Don’t ignore the real issues in Oakland
What’s wrong with City Hall? A real lack of accountability
Oakland City Auditor Courtney Ruby charged into the crowded Oakland mayor’s race last week touting her accounting and government watchdog experience and noting that Oakland residents don’t always get accurate data from their elected leaders. I am not taking a public position on the mayor’s race, but Ruby seems to understand one thing: The city needs a source of robust, objective and analytical information to inform its public spending decisions. Hiring an independent budget analyst would be a smart step.
Oakland’s suspect financial choices could fill this entire page but consider just a few examples:
Oakland residents are on the hook for at least $10 million a year through 2025 to pay off the debt on the 1995 deal that brought the Raiders back.
A 2001 City Council vote substantially raised employee salaries and pensions during the dot-com bust, which resulted in cuts to police and other city services.
In July, the council approved the first phase of a controversial surveillance center without knowing that at least part of the center’s $1.2 million annual operating costs likely would come from the city’s general fund. The center’s second phase was scaled back early Wednesday.
While electing a mayor with an auditing background is not necessarily a bad idea, it goes without saying that elected officials are political animals and do not always evaluate spending decisions on the bottom line. Policy priorities and interest groups have a way of blurring that line.
City staff have a different accounting problem: They are interested in preserving their jobs and beefing up their departments. Often, they have allegiance to the sitting mayor.
Elected auditors suffer from another constraint: They typically evaluate public spending after decisions are made — and often when it is too late to do anything about them.
What Oakland needs — and what the mayoral candidates should be talking about — is an independent budget analyst. The city needs an analyst who is neither elected nor on the city payroll, but is an impartial private contractor who can speak candidly and accurately. San Francisco, Santa Clara County and other municpalities hire budget analysts because they help city leaders make decisions that save residents money in the long run.
In 2013, Oakland took several steps toward improving its two-year budget process. A new rule bans the longstanding practice of council members submitting important budget amendments at the last minute, with little opportunity for public scrutiny. Another requires the all-citizen Budget Advisory Commission to review the city administrator’s budget proposal one month prior to the July 1 approval deadline.
While these are small improvements, they don’t apply to midterm budget adjustments and they don’t hold a candle to the kind of quality information that an independent budget analyst could bring to Oakland.