OO Newsletter Down Day as Legislative Session Ends

For various reasons, there won't be a regular format Oakland Observer newsletter this week. For a run down of what happened at the City Council meeting last week and at Rules committee Thursday, please take a look at the PDFs of live reporting linked above, which will tell the story in broad strokes.

This Tuesday, the Council will have the last committee meetings of the legislative session, thereafter on Thursday there will be one more Rules Committee meeting to schedule legislation past the break and no meetings until September.

OO will be focusing on other issues during the break, the many also newsworthy things happening in our city that special focus on Council meetings obviates for this lone reporter/editor/publisher. OO will be busy for most of the Summer, so stay tuned.

This week will be a light week for committees.

The Finance and Public Works/Transportation Committees have been cancelled and Life Enrichment and Public Safety committees have been rescheduled to take up their time slots earlier in the day.

At Life Enrichment, the committee will take up the renewal of the Shelter Crisis Ordinance, which will see the ordinance through an entire decade by the renewal's end. Many readers may recognize the ordinance from its mention in the Thao indictment, but the ordinance has actually been renewed every two years since 2017 and has been the foundational legal basis for many of the interventions that have become common place in Oakland, including 'community cabins' and 'Safe Parking Sites'. The ordinance taps a state-level legal process in which "emergency" type powers are afforded to the City to enact interventions that might not be necessarily allowed under the law, otherwise.

At Public Safety, CM Charlene Wang's request for a report on the OPD's ALPR data sharing policy will be heard; Wang has also asked for a report from OakDOT about their $1.4 MM sideshow mitigation efforts, which will be oral only. OPD will also present its biannual staffing report.

At Community and Economic Development, a rare instance of competitive bids for a Surplus Lands Act offering reflects in a report—the City is ultimately proposing giving an Exclusive Negotiating Agreement [ENA] to Unity Council to develop several long-vacant city-owned parcels at 35th and Foothill, over another developer. The committee will also receive a code enforcement report from Planning and Building.