Our new Oakland Beat newsletter provides exclusive reports, commentaries, and inside information on issues that matter, grounded in the evidence and facts that you have come to expect from Oakland Report.

Oakland Beat is offered exclusively for Oakland Report supporting members, but this installment is being made available to all readers.

Become a member of Oakland Report today to receive future installments of Oakland Beat, straight to your inbox. (If you have already donated: thank you.)

Donate today to support our nonprofit work

Donate now

Mayor Barbara Lee, council president Kevin Jenkins, and firefighters union boss Seth Olyer held a rally with public employees to gin up support for Measure E.

Oakland Report obtained video of today’s rally at Oakland City Hall in support of Measure E. (See above for the video, and below for a transcript.)

Rally speakers included Mayor Barbara Lee, council president Kevin Jenkins, firefighters union president Seth Olyer, and Chaney Turner of Oakland Rising Action.

Also in attendance were former councilmember-turned-illegal dumping project manager Rebecca Kaplan, Oakland school board president Jennifer Brouhard, and around 50 others holding signs that said “Yes on E - save our essential services” and “Save our fire stations.”

Transcript

[WORKERS DISASSEMBLING POLITICAL SIGNS]

Take them off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.

No, I’m not. I’m not.

FIREFIGHTERS UNION PRESIDENT SETH OLYER:

All right, good afternoon every… good afternoon? It is afternoon. Welcome, everybody. We’re gonna get started here in one minute.

Okay. Good afternoon. My name is Seth Olyer, president, Oakland Firefighters, Local 55. I want to welcome everybody.

Welcome, all the workers here today showing support for Measure E. Oaklanders coming out to support this incredible, incredibly important measure on the June 2nd ballot.

Again, I’m Seth Olyer. There goes my script. S-E-T-H O-L-Y-E-R, president, Oakland firefighters. And I’d like to pass the mic to Chaney.

ACTIVIST CHANEY TURNER:

Good afternoon everybody. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. My name is Chaney Turner. I’m the director of voter engagement with Oakland Rising Action.

And as Seth said, we are here to show our support for Measure E and also talk to voters about why this is important for all of Oakland.

I want to introduce our honorable Mayor, Barbara Lee, who has a few words to say.

MAYOR BARBARA LEE:

Thank you all very much. And let me just say thank you to Pamela, and thank you to all of our community members, to all of our workers, to all of our organizations for being here today, our pastors.

This is a very important moment in the city’s history, really, in terms of our financial history and where we are today.

And I just wanted to say, my first year as your mayor will be May 20th. Is that tomorrow one year? And this is the first time that I’ve been able to submit my own budget.

Now, let me just be clear. The budget I submitted does not include the parcel tax because it would not be responsible to put forward the budget before any initiative on the ballot had passed.

Read this related article:

But having said that, we have a spending plan… that is a plan… if the parcel tax, Measure E passes, that really supports our city services, it supports our neighborhoods, and I’ll give you an example.

Under the mayor’s budget plan, where we have our senior centers, for example, open four days. If we pass the parcel tax, they’ll be open five days, you know?

So we can’t tolerate just treading water and just barely making it. Oaklanders deserve to move forward. And they deserve not just to survive, but to thrive. And that’s what we do here.

And I just want to say to you. There are... there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Okay? And so we decided — and Miya [Saika Chen] is here. Thank you very much, Miya and to my team, because we have our spending plan laid out in terms of what... and I’ll just show you what Measure E will do.

Don’t believe what people are saying with regard to this is about union raises or COLAs [cost of living increases]. You know, those are just arguments that those who don’t support this are making.

Read this related article:

This is about the services. This is about public safety.

It’s about making sure our illegal dumping strategies work.

It’s about making sure that housing and our unsheltered population have the services and the shelter and the housing that they deserve.

So that’s what Measure E is about. It’s about making good on our promise.

And so believe me, there’s a lot of misinformation out… and Pamela and all of you, I’m glad that you’re here doing this because we need to clarify what the truth is about Measure E.

And so, president Jenkins, why don’t you come up and say a few words? May I yield to the president of the City Council if he, he’ll say, he’s my... our colleague, our friend, our leader of the city council.

And I’m really happy to see you here. And I have to go in just a minute to a rally - another rally.

COUNCIL PRESIDENT KEVIN JENKINS:

Well, Pamela Drake said I wasn’t invited.

But, you know, this is really important for Oakland and the future of Oakland.

And the mayor has come out with a plan that is blessed by council on how we would spend the taxpayers’ money.

If we are so blessed to get Measure E passed, it’s desperately needed to help with our aging infrastructure.

It’s desperately needed to help when it comes to our some of our fire trucks. I think they’re older than me. Some of them, right.

