Live Reporting: City Council Committee Meetings, ALCO BOS Meetings/AASEG-OAC Vote; Measure W Discussion, Public Comment

It was a jumbled week for both City and County processes, and the OO reporting structure. At Council, two committee meetings were cancelled, Finance and Public Works. Life Enrichment was rescheduled for the Finance time slot, Public Safety for that of Public Works.

At Life Enrichment, Fife broke the news that the City had re-funded the Cultural Affairs Manager position; the sense of gravity around the issue was punctuated by a ceremonial item on an Oakland-themed musical which Barbara Lee attended the meeting to speak about. Later, when a critical item to continue the City's homelessness intervention programs and housing was to be heard, CM Ken Houston apparently left the meeting in dissatisfaction about the discussion of the item, causing the body to lose quorum, as CM Ramachandran, who was present for the CED meeting later, did not appear the meeting.

At Public Safety, the committee got bad news on police staffing, but better news about the capabilities of OakDOT to limit sideshow hotspots.

Alameda County Board of Supervisors [BOS] also had significant issues to discuss and OO straddled the meetings to report. In the BOS regular meeting, OO focused on the vote to transfer the Coliseum Development Agreement from the A's-run LLC Coliseum Way Partners [CWP] to AASEG/Loop Capital's Oakland Acquisition Company [OAC].

Later in the day, a six hour special meeting focused on how to spend monies already accumulated from Measure W sales tax since the sales tax increase began to be collected in 2021 and over the next six years of the revenue. The tax was passed in 2020, and it has been collected since, but litigation required the proceeds be put in escrow until the County prevailed.

The County Administration has recommended three spending buckets: Home Together, ALCO's homelessness program; Essential Services, like healthcare, food insecurity, and critical infrastructure; and Prudent Reserve an additional rainy day fund to weather potential upcoming funding cuts from the Trump administration other unexpected costs.

A majority of speakers demanded that most of the money be spent on homelessness, and the majority of that on Oakland, with the rest spent on "essential services". Ostensibly, the prudent reserve would be taken from the accrued revenue in a one-time allocation. But the debate about how to spend the funds didn't match up with the overwhelming number of speakers who demanded at least 90% be spent on homelessness. Staff stressed that even 100% of the funds would not reach the estimated over $2 Billion required to mitigate homelessness completely, and that every percentage decrease from there would have large scale reductions in efficacy. Of the Supervisors, only Nikki Fortunato Bas pushed for the 90% amount, with the other four proposing about 80%. Bas eventually agreed to to an 80% figure, with any surpluses being spent on homelessness, although the final allocation policy is yet to be memorialized. There will be another meeting July 30th.

It was about 12 hours of continuous meetings and they meshed awkwardly—for this reason, OO did not cover Oakland's Community and Economic Development Committee with in any detail, so there's no thread from that meeting here.

At Rules on Thursday, there was some back and forth about urgency scheduling for CM Ken Houston's legislative attempt at restructuring the Encampment Management Policy into a punitive ban on vehicle and other encampments. Despite regular public claims since May that he's been working on the legislation and despite the initial demand for a mid-summer recess emergency committee meeting, Houston submitted no legislative document.

Houston's office withdrew that legislation and read in new legislation in with a more complete title then asked for a direct-to-council scheduling for the first meeting in September instead of the committee meeting in mid-summer and then Council, bypassing committee. Houston* also demanded that the item be scheduled to Public Safety instead of Life Enrichment, the subject matter committee for homelessness issues. Rules Chair Jenkins eventually appeared to suggest that after a perfunctory committee reading at a Special committee meeting in September, he would use his powers under Rule 28 to directly schedule the item to full council on September 16. But the item, and the special committee meeting required for it, were not apparently scheduled in the meeting. There was an uncommented irony as Houston fought to have his legislative proposal scheduled as an emergency, while the Shelter Crisis Ordinance had to be scheduled directly from Rules because Houston denied the Life Enrichment Committee quorum to pass it. The Shelter Crisis Ordinance will be scheduled to the first council meeting in September 16, per Jenkins.