In the Details: happenings, findings, discoveries and observations at City Hall, Week Ending 3/8/2026 (3)

1) The EAP Could be on its Way Back After Jenkins Promises a Special Meeting for it, Again With No Firm Date

In what has become a familiar cycle, CM Ken Houston again returned to the speakers podium of the Rules Committee on Thursday urging Rules members to schedule his Encampment Abatement Plan to full Council. Just weeks ago, Houston had demanded the same thing from the Rules committee [2/5], followed by a rebuff by CMs Janani Ramachandran and CM Rowena Brown who said the item, like other types of legislation, should go to committee first for full discussion. At that time, Ramachandran and Brown said they would prefer the EAP go to the 2/24 Life Enrichment Committee meeting if the Chair of the body, CM Carroll Fife, was amenable to it and Council President Kevin Jenkins acquiesced. The decision sent Houston into a days-long social media fury, posting and later deleting, threats of “an eye for an eye” for unspecified city officials who questioned his policy.

Fife, who also sits on the Rules committee but was absent at the Rules meeting, later denied the scheduling request as well, suggesting the EAP would have to wait for an LEC meeting with an unimpacted agenda. Despite the previous days' tirades, Houston appeared to be satisfied with that outcome. But in the meantime, the City’s Interim Homelessness Solutions Chief, Sasha Hauswald, presented the City’s strategic action plan for homelessness to the City’s Homelessness Commission. In several important regards, the City’s plan appears to starkly rebut Houston’s original legislation, operating on different assumptions than the EAP’s currently amended version. The strategic plan is far more focused on transitional housing and re-housing solutions. The plan Hauswald presented suggests a more ample set of areas homeless can occupy and smaller no-encampment areas—evictions would become rarer, with a focus on the provision of services to encampments instead of the visible aggressive eviction campaign the City has pursued since 2024. Hauswald specifically checked the City’s expanded displacement campaign, saying "we have to do something different". Houston meanwhile has characterized the current eviction response as insufficient, often mischaracterizing it as non-existent, and has promised to expand it.

Houston sent a staffer who read his complaints about the meeting at Rules the next day [2/26], complaining that CMs were not included in the presentation—but the Council took no action and did not comment on his claims.

The sense of urgency Houston brought to last week's Rules meeting may be prompted by the fact that the Homeless Solutions’ data-driven strategic action plan will receive a Council platform before his politically-charged EAP does. Hauswald will present the strategic plan at this week’s Life Enrichment Committee.

At last week’s Rules meeting, CM Fife told Houston she believed that a full special council meeting focusing only on the EAP would be a better use of the public and Council’s time, given the likely large public interest. Jenkins agreed to scheduling both the Homelessness Solutions action plan and the EAP to a special meeting in some future, but would not give any insight into when such a meeting would occur. Jenkins has been here before—late last year Jenkins scheduled a special meeting for the EAP with little public notice after also declining to publicly confirm on the record the target date for the meeting. But in that case again, though Jenkins had teed up the Special meeting, other members of the Rules committee declined to schedule the EAP to it and it was cancelled. Jenkins, who has characterized public complaints about untransparent Council processes as a “conspiracy theory” stated on Thursday that the EAP might be scheduled “6 months from now or six days from now”.

2) Black Business Owners Join Black Contractors to Call Out Biased City Practices

About two dozen Black business owners came to Council on Tuesday to speak out on Oakland’s most recent Disparity in Contracting report. The report is charter-mandated to be compiled and presented biennially. But in practice, the report has covered broad five year periods—with the current report spanning five years from 2016 to 2021, the majority of the term of former Mayor Libby Schaaf. The report paints a stark picture of that period's City procurement process that has excluded Black, women and other minority contractors from what should be an expected fair contracting playing field. Black contractors had by far the highest gap in what should be their share of city contracts during the period, on an order of $41 million worth of contracts. The report, given by Mason Tilman’s Dr. Eleanor Mason Ramsey, the CEO of the consultancy, noted that the City’s disparities are vectored by practices like on-call services, emergency contracts, and collective agreements with other cities.

Several representatives of Oakland’s Black business community spoke out about the ongoing disparities, including leadership from the African American Chamber of Commerce, while supporters rallied behind them at the podium. Kathy Adams, the President of the Oakland African American Chamber of Commerce, urged the Council to take a three step action approach to resolve the disparities.

“When public dollars fail to circulate locally, Oakland loses jobs, we lose tax revenue, we lose opportunities for small businesses to grow and hire...we're asking for three specific actions. First, formally accept the disparity study findings, not symbolically, but with acknowledgement that disparities exist and require correction. Second, create a business led, staff supported taskforce to recommend structural procurement reforms. Third, direct city administration to produce a remediation and implementation road map within 60 days....the [disparity] study must be a mandate, not a document that sits on the shelf.” Adams told Council members.