Read this related article:

She said everything’s older than me, but we desperately need this for the city of Oakland.

We are rowing in the right direction and we have to continue that. We have to continue supporting the infrastructure that has been desperately underinvested in.

And so, with the mayor, with city council, we will be accountable to the voters. We’ll be accountable to the taxpayers on how we spend their money in a transparent way. Thank you so much.

WE ARE 100% SUPPORTED BY YOU

Oakland Report accepts no advertising or “sponsored content.” We rely on you, our readers and subscribers, for the financial support we need to produce news stories like this one.

Your donation in any amount helps Oakland Report continue our 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit work:

Donate now

Learn more

This report explains the step-by-step scientific and statistical process we used to estimate how many City of Oakland employees actually live in Oakland and comparable California cities. Because cities are not required to publicize this information (some do so voluntarily), and California state law prevents local governments from forcing employees to live in the cities they serve, most city HR departments do not publish lists of employee ZIP codes.

To bridge this data transparency gap, we used established scientific and statistical methods—the same kinds used by economists and public policy researchers—plus available data from Oakland and other cities to build a reasonably accurate estimate. By combining information in federal databases with verified data from comparable cities (our “model groups”), we corrected the natural errors found in survey data. Ultimately, this statistical modeling estimates that about 32% of Oakland’s city workforce lives in Oakland, with a mathematically defensible range falling between 22% and 42%.

Here is how the methodology works, and how we adjusted our models to reflect real-world data and evidence.

1. Statistical triangulation

Since the City of Oakland does not publish lists of its employees’ ZIP codes, we employed a statistical method that analyzed large datasets from the federal government using a method called triangulation—i.e., looking at a problem from multiple angles using different sources to see where the data overlaps.

• Person-Based Data: We used the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), filtering for people who marked their job as “local government.”

• Jobs-Based Data: We used the Census Bureau’s commuting database (LEHD), which tracks cell phone and tax data to map where people in “public administration” live versus where they work.

By combining these two datasets, we built an initial, rough estimate based on the statistical data they contain.

2. Calibration

An early challenge with our initial Census estimates is that federal data groups all “local government” workers together. If we pull Census data for Oakland, it doesn’t just count City of Oakland employees; it also counts public school teachers, transit workers, and regional utility staff who happen to work inside Oakland boundaries.

Because the Census-only measurement tool is slightly blurry or biased, we employed other data to help calibrate it. To do this, we used a statistical method based on Bayesian principles that compared the initial, blurry data against a “model group” to derive a more exact error rate.

• How we did it: A few local government jurisdictions do publish their exact, official residency numbers. San Francisco officially reports a 41.9% residency rate, Los Angeles reports 36.3%, and Alameda Unified School District 57%. We ran our blurry Census query for these jurisdictions to see what the Census estimates the rate was.

• Why we did it: By comparing the Census guess to these cities’ actual numbers, we discovered exactly how “off” the Census data usually is (it typically misses the mark by 3 to 6 percentage points). We then applied that same mathematical correction to our Oakland data to fix the blur. This adjustment gave us our reasonably accurate baseline estimate of 32% for Oakland, with a confidence interval (margin of error) of approximately +/-10%.

3. Confidence interval

Because we are using survey data and making statistical adjustments, it is mathematically imprecise to give one single, perfect percentage. All surveys have a margin of error.

To account for this, we used a statistical method that runs thousands of simulated scenarios to calculate a confidence interval. This tells us that while 32% is our best, middle-ground estimate, the true number could realistically sit anywhere between 22% and 42%. When estimating Oakland’s residency rate, we looked at this entire range, knowing the true number is highly likely to fall within those boundaries.

4. Real-world adjustments

A flat 32% average doesn’t tell the whole story. Different jobs have different lifestyles, shift schedules, and rules. We adjusted the model for different municipal unions based on hard data and operational realities:

Where we have the actual data (overriding the model)

• Police Officers (OPOA): We did not have to estimate this at all. Actual Oakland Police Department staffing reports explicitly state that only 8% to 9% of sworn officers live in Oakland. Because the hard, official data exists, we threw out the Census estimate entirely and used the city’s exact numbers.

Where we adjusted for shift schedules (cross-referencing)

• Firefighters (IAFF Local 55): The raw Census data overstates the statistically-derived percentage of resident firefighters because of their unique schedules. Firefighters work 48 hours straight, then get 96 hours off. Because they commute only about 10 times a month (instead of 20+ like an office worker), they can easily live in further distant cities— and copious anecdotal information suggests that the vast majority of Oakland firefighters do live outside of town.

  • How we adjusted it: We looked at official data from San Francisco and Los Angeles. In those cities, public safety residency is routinely less than half the rate of the civilian workforce. We applied this known public-safety drop-off to Oakland, reasonably adjusting the firefighter estimate down to 15% to 20% to match the real-world impact of their shift structure.

