya (via Substack)
Oakland

Ilya — Thank you for your excellent comment. Voters are not to blame when they cast their votes based on misdirection and lies, as has happened in Oakland multiple times. Thank you again for your comment; the discussion is appreciated.

Oakland needs leadership, not incompetency

Re: Oakland’s ‘unanticipated’ financial emergency set to enter its fourth year, Jun. 2

Oakland needs leadership that is ready to roll up their sleeves and face these issues head on.

Mayor Barbara Lee had no business promising “no layoffs” at a time of fiscal crisis. Her approach shows her incompetency in managing a city government. The mayor seems to have forgotten that her constituents are the focus — not the union members, most of whom may not even live in Oakland.

We need an audit of all departments badly, but for now, rolling furloughs should be on the table to shore up the budget gap.

Malla Hadley
Oakland

Chapter 9 might make it easier to re-engineer City Hall

Even assuming the council was willing and able to find the multi-million bucks to hire, say, McKinsey to perform an audit of the city’s operations, there isn’t the political will at City Hall to carry out the recommendations against the opposition of the unions that helped them get elected. And even if there were, almost every City employee, including lower management, is covered by multi-year labor contracts that govern work conditions as well as compensation.

It will take years to resolve this issue, even under the best of conditions. Chapter 9 bankruptcy proceedings might make re-engineering City Hall processes easier. Or it might not. I’d rather avoid Chapter 9, change to a strong-mayor system, and elect a competent mayor who isn’t beholden to special interests, be they labor or real estate or whomever.

I’m a hopeless optimist about Oakland’s government. That’s what motivated me as a serial candidate for office.

Len Raphael
Oakland

Scope of work to reform the Oakland city charter

Re: Oakland’s charter reform process: the questions it was built not to ask, Jun. 2

Today’s article borders on the irresponsible. Of course there had to be a scope of work to review the Oakland charter. Have you not seen the charter in its entirety? It’s like the Grand Canyon. Adopting these charter reforms only helps improve the structure by which everyone understands the rules of engagement. There is much work ahead unrelated to the charter. Thanks for your attention.

Viola Gonzales
Oakland

Viola — Thank you for your comment. The article’s point is that the working group’s scope did not include key reforms that Oaklanders have asked and voted for — reforms that reasonably can and should have been considered in the scope of the process — and that the process was structured in such as way as to avoid the formal public scrutiny and participation required of other city advisory bodies. Thank you again for your comment; the discussion is appreciated.

Nothing nefarious here

Re: Hand-picked: the political and personal ties between mayor Barbara Lee and her Oakland “charter reform working group”, Jun. 16

While I don’t personally support the proposed strong-mayor initiative (I’m a council-manager kinda guy), I think it’s not exactly surprising that a mayor who campaigned on looking into strong-mayor reforms would assemble a group to do so that she feels confident in.

Honestly, I think the outrage here is a little feigned. I mean, when was the last time you made a decision by asking a bunch of people you don’t have confidence in? And then, of course, the council is the ultimate decision-maker about what goes on the ballot, and despite laudable attempts by council member Zac Unger and others to go the better way, the council went with this one.

I don’t like the policy, but I don’t see anything nefarious here.

It personally doesn’t bother me that the group wasn’t a formal advisory body subject to the Brown Act. I’m not of the opinion that every meeting to discuss public business needs to be noticed and open to public observation. But I can understand why some people would in this case.

Justin Horner
Oakland

Justin — Thank you for your comment. The article simply lays out the connections, and does not state that anything nefarious is happening.

As we reported earlier this month, the mayor’s decision to use a hand-selected “working group” instead of a more formal advisory body (which would be subject to open-meeting laws) is worthy of scrutiny. Here’s a relevant excerpt from our June 2 article:

“The mayor’s decision to appoint a ‘working group’ instead of an official city advisory body was a critical component of the overall process — one that almost inevitably would lead to a recommendation favored by and largely benefiting the mayor.

“Most public bodies in California are required by law to conduct their business in the open. The state’s open-meetings government ‘sunshine’ law — the Ralph M. Brown Act — forces city councils, their committees, and advisory bodies to post agendas in advance, let the public watch them deliberate, post official minutes of proceedings, and keep no decisions hidden.

“But the law has a well-known gap. It generally does not cover a body that a single official creates on their own, as opposed to one a city council establishes by formal vote.

“The mayor’s political charter reform ‘working group’ exploited that gap. Mayor Lee convened it herself, as part of her 100-day plan; the city council never created it by resolution, and the council neither appointed nor confirmed a single member.”

— From Oakland Report, “Oakland’s charter reform process: the questions it was built not to ask”

Thank you again for your comment; the discussion is appreciated.