Paul Cobb, the founder and publisher of the Oakland Post, thanked Carroll Fife for her efforts in bringing the report and working against the disparities. Cobb also appeared to blame much of the disparities on the Mayor during the reporting period, Libby Schaaf. Cobb said he hoped the City would be “Libby-rated” from those policies.

“I think that we should commend Eleanor Mason Ramsey for this wonderful, thorough study that has researched and exposed all of the wrongs of the city, especially the Libby era...we need to be “Libby-rated” from all of that…I join with all the other individuals and organizations that have spoken here tonight. I hope that you do adopt a policy, I hope that you establish a board. I would like to volunteer to be a member of that board…” Cobb said.

Several business owners spoke of an exclusion that goes beyond the limits of the disparity study, which only focused on the city's procurement process for construction, goods and services.

Roxanne Mosely, the owner of Sweet Fingers, an anchor business in East Oakland's Seminary Point, complained about the operation of the site by current leaseholder Sunfield Development—which she said was given a decades-long lease for the land for only a few thousand dollars by the City. The City of Oakland still owns the land under Seminary Point, but awarded the 66-year exclusive lease to develop the outdoor retail center to Sunfield over ten years ago—along with millions in tax credits, a credit line and a bridge loan for its development. Siavash Sid Ashfar, the founder and CEO of Sunfield, doesn’t appear to live in Oakland.

Moseley painted a picture of a Sunfield indifferent to the surrounding community and economic environment of the East Oakland, D6, neighborhood. Mosely said that Sunfield has kept the rents too high for that area—Mosely pays $12K a month to rent the restaurant space for Sweet Fingers in a largely economically depressed part of Oakland that can’t afford the necessary price point for such steep overhead. She said that, likewise, the proposed monthly rent for the former Walgreen’s building, which closed last year, is so high that it likely will not get a new tenant.

“Walgreens isn’t there anymore. Some other places are vacant there as well. Why is that? Because he [Ashfar] does not care about the Oakland residents or Oakland businesses…he prices the units extremely high. My particular unit, he has at $12,000 a month when I actually invested in that property...now I am being forced out of this property because I will not agree to a $12,000 a month rent. That particular community, although I love it well, cannot sustain a $12,000 a month rent...we need to take steps to make sure that if we have a slum lord...is not allowed to stay there. I know for a fact that when that particular contract was awarded to him, he was supposed to make that an affordable place for businesses to thrive and to grow…it's half empty because you cannot thrive and grow with some made up CAM [Common Area Maintenance] charges…this man is lining his pockets while he doesn't even live here," Mosely said.

According to the City’s lease terms, Sunfield appears to have been required to pay no monthly payments for the first 8 years of the lease, and only $1K per year afterward for the next 12 years—no amendments to the lease appear to have ever come before Council. Though the City's land-dealings are not under S/SLBE or any other limitations and are not "contracts" per se, the City had no processes or controls in its disposition of City-owned land last decade. A city-wide movement sprang up to counter Schaaf-era land disposition policies and ultimately succeeded in getting legislation passed that would yield concessions for the public and residents from any land sales—but for various reasons, the legislation was never enacted.

Though the disparity report is informational, CM Carroll Fife proposed implementing several measures in response to it as soon as possible—including the three point demand from the African American Chamber of Commerce. Many of those moves will be reviewed in an already agendized presentation from the Department of Workplace and Employment Standards on ways of improving Oakland’s L/SLBE Program. Fife said that she would be meeting with the CAO and OCA prior to the LEC meeting on potentials and possibilities.

“The three things I heard clearly…accept the findings, accept the report, work with the city to create that road map. And I heard 60 to 90 days, I think that is doable,” Fife said, which could include an advisory group on contracting, and routine review of the contracting process, especially for bids under the 250K limit that remain in the purview of the City Administrator.

3) Mayor Declines Second Tie-Breaking Opportunity, as Council Bans Local Control on SB79 Implementation

For the second time in her less than one year old term, Mayor Barbara Lee declined to break a tie in a City Council vote last Tuesday. The pause in the legislative process for the item while locating either Lee or her representative also allowed another amendment to be added to legislation in the meantime which went undiscussed before being added as a “friendly amendment” minutes before the Council voted again.

The item in question was legislation that would have allowed the City to set a pause in Oakland’s implementation of SB79 in July while Planning and Building [PAB] creates what Director William Gilchrist calls a “tailored” implementation of the new state law. SB79 requires cities to allow greater height and density limits in areas that are within a half mile of a BART or an AC Transit Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] station, calling these Transit Oriented Development [TOD] zones. But PAB says its in the midst of completing it's general plan that in some areas would exceed the increases, and in others would preserve current limits. The PAB's major concern is that SB79 would override the City's own detailed density plan for Oakland. Almost all of the TODs are in low-resourced areas that likely require fine-tuning of the bulk state changes, according to PAB.