Where we adjusted for contract rules

• Civilian and Office Workers (SEIU 1021): We adjusted this group’s estimate higher (35% to 48%) because Oakland gives a 5-point bonus on hiring exams to local residents, which statistically increases local hiring for these entry-level and service roles.

• Engineers and Management (IFPTE 21): We adjusted this group lower (22% to 35%) because these are highly specialized jobs. For example, the city recruits and employs engineers— a highly specialized and in-demand profession— from all over the Bay Area, meaning many already own homes in other cities before they are hired, have greater means to absorb the expense of longer commutes, are more likely to have work-from-home options, and are less likely to relocate.

5. Adjusting the peer cities

When we applied these statistical methods to other California cities that don’t publish their ZIP code data, we similarly adjusted the estimates to account for the unique math of their local jobs and housing markets:

• Sacramento (estimated 43%): We adjusted Sacramento’s numbers upward in part because they have historically greater wages-to-housing parity, and a strict proximity rule: emergency workers must live within a 35-air-mile radius of the city.

• Fremont (estimated 18%): We adjusted Fremont’s numbers downward using an economic housing metric. Fremont has 1.65 jobs for every housing unit in the city, a relatively high jobs-to-housing ratio for the region. Because the jobs substantially outnumber the homes, thus creating upward pressures on the housing market in that city, it is a statistical likelihood that more of its workers commute from out of town.

• San Jose (estimated 24%): We adjusted San Jose downward based on the extreme disparity between its local real estate prices and municipal salaries, a dynamic that pushes city staff into less-expensive housing markets located within commuting distance, such as the Central Valley.

Conclusion

The above-described methodology resulted in a reasonably accurate and staisticallky defensible estimate of Oakland city worker residency, with a confidence interval of ±10% .

The ideal situation would be for the city of Oakland to voluntarily produce its own concrete data about worker residency, as the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Alameda Unified School District have done— perhaps through an independent report produced by the Office of the Oakland City Auditor, which presumably would have access to the city’s personnel data for the purpose.

In the absence of official data and reporting from the City of Oakland, and because no other studies of city worker residency yet exist, we assert that this analysis is currently the best and most accurate estimate available— and further note that its findings are roughly consistent with the known data produced by other local government jurisdictions.

If the City of Oakland produces a report based on actual employee residency data in the future— and we encourage the city to do so— then we will update and republish this analysis accordingly.

References

1. Oakland Police Department. Quarterly Staffing Reports. This provided the exact 8-9% numbers for sworn officers, overriding the statistical estimates. https://www.oaklandca.gov/files/assets/city/v/1/city-administrator/documents/informational-memos/2022/quarterly-policy-staffing-report-q4-2021.pdf

2. Port of Oakland and SEIU Local 1021. Union Contract (MOU). This provided the local residency hiring points used to adjust civilian models upward. https://www.portofoakland.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/SEIU-Local-1021-and-The-Port-of-Oakland-MOU-July-1-2022-September-30-2025-signed.pdf

3. City and County of San Francisco. 2023 Workforce Report. Along with concrete data provided by the city of Los Angeles and Alameda Unified School District, this provided our “model group” data to calibrate the estimate. https://media.api.sf.gov/documents/DHR-Workforce-Report-2023_3lZNFRh.pdf

4. City and County of San Francisco. 2020 Annual Workforce Report, Phase I.

   https://sfdhr.org/sites/default/files/documents/Reports/annual-workforce-report-2020.pdf

5. City and County of San Francisco. 2023 Workforce Report. https://media.api.sf.gov/documents/DHR-Workforce-Report-2023_3lZNFRh.pdf

6. San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s where San Francisco government workers live.

   https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sf-city-government-employee-20329218.php

7. City and County of Los Angeles. 2022 City Controller Payroll Analysis. This additional data provided the 36.3% anchor data for cross-referencing public safety drops. https://controller.lacity.gov/landings/2022-employee-residence-analysis

8. City of Alameda. 2020 Housing Affordability and Displacement Report. This additional data provided the 57% anchor data for Alameda Unified School District. https://www.alamedaca.gov/files/assets/public/v/3/departments/alameda/econ-dev-amp-comm-services/city-of-alameda-housing-affordability-and-displacement-report.pdf

9. Port of Oakland. 61% local hiring reached at Port of Oakland’s Army Base development. https://www.portofoakland.com/press-release-406

10. City of Sacramento. Pre-employment Conditions. This provided the 35-mile emergency worker rule used to adjust our estimate for that city. https://www.cityofsacramento.gov/content/dam/portal/hr/Divisions/ECD/PreEmploymentConditions.pdf

