Issues and legislation coming before Council's subject matter committees Tuesday. Not an exhaustive list, but these are issues and legislation worth taking note of. Often, the Council's Committees are the only place significant deliberation occurs on some legislation.
Finance Committee
At Finance, the main item of discussion will be a report on ongoing “Roadmap to Fiscal Health” process. It's a slim report with few specific plans as of yet, and oddly reliant on solutions with a high degree of chance involved—like a 2026 ballot measure, vaguely identified solutions for police recruitment, “philanthropy and very generally described pension reform. The report does describe a finance taskforce that will likely hone some of these ideas.
Public Works and Transportation Committee, Special Meeting
The Public Works & Transportation meeting is scheduled as a special meeting, beginning a half hour earlier at 11 am. The meeting has a deep agenda split between ongoing paving contracts; several policy changes in the City’s sidewalk/curb repair construction contract process necessitated by an anticipated class action settlement on ADA access and sidewalk conditions [Curran]; and a proposed contract with a mega-security company that will replace the now reputationally barnacled ABC Security.
Items 3, 4, and 5
focused on the city’s paving program and award contracts and authorize purchasing:
Items 6, 7, 8
are related to the scope of works and repairs likely necessitated in a potential settlement in the Curran class action.
Item 6: Authorizes the City Administrator by resolution to award contracts up to $7.5 MM without returning to Council in order to meet the extensive requirements of the Curran settlement over the next decades—with an estimated 10 bid processes annually to meet the scope of the changes. The legislation notes that the process would follow all other city guidelines, rules and laws, with bids going to the lowest responsible bidder in an open process. The City would still have to seek Council approval for contracts that seek to go outside the normal bidding process, but the CAO would also have the power to amend and change-order the contracts within scope of work. The City argues that the pre-authorization would save countless hours of report creation and presentation to Council in order to get authorization.
Item 7: A companion legislation would allow the City to waive the Local/Small Local Business requirements in all sidewalk/curb -focused contracts. The accompanying report argues that the sidewalk construction industry pool Oakland has access to lacks any L/SLBE contractors, per previous bidding experience.
Item 8: A Curran’s complaint is that despite having legislation that requires homeowners to repair sidewalks adjacent to their property, property owners are still regularly failing to do so. The legislation would remove the City’s cap on its own low-income homeowner assistance for the repairs in order to potentially increase them.
The City's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission for the most supports the proposed legislation, although it suggests that the City at least endeavor to find L/SLBE contractors.
Citywide Security Services Contract with Allied Security
The City’s* previous security contractor became a focus of media attention last year as the City struggled to maintain a security contractor amid several challenges: delays from ransomware, a change in administration in mid-contracting process, and subsequently, ABC’s own connection to the rapidly unfolding FBI investigation into the Sheng Thao administration.
In the City’s narrative in various reports, the delays begin as ABC’s contract wound down during the waning months of the Schaaf administration, several changes in the contract scope delayed adjudicating the bids until eventually another process with new bids had to be initiated. With no actual security alternative, the end result was that ABC Security ended up with an additional two years of uncontracted work worth tens of millions of dollars.
ABC again applied in the new processes, and part of those efforts have also made the news. But city documents show ABC scored last in all of the criteria in the current process, both in initial application and in interview. Allied Universal Security, one of the largest security companies in the world, had the top scores, along with a local small business partner, Oakland-based Diligence, which also has contracts with Alameda County for armed security services.
Allied struggled in the previous bid process because it did not have a local small business subcontractor; at that time, Marina Security Services, also competing for the bid, was in talks with the City to partner with Allied. But in the meantime, Allied appears to have gone another route for its 50% L/SLBE of the work scope, leaving Marina to compete alone and unsuccessfully for the bid.
The contract the City Administrator would set an upper expenditure limit for the contract at double its $27 MM base to $45 MM, meaning the CAO would not have to return to Council for authorization at the higher expenditure level. One way the ABC contract grew, for example, was an increase in sites guards were being regularly sent to.
One of the delays in the original bidding process that ultimately failed in 2022, according to city staff in previous meetings, was the exploration of the potential to expand the contract at any point with armed guards. It’s unclear where this question originated, but the new contract for Allied would add potentially armed security guards at the CAO’s discretion. At previous meetings last year, Council members told City staff they did not believe armed guards were a wise move, but the contract appears to have retained the option, regardless
Allied is a controversial brand name associated with troubling anecdotes and significant lawsuits across the country and world. In 2023, when the City began the bidding process that included Allied, an Allied security guard working at a San Francisco hotel gunned down a tourist in the tenderloin, apparently over a disagreement.
Allied is notorious for expanding by buying out and subsuming smaller regional security companies, and its footprint extends into very political territory in the developing world.
Community and Economic Development Committee
Joaquin Miller Park Land Transfer
Though the initial transfer of stewardship of land at Joaquin Miller to indigenous control under Sogorea Te Land Trust occurred in 2022 through a cultural conservation easement, some ministerial issues continue. Though owned by the City, portions of the land are actually in unincorporated Alameda County–the legislation would transfer the land into the full boundaries of city control to facilitate the land trust.
OAB Air Quality Report Reveals California Waste Solutions is Out at Army Base
A regular report on activities of tenants and construction operation at the Oakland Army Base mandated by the Oakland Army Base Development Agreement would normally raise few eyebrows. But this report has coincided with the failure of the California Waste Solutions development agreement at the Army Base—the site where it would have eventually transitioned its Pine Street processing location, long a source of community complaints. On Thursday on introduction, a City staffer noted the need for a title change to remove CWS from the report for this reason.
"We had to take it off because of the termination. The termination occurred when the report was drafted and submitted to the city administrator's office," Planning and Building's Corey Alvin told Rules Committee members.
The original report is still included in the packet, as well as the new report with CWS removed. The timeline indicates that at some point between mid-June and July 3, the termination occurred. The Oakland Observer contacted the City Administrator for more information but has not received a response by press time.
Life Enrichment Committee
Changes to Animal Control Ordinance and Oakland Animal Shelter Policy
The changes are focused on animal surrender, impoundment and spaying/neutering.
Extended Stay America/Mandela House Report Back
Ongoing oral reports on the City’s newest homelessness intervention, now dubbed Mandela House. There is some additional information about the closure of the MLK/23rd encampment, initially meant to coincide with the funding of a housing alternative that eventually created Mandela House. Mandela House is approaching full occupancy, and would be fully occupied if the total MLK residents had been able to transition there as was the original intention. The E 12th median closure does not include concurrent closures along E 12th where the Oakland Observer verified no alternative housing was offered.
Public Safety Committee
IAB to CPRA Transition Report
The long-overdue report on a potential civilianization of many Internal Affairs Bureau** [IAB] processes is the only item on the agenda for the Public Safety Committee [PSC]. The actual report, created by law firm Moeel Lah Fakhoury, is included here from the City's court monitoring packet submitted last week, but it's not included in the agenda packet. The item contains only a summary of the findings and recommendations from the Community Police Review Agency [CPRA].
The MLF report has had a circuitous journey to the PSC since the idea of transitioning many IAB duties to the CPRA was first proposed by CPRA Director John Alden to the Oakland Police Commission in early 2021. At that point IAB civilianization was a draft recommendation by the Reimagining Public Safety Taskforce as a way of improving OPD oversight and was given further weight by Alden’s serious consideration. The taskforce also included IAB-CPRA transition in the body’s published recommendations.
With the support of the City Administrator’s Office, the Commission pursued the potential process, beginning with commissioning a third-party feasibility study. But in the ensuing months before the scope of work of the contract could be completed, the Commission fired Alden for still unknown reasons, and then visibly struggled to determine a scope throughout the short term of Alden’s successor, Aaron Zisser. Zisser left the role just months after assuming it.
Under Mac Muir, Zisser’s successor and the most recent permanent CPRA director, the two agencies still struggled to move the study contract forward, despite the original biennial budget of former Mayor Sheng Thao relying on FY 24-25 savings to the budget with the transition. Eventually just before Muir left the body, the study got underway and was completed last month.
In the ensuing period since the commissioned study began, the idea of IAB civilianization has experienced reversals, however. Civilianization was a distant afterthought through the fraught budgeting of the second year biennial in mid 2024 and barely mentioned as the CPRA funding necessary for it was slashed. But subsequent intersecting events have again re-agendized CPRA’s role.
As budgetary realities began to close the window on a potential transition in 2024, a CPRA investigation [in partnership with a third party investigative consultant] found that IAB and OPD commanders had disastrously botched an investigation into serious officer misconduct. The misconduct had initially been made public when two murder convictions were reversed due to findings that OPD Homicide Detective Phong Tran bribed a witness and perjured himself. The CPRA investigation found command staff lied and covered for the officer and recommended severe discipline, including termination, of over half a dozen command staff who oversaw the exculpatory investigation of Tran. Murder convictions continue to be reopened thanks to Tran’s misconduct as of this writing.
The Tran investigation became part of an unlikely confluence that has the OPD proposing elements of the IAB transition as policy. In a recent assessment of the IAB Tran investigation transmitted to the NSA court monitor, OPD recommends such serious investigations be taken over by CPRA–literally admitting to the court appointed monitor that OPD may not be able to adequately police itself in matters of significant misconduct.
A long-awaited OPD staffing analysis also recently suggested that the OPD is more likely to solve its staffing issues by reducing work burdens, like shifting the burden of internal affairs, than recruiting more officers.
The road to the transition outlined in the report is challenging, however. The report notes that CPRA currently lacks the stability to take on the transition. Multiple terminations and departures of CPRA directors–over half a dozen permanent and interim directors since its inception–have left the agency in a constant state of catch up. And the City’s budget cuts indicate that the agency is very prone to the vagaries of budget cost-cutting, which doesn’t lend CPRA the same immunity to layoffs and budgetary overspending as the IAB.
One of the reports findings is that the City would have to invest “foundationally” in the CPRA, with directorial stability and a permanent staffing level sufficient to take on the oncoming work load from the transition. As long as court oversight continues, as well, IAB has mandates of timeliness and completion to comply with the settlements, but CPRA is not a party to the NSA. The report leaves the solution to this issue unexamined.
The report recommends the foundational investment parallel CPRA taking on some areas of IAB investigation in phases. The report recommends a three phase process.
Phase 1: Fully Staff CPRA and Eliminate Parallel Investigations; after full staffing to its current complement. CPRA’s staffing would be solely responsible for its charter-required investigations with non IAB parallel. With transition of administrative staff to the CPRA house and increase in supervisory staff, the CPRA would be able to escalate into Division Level Investigations. The report recommends a working group of the stakeholders to oversee the transitions.
Phase 2: Expand CPRA’s Investigative Capabilities with staffing increases, administrative support, directorial investment. In this process, CPRA would need clear routes to timely on-scene presence, and direct access to evidence and documents—which it does not currently have universal access to.
Phase 3: Transfer Discipline Functions and Division Level Investigations (DLI) to CPRA, beginning to transfer the investigations representing the greatest volume and impact to OPD supervisors to CPRA alone, ramping these up on an unspecified timeline.
* *There’s confusion about the proper name of Internal Affairs as the OPD now calls the Internal Investigations unit a “bureau”. This publication will henceforth use only IAB, though IA and IAD still seems in use, and in the report is often used interchangeably with IAB.
*the public works department is nominally in charge of the process.
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