Oakland feud at new low for City Council
Oakland’s political feuding hit new depths of dysfunction when a City Council member seized the public-speakers’ microphone for a 40-minute diatribe that ended only when her colleagues pulled the plug on their meeting.
Councilwoman Desley Brooks, attending the Rules Committee session as a spectator, declined repeated pleas from the panel’s council members Thursday to surrender the microphone so they could get on with their meeting. When they had the microphone turned off, Brooks started shouting.
“I can filibuster,” Brooks said. “That’s what this process is supposed to be about.”
At one point, the councilwoman called for a
“mike check” — a technique used by members of the Occupy movement to disrupt and take over public meetings. She then led supporters sitting in the audience in a call-and-response taunt directed at the three committee members: “You have not followed the rules.”
“How childish,” City Councilman Dan Kalb said as he argued with Brooks from the dais.
They continued chanting as the committee members — Kalb, council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney and Councilman Abel Guillen — tried to press on. Finally McElhaney, the committee chairwoman, ordered City Hall security guards to clear the chambers and ended the meeting.
“We had important business that day,” McElhaney said Friday. “We were going to hold a hearing to name Bobby Hutton Grove at DeFremery Park” in West Oakland, honoring a 17-year-old Black Panther Party member killed in a confrontation with Oakland police in 1968.
“That item got shut down because of a political play,” McElhaney said.
Kalb said Friday that it may have been the worst outburst he’d ever seen from a council member, but that this isn’t the first time a meeting has fallen off course because of “extended interruptions” and “lack of adherence to the council president’s authority.”
And it’s always the same member making the interruptions, he said — Brooks, who has been on the council since 2002 and represents an East Oakland district. She did not respond to requests for comment about her actions at the Rules Committee.
The uproar started with an agenda item aimed at re-crafting marijuana ordinances that the council approved in May, which have caused a continued outcry from people involved in the city’s cannabis business.
At the heart of the ordinances is a program that sets aside half the city’s cannabis permits for people who were either jailed on marijuana convictions in Oakland or who live in one of six East Oakland police beats that saw a high concentration of marijuana arrests in 2013. All of those beats are either in Brooks’ district or the district represented by an ally, Councilman Larry Reid.
Opponents say the plan will kill the city’s marijuana business just as the state’s voters are on the verge of legalizing recreational use of the drug. They say many Oaklanders suffered because of enforcement of marijuana laws, not just those in Brooks’ and Reid’s districts, but they’ll be shut out of obtaining business permits unless the law is changed.
Brooks “has developed a pattern of disrespecting voters in West Oakland by undermining their representative,” McElhaney said. “And we see that in the cannabis legislation.”
Brooks, however, has doubled down. Along with Reid and Councilman Noel Gallo, she has proposed an ordinance that would require all pot businesses — and anyone who leases property to a pot business — to give 25 percent of their profit and at least one seat on their board of directors to the city in exchange for permits to operate.
McElhaney has been largely silent on what the city should do, but that didn’t keep Brooks from going after her at the Rules Committee meeting. She demanded that the council hold a disciplinary hearing on a June civil grand jury report that concluded McElhaney had broken ethics rules by getting involved in a dispute over a town-house development next to her home.
When the committee refused to convene an immediate hearing, Brooks went ballistic.
“I have watched this body over and over again attempt to stifle the voices of the community,” Brooks said, eliciting angry jeers from her supporters.
McElhaney said Brooks’ actions Thursday were unprecedented, even for a council that has shut down meetings because protesters chained themselves to the dais.
“Look, I went to UC Berkeley, I learned all about Mario Savio, and I have never been upset or called for arrests when members of the public tried to shut us down,” McElhaney said. “But here you have an elected representative using a (protest) tactic as a political ploy. I don’t understand why she would resort to a tactic that’s really for people who don’t have access.”
Political strife isn’t unusual for the City Council, whose members often treat each other like the heads of rival fiefdoms. But McElhaney said she and the other members have tried since the 2014 elections to get along better and work cohesively.
In April, for instance, McElhaney asked council members to tour each other’s districts so they could understand the challenges that each representative faced. It wound up being a powerful team-building exercise, she said.
The only member who did not participate was Brooks.
She has battled ethical fights of her own. Two years ago, after a civil grand jury concluded that she had hired a contractor for a teen center in her district without taking bids and had authorized $19,000 in payments to a guitar store without city permission, Brooks argued that the investigation had been politically motivated. The council voted not to censure her.
“Council member Brooks has a long history of insisting that the rules apply to everyone but her,” said Pat Kernighan, who was council president at the time. “Her self-righteousness knows no bounds.”
Kalb, who is among the council members trying to scrap the marijuana permit ordinance, noted with dismay that Brooks’ outburst Thursday was aired on the city’s government affairs cable channel.
“It’ll be replayed Sunday,” Kalb said. “And that’s embarrassing.”