Video clip 3: Warning: graphic content. Compilation of unsanctioned after-hours party scenes in the streets near the official First Friday event. (Source: Instagram / various accounts)

Oakland’s leaders allow a small number of people to terrorize the city

Re: Late-night crime spikes 44% on First Fridays. The city says it has a new plan to curb it, Jun. 5

Once again, Oakland’s leaders continue to allow a very small number of people to terrorize a city of at least 400,000 people.

Oakland Police Department and city leaders know who the people causing the problems are, but because of ideology, these leaders keep offering carrot after carrot to the criminals while residents and small businesses are negatively impacted.

Former police chief Howard Jordan wanted to implement gang injunctions against a very small number of people because residents and small businesses along the 35th Avenue corridor were being terrorized (for example, new parents too frightened to go out in the dark to get milk for their newborns).

Instead, former mayor Jean Quan directed chief Jordan to not implement the injunctions. Also, Quan invited the gang members causing the problems to her office to meet with her, and of course, she bought into their bullshit that there weren’t any jobs for them.

Think about that: the mayor invited the gang members to her office, but not the residents and new parents and small businesses who were victimized.

The altruism of city “leaders” keeps criminals out of jail and as a result, residents are essentially jailed in their homes out of fear, and small businesses suffer because customers are too afraid to walk the streets to their stores.

Pissed off Oaklander (via Substack)
Oakland

For reasons that need no explanation

Re: Late-night crime spikes 44% on First Fridays. The city says it has a new plan to curb it, Jun. 5

Another story you won’t see in the Oaklandside, for reasons that should not need explanation.

Roland De Wolk
Oakland

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City councils refuse to do what must be done

Re: ‘Our babies are drinking lead and we wonder why they’re fighting at First Friday’, Jun. 13

Oakland’s and Berkeley’s city councils and city managers simply refuse to do what must be done.

I don’t know how many employees Oakland has, but Berkeley has in the neighborhood of 1,300 — known to be among the highest number of employees per capita in the state and possibly the country. They’re telling us that they can’t meaningfully identify where cuts need to be made in headcounts in both cities?

Berkeley’s list of positions to cut is laughably meager. It seems like no one is willing to do the hard work in Oakland, either. The corrupt union-to-council pipeline where the council members are indebted to the unions for their own employment is a huge part of the problem for both cities when it comes to meaningfully balancing their budgets.

I commend Oakland Report for keeping the heat on these inept and corrupt politicians and the SEIU union machine. Heaven knows our local online media such as Oaklandside and Berkeleyside don’t have the guts or the skill to put their finger on the problem and call it out.

Leaping Lemur (via Substack)
Oakland

Guardrails on city council pay raises

Re: Oakland city council pay raises: the charter reform provision no one is discussing, Jun. 15

There is a simple amendment to the proposed city council pay raises that would demonstrate the council’s intent:

1. No council member shall be eligible, in the present or future term, for any compensation increase that is approved or effected by the council or city administration while they are serving as a member of council.

2. During a declared fiscal necessity or fiscal emergency, the council, mayor and mayor staff salaries shall be reduced by 50% and benefit calculations shall use this reduced salary as the basis.

3. This provision may be revoked or suspended only by 2/3 supermajority of the vote in a general or special election.

Tim Gardner
Oakland

Tim — Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately, the city council opted not to include any such guardrails on their pay raises when they voted to place the charter reform measure on the November ballot.

Inviting stronger competition for council seats

Re: Oakland city council pay raises: the charter reform provision no one is discussing, Jun. 15

Just think: council members might think they are approving pay raises for themselves when they are actually inviting stronger competition for their seats. I think that is a good thing.

Josh Rowan
Oakland

Josh — Thank you for your comment. The charter reform measure would expressly prohibit council members from having “outside employment.” That could actually inhibit potential candidates who are gainfully employed and financially successful in their day jobs — precisely the type of accomplished people who might be more qualified and competitive for council seats.

You get what you pay for

Re: Oakland city council pay raises: the charter reform provision no one is discussing, Jun. 15

I look at it the other way. The goal isn’t to give raises to incumbents. The goal is to attract more qualified, competitive candidates.

Let’s say I am an active member of the community, have a real job, have real experience, and would like to challenge my district council member who is not doing (in my opinion) a good job — but I can’t afford the pay cut.

What’s the saying? “You get what you pay for.” Maybe some term limits should be attached to this proposal too. After a maximum of two terms, it’s time to move on.

Josh Rowan
Oakland

Josh — Thank you for your follow-up comment. Regardless of the goal, the practical effect of the charter reform measure is to give city council incumbents substantial pay raises.

Notably, if the goal is to “attract more qualified, competitive candidates,” the implication is that the incumbent council members are neither competitive nor qualified enough.

So far, no council member has commented or offered any justification for or against the raises, despite the raises being a main component of the overall charter reform measure.

Thank you, all, for your comments; the discussion is appreciated.

Editors’ note

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Oakland Agenda Watch provides summaries of key items on upcoming public meeting agendas that catch our attention. In this installment, we look at the June 18, 2026 warning letter from the Alameda County Office of Education to the Oakland Unified School District board, which is set to adopt a $1.2 billion budget on June 24.

How public schools are managed affects all of us

Public school districts are instrumental to the success or failure of a community, whether one has children in public schools or not.

Public education is rightly one of the biggest and most consequential expenses of public funds, and public school districts often are among a city’s largest employers.1234

Yet, the actions and composition of elected school boards are often overlooked by the general public — an afterthought taken for granted, until something goes wrong.56

Last week, the Alameda County superintendent of schools, who oversees the finances of public school districts throughout the county, sent a letter to Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) warning that a new contract with teachers union Oakland Education Association (OEA) “endangers the district’s fiscal stability.”7

“As the Board has not yet identified how or when it will make the necessary adjustments to balance the budget and maintain required reserves, the County Superintendent is required by law to notify district leaders and the community that the [OEA teachers union] agreement endangers the district’s fiscal stability.”

— Alameda County superintendent of schools Alysse Castro, June 18, 2026

Superintendent Alysse Castro’s warning comes as OUSD is set to adopt its 2026-27 budget on June 24.8

Castro’s letter says that the district appears to have the ability to pay for the raises in the coming year, but it has not shown how it will keep paying for them in future years.

State law requires school districts to publicly disclose the cost of any tentative labor agreement (union contract) and to certify in writing that they can afford the deal in the current year and the two years that follow.9

This is the third escalating warning Castro has sent OUSD in five months. In April, she issued a rare “going concern” letter — a formal oversight step that precedes county intervention and “safeguards for rapid intervention if conditions worsen.”10

Key points

• The proposed OEA contract will cost OUSD an additional $104.8 million over three years. The additional annual cost to OUSD’s general fund would be $12.9 million in 2025-26, and would rise to $60.2 million by 2027-28. Another $3.6 million in costs would be borne across other funds.

• The OUSD board needs to make $30 million in cuts it has not yet identified. The district’s budget assumes roughly $30 million in cuts in 2026-27 and again in 2027-28 — but the district doesn’t say what those cuts are.

• Without those cuts, the district would fall below the required 2 percent reserve (emergency savings) in 2026-27. OUSD also would have a negative fund balance in 2027-28.

• The OUSD board is set to approve a $1.2 billion budget for 2026-27. General fund spending would be cut around $99 million (10.2 percent), with the deepest cuts in services, supplies and capital, rather than its largest spending category: personnel.11

• The OEA teachers union contract was negotiated and is being funded by a school board majority and staff who have deep ties to OEA. Four school board members worked for or received campaign support from OEA, and OUSD’s interim superintendent is a past president of OEA.12

OEA union contract would award up to 13% raises, some retroactively

The proposed contract awards raises in two stages:

1. Retroactive 7 percent raises at the top of the salary range and 4 percent raises to all other salary steps for the current fiscal year 2025-26.

2. Additional 2 percent raises for the top step and 3 percent to other steps on July 1, 2026; and another 4 percent across the board on June 30, 2027.

The cumulative raises equate to roughly 13 percent at the top salary step and 11 percent at the other steps over two years — roughly twice as high as a neutral fact-finder’s recommendation of around 6 percent.13

The deal also creates targeted increases for special education teachers, nurses, psychologists, social workers, speech-language pathologists, and early-childhood educators.

OUSD’s spending is forecast to result in a $100.2 million budget deficit (10.3 percent) in the current 2025-26 year, and a $37.2 million deficit (4.3 percent) in 2026-27.

OUSD is one of the highest-funded large school districts in California on a per-pupil basis.14

Despite its relatively high funding, only 33.7 percent of OUSD students met or exceeded California’s English language arts standard, and only 26.9 percent met or exceeded the math standard — well below the statewide rates of 48.8 percent in English and about 37 percent in math.15

The OEA raises depend on school cuts that don’t exist yet

The county superintendent’s stated concern is not the raises themselves, but the absence of a clear plan to pay for them.

Castro’s letter notes that the proposed OEA contract increases OUSD’s ongoing costs by approximately $30 million starting July 1, but its budget forecasts are “built on an assumption of… as yet unspecified budget reductions.”

She writes that OUSD identified “a single budget revision of $30 million in future reductions that have not yet been specified,” without the clear plan, timeline, and board-approved direction that typically accompany such reductions.

State law requires a district to “itemize any budget revision necessary to meet the costs of the agreement [union contract] in each year of its term.”

Public Disclosure of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between OUSD and the Oakland Education Association (OEA)

434KB ∙ PDF file

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Letter from Alysse Castro, county schools superintendent to Oakland Unified School District, warning that OUSD can’t afford its new teacher contract unless it finds $30 million in cuts it has yet to identify.

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Castro warns that because the new fiscal year begins July 1 — days after the board vote — any savings will likely have to come mid-year, where one-time fixes are easier to find than permanent reductions to ongoing costs.

She adds that one-time savings do not resolve a structural deficit; they must be repeated again and again in “a process that multiplies the pain.”

The budget the board will consider tomorrow reduces General Fund expenditures to about $874 million from around $973 million the prior year — a $99 million, 10.2 percent reduction.

Roughly 5 percent of the reduction is consistent with the over 400 staff positions the board voted to eliminate earlier this year.16

Castro’s letter notes that although the board “made the hard choice to reduce staff by nearly 400 people, dramatically cutting central support services,” it cautions that “next year will bring more cuts, and the year after, more still.”

Raiding today’s cash to fund tomorrow’s promises

Castro makes clear that this is not a cash crisis. “The issue is not whether OUSD has sufficient cash to implement this agreement today — based on the District’s projections, it does.”

But the one-time cash comes with an ongoing cost. The 2026-27 budget draws the General Fund balance down by about $37 million in a single year, even after the cuts.

State revenue updates and unspent 2025-26 funds also could potentially reduce the extent of the required cuts. OUSD accumulated substantial reserves from one-time pandemic resources, and could divert restricted funds to support routine operations.

The district’s 2025-26 Third Interim multiyear budget forecast, released last month, showed OUSD meeting both the 2 percent state-required reserve and its locally adopted 3 percent reserve in the current and two following years — but only if the unspecified $30 million reductions are achieved in each of 2026-27 and 2027-28.17

Castro writes that without those cuts, the district “would be unable to meet the 2 percent state-required [reserve funding] in 2026-27 and would project a negative fund balance in 2027-28.”

The OUSD board majority and staff have deep ties to OEA

As Oakland Report has documented, the four-member board majority that has driven OUSD’s major decisions over the past year — president Jennifer Brouhard, vice president Valarie Bachelor, Rachel Latta, and VanCedric Williams — was elected with OEA’s financial and political support, and the union has publicly stood behind their leadership.

The most influential beneficiary of OEA’s support is board president Jennifer Brouhard. Before her election to the school board in 2022, Brouhard held prominent leadership roles in OEA, including three terms on the OEA executive board and one term as OEA secretary, in addition to many years as an OEA school site representative.18

Another influential recipient of OEA’s support is OUSD’s interim superintendent, Denise Saddler. She served six years as OEA’s president before the same school board majority installed her as interim superintendent, after abruptly ending the contract of the prior superintendent who steered OUSD out of financial receivership.19

Read this related article:

Board member Mike Hutchinson, part of the three-member minority, called on Saddler to resign in late March, warning that approving the OEA agreement without specifying what the needed cuts would be would push the 2026-27 budget shortfall back above $100 million.20

None of the above-mentioned union-school board ties is necessarily disqualifying. Elected boards routinely negotiate with unions who helped elect them, and it is possible for a former union leader to serve as an elected official in a manner that prioritizes the best interests of the public they were elected to serve.

However, it is reasonable to consider that elected officials who benefit from financial and political support from a union, and then negotiate a lucrative contract with that same union — a contract that requires deep budget cuts to afford — may have real or perceived conflicts of interest that would warrant recusal in many other settings.

Other considerations and counterpoints

In fairness, the county superintendent does not dispute that OUSD can pay for the agreement this year. Castro credits the district for improving its budget outlook by using restricted funds for regular operations, that is, shifting eligible costs off the general fund and onto the restricted funds instead, which she calls “a positive budgeting practice.”

She also notes that it is “not uncommon for districts to leave details of future year reductions to be developed later,” and that some solutions can be refined later in the budget cycle.

Castro acknowledges that the board did make some difficult reductions this year, including the elimination of over 400 positions, and she notes that “all schools stayed open, staff got raises, and 34,000 kids enjoyed community schools.”

Higher revenue from the state and unspent 2025-26 funds could shrink the cuts still needed in the coming year.

Supporters of the raises also argue that competitive pay is itself a fiscal strategy in a district that has struggled to retain teachers.