SB79 allows for “exemptions” to create an alternate plan that in its totality produces the same level of density as SB79—PAB had asked for nearly all of the BART and BRT areas to be exempt to create that alternative. Most of Rockridge, Macarthur and Ashby BART TOD zones do not qualify for the exclusion, but PAB sought to exclude commercial corridors in those TODs from SB79 in the short-term while it created a cohesive alternative.

CM Zac Unger argued that excluding the already developed—and open to development—corridors and not the residential areas around Rockridge BART made little sense. At the meeting, Unger said he supported the SB79 goal and thought it should be implemented immediately, introducing an amendment that would essentially include all of D1 into SB79.

CM Charlene Wang then added an additional amendment after reading a lengthy prepared statement. Wang’s amendment would also prime nearly all of D2’s areas for SB79 in July with no exemption-period to create an alternate plan. But Wang's amendment was significantly different than Unger's. In his statements, Unger agreed with the general strategy of the PAB in ensuring that SB79 be tailored to work with the City's general plan—his amendment simply made the entirety of the area subject to SB79 when it begins in July, not just the residential areas. In her statement, Wang appeared to imply that attempts to "tailor" the changes were themselves permanent challenges to SB79. And Wang argued that SB79 should be the baseline minimum for a density that in Oakland should be much higher.

"I do take issue with this staff proposal, it essentially seeks as broad exclusions to the state bill that is allowed for... it does not, in my opinion, meet the moment of where we are housing affordability crisis...SB, 79 allows for locality to adopt alternative plans as long as overall density is required by SB79... but keep in mind that those density minimums in SB 79 were designed to get even suburban areas in across the state on board. So in an urban area like Oakland, we should be far exceeding the density minimums in SB 79. Adopting SB 79 plus the anticipated outcomes that would come in the General Plan update, will allow us to to far exceed those density minimums," Wang said.

In her argument, Wang also claimed that SB79 would ensure affordable housing.

"SB 79 furthermore has affordability provisions where 7% of total units in SB 79 projects need to be for extremely low households, 10% for very low income households, 13% for lower income households. So adopting the full throated version of SB 70 now not only ensures more market rate housing, but also affordable housing that we still need in the city," Wang said.

Wang's reading of the legislation on affordability does not appear to be correct. SB79 requires only that ANY of those affordability levels be provided, not all of them. The affordability requirement in any development seeking to tap SB79 benefits could be as low as 7% of the total units, per the law.

Wang also argued that the area around the BRT line in her district on International boulevard has "naturally affordable" housing, but lacks sufficient amounts of it, which she argued would be remedied by more construction.

Despite Unger's initial claims that with his amendment the PAB would still be able to exempt other areas and have time to provide an alternative plan, he did not contest Wang's statements, which made it appear as if the City is avoiding implementing higher densities.

CM Rowena Brown took issue with some of the representations of the PAB's proposed changes in Wang's statements, noting that Oakland has already surpassed the minimum density across the city by a factor of 2 or 3.

"We're actually building more housing...in the [staff] report you see that the city of Oakland is far exceeding the proposed density, whereas we know that that is not the case in other cities throughout the state," Brown said. Brown also noted that the current SB79 is currently being amended again, regardless.

Brown also confirmed with staff that the PAB's intention is to pause SB79 long enough to tailor Oakland's density, but that ultimately the overall density requirements will have to be presented to the state and approved.

During the initial vote on the amended legislation, the City Clerk calculated the tally incorrectly and recorded the 4 affirmative vote count as having failed. CM Jenkins and Fife were absent, and Gallo was noted as absent because he was having technical difficulties as he zoomed into the meeting. But Wang, Houston, Ramachandran and Unger all voted in affirmative, which represented a tie—absences and abstentions under Measure X revisions to Oakland’s charter count as nay votes for the purposes of determining a tie, which requires the Mayor’s involvement.

No one on Council, parliamentarian or Clerk appeared to catch the mistake, which resulted in another attempt to pass the amended legislation. The second attempt also ended in the same tie, with Fife absent, Gallo voting no, due to the amendments, and Brown abstaining. This time the mistake was caught and noted, however. After the tie determination, the legislation was put on hold until the Mayor could be reached.

Later, Jenkins and Fife had returned to the meeting and the Mayor’s staffer Preston Kilgore took the podium and read Lee’s statement declining to break the tie. CM Ramachandran re-introduced the motion to adopt the amended legislation, but this time CM Ken Houston added a “friendly amendment” that would also exclude almost all of the BRT stations in East Oakland in nearly identical language as Wang’s amendment for D2. Houston's amendment was added just after Ramachandran had initially introduced the amended legislation again. The only pause was to ascertain that both Wang and Unger had agreed to the friendly amendment.

Despite voicing concerns and voting initially to abstain, Brown now voted yes, Fife abstained and Gallo voted no. The amended legislation passed with 6 ayes, denying the TOD exemptions sought by PAB for D1, D2, D6 and D7.