Oakland’s City Council passed Interim Mayor Jenkins’ FY 25-27 budget along with amendments from a Council budget team led by CMs Janani Ramachandran and Rowena Brown Wednesday morning at a little advertised meeting that began at 9am.
The budget session set a record for brevity, amid a historically small number of budget meetings in cycle. In total, Council had three meetings on the budget and all were held during work hours: the first to introduce Jenkins’ budget held at 1pm on May 14; the “study session”, a report from directors on each department’s budget starting at 9am; and Wednesday’s 3 hour meeting to introduce and pass amendments, which began at 9am and was done by lunchtime. By contrast the last biennial budget process in 2023 went through four meetings—the last two meetings on amendment introduction and budget deliberation went on for a total of 16 hours according to the video record.
Council often goes through several budget sessions after the introduction of the Council President’s budget, and the discourse often lasts through the entirety of June in long and continued meetings as CMs debate the proposals and the original mayoral budget. The meetings serve not only to parse the President budget team amendments, but for on the record analysis of the Mayor’s budget and historical data, trends and drilled-down details.
Because the team can only include 4 of the 8 CMs* due to the Brown Act, other CMs often add their own set of amendments to the mix that play off the President team’s amendments and original Mayoral budgeting. Several CMs introduced amendments in addition to the budget team’s in the 2023 deliberation, including Ramachandran, Jenkins, Kaplan and Reid.
Intense budget deliberations often result, with CMs trying to fit in amendments ostensibly demanded by their district constituencies. During the budget mid-cycle deliberations of 2024 the sessions went into overtime, technically past the July 1 required date of passage—Ramachandran demanded that the Mayoral budget be re-issued after further study, a process that would have continued through July, though Council rejected the idea.
But none of that happened this year. The budget was presented in 55 minutes, CMs spent another hour in discussion and questions with departmental directors, most of it focused on an ancillary question about a $1 MM homelessness prevention grant that spiraled into a longer discussion about the program and how it operates. But larger questions went unexamined.
Few Questions About a Suggested $40 MM Parcel Tax Revenue Patch
Questions about the parcel tax revenue the Jenkins/Brown/Ramachandran budget relies on in the second year were few and muted. The suggested parcel tax must still be written, deliberated and approved by a majority on Council before it is put before voters on a June 2026 primary election that would occur as Council is deliberating on the mid-cycle amendments for the budget. In a question and answer follow up, Ben Rosenfeld, the City's budget consultant, briefly explained that the City has time before now and the election to create an alternative to the parcel tax, should it fail.
“Should [the parcel tax] not proceed, there is time to implement contingency plans as part of the biannual update to address that revenue loss,” Rosenfeld said, differentiating it from the Coliseum sale.
The brief comments essentially relegated the second year of the budget to little more than a rough draft with pencil-graphite revenue but were not discussed at length. Rosenfeld gave no suggestions or implications of what $40 MM of hole in year two would look like and no CM asked about it or discussed it.
Only CM Carroll Fife briefly alluded to some of the incongruities of the process, noting “hypocrisy”—which was likely in reference to several issues, from using still unrealized revenues in the budget, such as a contract that goes before Council Tuesday and parcel tax, and cut to police academies.
“I see a lot of hypocrisy as compared to the last budget cycles. I'm not going to go there because I don't think that is productive, but I will say that at the beginning and the end of the day, we need to have transparency in this process, and we need to be a lot more direct about the challenges that the city faces and how we get from there,” Fife said**.
Another hour went for public comment, most of which was focused on bare bones budgeting of Oakland’s senior centers, the use of Measure C library funds for other uses, and the elimination of the cultural affairs director position. [you can read more of the comments in the live thread here]
No Focus on Once-Third Rail Police Academy Deletion
There was almost no Council discussion on the typical budgetary third rail of police staffing, and no representative of the OPD spoke before Council about it at the meeting. The un-editorialized move to delete an academy was in stark contrast to public stage battles over academy recruitment of the past several years. Academy scheduling took center stage in 2021*** and became a cornerstone of Mayoral discussions between CMs Sheng Thao and Loren Taylor into the 2022 election cycle and a focus of media reporting on the election. During that debate, CMs made similar statements about the lack of academy production for the money.
Fife says that only half of cadets graduated from the last set of academies and that they are paid regardless for the time, and then the attrition rate of new grads was high. She wonders if there isn't better ways to spend the money
— Jaime Omar Yassin (@hyphy_republic) June 7, 2021
By contrast, no news articles about the Council budget team’s proposal even appeared until Tuesday, and those that did spent little time on the academy reduction or putting it in context. No CM outside of the budget team made public comments about it ahead of the meeting.
Council Rushes Awkwardly Past Co-Chair to Budget Vote
When the Council returned to deliberation after public comment, members voted on the ancillary package of fund waivers necessary to tap monies that are not generally allowed to be used for the GPF, a process that took minutes. The only commentary on the budget and the amendments afterward came from budget co-chair Rowena Brown, who sought a last minute shift of resources to re-fund the cultural affairs manager position. The proposal went ignored as CM Ramachandran moved the budget item for approval almost as soon as Brown stopped speaking with no comment, with Unger’s immediate second, triggering the vote.
The dynamic may have led San Francisco Chronicle’s reporter to assume that Ramachandran was the sole budget chair, though she ostensibly shares the role with Brown, who isn’t mentioned at all in the Chronicle’s report.
The final vote was 6 yes, to 1 no. CM Noel Gallo voted no without offering amendments. Fife was called away with a family emergency by the time of the vote.
*the Council President is charter-mandated to present the budget, and may draft a proposal themselves, and every CM may also propose amendments. Bs began the practice of unifying the process under the President with 4 CMs allowed by the Brown Act to discuss legislation. In previous years, Council members proposed their own amendments separately in a process overseen by the President. This year, because the Council President was serving as Interim Mayor, Jenkins "appointed" Brown and Ramachandran "co-chairs" of a "budget committee", through a process that's not quite clear.
**Fife also protested the elimination of the Cultural Affairs Manager in the Brown/Ramachandran budget, but was called away on a family emergency before the vote.
** *Schaaf’s proposal was an actual increase from the previous biennial, where only 4 academies had been budgeted. Schaaf had previously presided over an increase in yearly academies, but those academy graduates were quickly mired in high profile scandals, including the Celeste Guap rape scandal. A combination of fewer applicants, and heightened screening decreased academy scheduling.
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