FY 23-25 Budget Amendments to be Heard, Budget Potentially Voted on at Special Monday Afternoon Meeting

The final version of the amended City of Oakland biennial budget, for the period between July 1, 2023, and June 30, 2025, will be heard at a special City Council meeting Monday at 2:30 p.m.*

This biennial budget balances the City’s largest ever shortfall of revenue, estimated in each year to be nearly $200 MM. Amendments proposed by President Nikki Fortunato Bas’ budget team [Bas, with Councilmembers Kevin Jenkins, Rebecca Kaplan and Carroll Fife] don’t substantially change Mayor Sheng Thao’s originally proposed budget, which the team in its introductory memo calls “thoughtful and creative.”

Even if many of the additional amendments brought by Councilmembers Dan Kalb, Janani Ramachandran and Treva Reid were to be adopted, the broad strokes of Thao’s budget would remain, although the budget can still be changed during Monday’s deliberation by Council vote:

• Police: An estimated $40 MM** increase for police [compared to the FY 21-23 budget] remains, paired awkwardly with freezing vacant positions and reducing overtime by 15%. Oakland will get fewer officers while spending more money, thanks to increased costs stemming in part from renegotiating and extending the City’s memorandum of understanding with Oakland Police Officers’ Association [OPOA] ahead of schedule last year. Oakland Police Department’s union has been far more successful than other City unions at wringing cost of living adjustments and bonuses out of the General Purpose Fund [GPF], and the new contract continues the OPD's years-long arc of inexorable cost of living increases and bonuses. OPD is back to a maximum of six academies graduating within the biennial, but the budget only funds five, as one is set to begin this month and graduate in December 2023. Kalb has notably dropped his proposal to restore funding for 10 vacant officer roles–the salary savings from which OPD could draw to pay overtime, an effective increase in police funding. No similarly substantive increases to OPD’s budget were introduced by any other councilmember. For the first time in years, even as it reaches all-time highs, the OPD budget is not a central issue of the budgeting process.
• Fire: Accepting a Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response [SAFER] grant changes the math in Thao’s budget, freeing enough funds to eliminate the need for one of the station “brownouts” envisioned by the mayor. But it’s worth noting that if Bas hadn’t introduced the funding, it would have been allocated regardless, as the funding allocation is up for a Council vote in mid-July.
• Violence Prevention: Thao’s year-over-year reduction of Department of Violence Prevention [DVP] grants will be dialed back by the Bas team’s changes, which will restore about $1 MM per year to the agency’s third-party violence interruption grants. Thao initially would have cut both GPF and Measure Z funding of nearly $7 MM from what community-based organizations working with DVP received in the last two-year budget period. Bas’ restoration of $2 MM [$1 MM each year] in funding will soften that blow. While the violence interrupters who receive grants from DVP will see a reduction compared to the unprecedented support they received for their work in the last biennial budget, funding for violence prevention will be markedly higher than it was in the DVP’s first biennial budget, FY 19-21.
• Departmental Mergers: The Bas budget team left Thao’s proposed departmental mergers untouched. But both Reid and Ramachandran have voiced doubts about the process for onboarding a consultant for the mergers, as well as asking how the envisioned departments will function and how likely it is that consolidating staff and eliminating leadership roles will generate the projected savings. It remains to be seen how hard Reid will push on the merger issue. And there’s not much Ramachandran can do at this point without full support of at least four other councilmembers, which isn’t likely to happen: Ramachandran has included in her proposals full funding of the vacant Oakland Parks, Recreation & Youth Development Department [OPRYD] Director, which would otherwise be frozen for both years in Thao’s budget as a concrete proposal behind her criticism. To date, other CMs haven't voiced much criticism of the mergers but did ask questions of staff in the original amendments introduction last week.
• Hiring Freeze/Vacancies: The Bas team’s budget reverses a handful of vacancy freezes from the GPF, counterbalancing some by using special funds, mostly from tax measures, to cover necessary positions and hiring. But Thao’s strategy of a hiring and vacancy freeze remains in place. The City’s vacancy savings may be greater than anticipated, as it seems that larger than predicted vacancies saved millions in the last months of FY 22-23.

You can read more about the original amendments here.

In the latest revisions, the Bas team maintains most of the previous amendments, while pushing back the start date for some new positions to save funds. Bas’ budget retains its restoration of funding for cultural programming, community ambassadors, and an OPD staffing study. The team also retains the plan to shift homelessness funding to tenant support services and a partial restoration of Democracy Dollars funding. The Public Ethics Commission will be able to choose how to use that partially restored funding to fulfill the goals and intent of Measure W.

The Bas team’s proposal allows council members to directly choose the beneficiaries of community grants–in order to offset some impact of funding reductions. Those grants now have increased funds in the newest iteration. A future resolution will come before Council in July to allocate the grants.

The updated Bas team amendments also now incorporate the proposals from Kalb, Ramachandran and Reid, including:

• Reid’s request to add the Welcome Inn motel to a proposed rapid rehousing property acquisition fund in Bas’ proposal. Also adding more funding for traffic calming and vehicular violence prevention measures.
• Kalb’s request to restore the senior services manager role.
• Ramachandran’s request for two full-time tree workers. But her request for an OPD-specific grant writer has become, in the Bas proposal, a citywide grant writer who will use new grant management software to increase grant-seeking for all departments that have a relationship to public safety***. It doesn’t appear that Ramachandran’s request for an additional Public Ethics investigator made the cut, but it still could during deliberation.
• Councilmember Noel Gallo shared what amounts to a policy paper with suggestions including creating homeless “villages” on public land and requesting resources for specific parks, while reaffirming many of the items in his colleagues’ proposals. Gallo’s document contains no math or line items, however, and no sources of funding for any ideas he adds, so it isn't written about here.

Given the tone and dynamic of recent meetings, the Council will likely vote on a final budget at the meeting.

Thanks to Rachel Beck for editing

* The deadline to pass the budget is June 30, but if Council were to miss that date, spending and revenue projections would continue based on the current fiscal year until a budget is passed.

** Sum calculated from the official budget book. However, the budget book compares the current proposed budgeted expenditures for FY 23-25 to the actual expenditures in FY 21-22 combined with the mid-cycle budgeted amount in FY 22-23.

A comparison of what was budgeted at this same time in 2021 for the FY 21-23 biennial budget would compare $667MM to this biennial’s budgeted $723 MM, for an increase in budgeted spending of about $56MM. That would more correctly compare the budgeting intent of Council in 2021 vs the intent of Council in 2023.

The final expenditures for FY 21-23 have to be estimated from various City reports and documents, and estimated for FY 23 which ends June 30 , but these are about $690 MM according to the OO’s calculations. If those numbers are accurate, the difference from what was spent in the previous biennial to the expenditures being proposed for FY 23-25 is about $33MM.

*** The scope of the new grant writer position is, in Bas' description, focused on certain departmental activities that enhance public safety, this text was corrected to reflect that rather than what was written previously, "all departments". The focus will be on the DVP, OFD, Neighborhood Services, OPD, OakDOT and Children, Youth and Famlies.