11. City of Sacramento. Pre-employment Conditions.

    https://www.cityofsacramento.gov/content/dam/portal/hr/Divisions/ECD/PreEmploymentConditions.pdf

12. City of Sacramento. Employee Handbook.

    https://www.cityofsacramento.gov/content/dam/portal/city-government/policies-procedures/EmployeeHandbook.pdf

13. City of Sacramento. Rules and Regulations of the Civil Service Board.

    https://www.cityofsacramento.gov/content/dam/portal/hr/documentlibrary/CivilServiceBoardRules62012.pdf

14. U.S. Census Bureau. American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata. Used to gather person-based data and filter for “Class of Worker.” https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/microdata.html

15. U.S. Census Bureau. Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD). Used to track commute flows for public administration workers. https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/lodes/LODES8/LODESTechDoc8.3.pdf

16. City of Fremont. Draft 2023-2031 Housing Element.

    https://www.hcd.ca.gov/housing-elements/docs/fremont-6th-draft082522.pdf

17. Community Scale. Fremont, CA - Housing Forecast - CommunityScale.

    https://app.communityscale.io/dashboard/municipality/0626000/Fremont-CA

18. Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). Jobs-Housing Balance Report. https://abag.ca.gov/sites/default/files/factor_j3_jobs-housing_balance_v2.pdf

19. U.S. Census Bureau. American Community Survey Microdata. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/microdata.html

20. U.S. Census Bureau. Data - Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics.

    https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/

21. U.S. Census Bureau. OnTheMap. https://onthemap.ces.census.gov/index.html

22. U.S. Census Bureau. LODES Technical Document Version 8.3. https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/lodes/LODES8/LODESTechDoc8.3.pdf

23. U.S. Census Bureau. Census Geocoder Documentation. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/technical-documentation/complete-technical-documentation/census-geocoder.html

24. U.S. Census Bureau. Geocoding Services API. https://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/Geocoding_Services_API.html

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-unified-risk-state-oversight-again-board-members-warn/

Oakland City Council is aiming to collect $40 million from a new tax increase on Oakland properties.

The city council is already spending the money.

The city council has included the revenue in its operating budget for the current fiscal year, even though the new tax has not been put on the ballot for a vote yet.

As Oakland Report reported last week, the city’s public employee unions now are funding paid signature-gatherers to collect signatures to put a new parcel tax on the June 2026 ballot. Their proposed new tax would raise up to $40 million — the exact amount the city council budgeted.

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021 appears to be leading the campaign committee — called “Oaklanders For A Safe, Clean & Healthy City, Sponsored By Labor Organizations” — to put the tax increase on the 2026 ballot.

SEIU has already contributed $200,000 to the campaign.

The campaign committee’s donors also include the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) Local 55 which contributed $150,000, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 21 which contributed $50,500. PG&E contributed $50,000.

Campaign finance disclosure: Oaklanders For A Safe, Clean & Healthy City, Sponsored By Labor Organizations

102KB ∙ PDF file

Download

California Form 460: Recipient Committee Campaign Statement. Submitted by "Oaklanders for a Safe, Clean & Healthy City, Sponsored by Labor Organizations," Feb. 2, 2026.

Download

Notably, with a “citizen-sponsored” ballot initiative such as the one the public unions are leading — even a parcel tax — the threshold for voter approval is a simple majority (50% plus 1). If the new tax is placed on the ballot by the city council, the approval threshold would be much higher at two-thirds (66.67%).

Based on the evidence in city documents, it is clear that the city council is aware of and has committed to placing a tax increase on the 2026 ballot to “generate an additional $40 million in ongoing revenues to maintain operations and support key systems such as 911 dispatch, IT infrastructure, and public safety.”

This is the exact same criteria, and the exact same dollar amount the public employee unions are now proposing in the parcel tax measure for which they are currently gathering signatures.

Proposed ballot measure: Oakland Public Safety, Cleanliness Accountability Act of 2026

2.86MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Oakland Safety/ Cleanliness Measure. Shall the measure to prevent longer 911 response times; keep fire stations open; prevent cuts to fire protection, police patrols, crime prevention/ investigation; address homelessness, dumping, litter/trash by levying a parcel tax of $192 on single-family and other parcels as specified, resulting in lower taxes for most homeowners, with low-income exceptions, including seniors, raising approximately $34,000,000 annually for 9 years, public disclosure, citizen oversight, independent audits be adopted?

Download

By all appearances, the city council and the public employee unions are coordinating in plain sight to increase taxes on Oaklanders by shifting the planned ballot measure from a city council-sponsored measure that requires a two-thirds vote to pass, to a “citizen-sponsored” initiative that only requires a simple majority.

See this related article: