A firefighter, a certified public accountant and a bread-making stay-at-home dad are running to replace Oakland City Councilmember Dan Kalb in the Nov. 5 general election.
Kalb, who isn’t running for his District 1 seat after losing the March primary election for a state Senate seat, has endorsed Zac Unger, a long-time Oakland firefighter and president of the International Association of Firefighters Local 55. He is competing against Len Raphael and Edward Frank in a three-way race.
Zac Unger
Unger hasn’t held elected office before but has served on various local ballot measure oversight committees, the Rockridge Community Planning Council and the Peralta College District Bond and Parcel Tax Oversight Committee, among other things.
“I feel like this is a way for me to continue serving Oakland,” Unger said. “You know, I live on the same street that I grew up on and Oakland has been so good to me and has really made my life so rich that I want to be able to give back in any way.”
Unger has amassed a list of endorsements that reads like a who’s who of Bay Area politicians and union organizations, including Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, state Sen. Nancy Skinner, Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks and Mia Bonta and Oakland city councilmembers Carroll Fife, Noel Gallo, Kevin Jenkins, Nikki Fortunato Bas and Janani Ramachandran.
He has raised more than $160,000 in campaign contributions on his own and an independent expenditure committee formed to support his candidacy has raised a few thousand more.
Unger says one of his top priorities is public safety.
“I think that we’ve been offered a really sort of crass discourse, mostly online, that tells us that we could have either public safety or we can have civil rights and I think that’s really a false choice,” he said.
He said the city needs to focus on preventing police officers and 911 dispatchers from leaving Oakland, increasing the size of the Police Department and adding security cameras and license plate readers.
He also would invest more in the city’s Department of Violence Prevention, as well as alternative public safety programs like Ceasefire, a data-driven, community-focused effort to reduce gang violence and homicides.
He said he’s proud of his work to bring MACRO — Oakland’s non-violent, non-emergency response 911 program — under the fire department’s jurisdiction.
Also, Unger is a member of the steering committee for Measure NN, the Oakland ballot measure that seeks to increase parcel taxes to $198 on single-family homes in order to raise $47.4 million annually to increase police and fire department staffing, among other things.
He also supports Measure OO, which would update and strengthen the city’s Public Ethics Commission, and Measure MM, a special tax in Oakland’s “Wildfire Prevention Zone,” mostly in the hills, to raise nearly $2.7 million annually for things like clearing brush and increasing fire patrols.
Unger said he’s opposed to both the recall efforts targeting Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, even though he supported Price’s opponent in the last election.
“If we create a system in California where the minute you get elected you have to start running for re-election then I don’t think we’re going to have effective governance,” Unger said. “I think that unless somebody has committed a crime or done something really egregious, we shouldn’t just be recalling people whose political positions we disagree with.”
This is in stark contrast to the stance of another candidate in the council race, Len Raphael, on the recalls targeting both women.
Len Raphael
Raphael is a well-known local CPA who has unsuccessfully run for city auditor and a seat on the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee and was formerly the treasurer for the nonprofit Coalition for Police Accountability.
He is currently the chief financial officer for a fundraising organization working on the Thao recall effort and an organizer for the campaign to oust Price.
He was also involved in the failed effort to remove former mayor Jean Quan, although he now says he regrets his involvement in that campaign because he later realized she had little ability to reduce the city’s violent crime rate.
When collecting signatures to put the latest mayoral recall on the November ballot, Raphael said he’d ask people if they thought Thao was doing a good job.
“Then I paused and I say if the answer is yes, I draw an X through myself with my finger, I said then I’m not your guy, your guy is Zac Unger, the firefighters’ president,” Raphael said.
Among other things, Raphael said Thao and her allies on the City Council bungled an opportunity to deal with the city’s structural deficit, which this year was roughly $177 million, in part by relying on one-time revenues coming in from the sale of the Oakland Coliseum.
“You don’t sell your interest in a long-term asset like that to cover a structural — meaning repeating, permanent, recurring — deficit,” he said.
He also said he disagrees with Thao’s firing of former police chief LeRonne Armstrong, whom he said was “a popular, trusted police chief.”
Raphael said he wants to increase law enforcement use of technology like drones and cameras, loosen the police pursuit policy and double the size of the police force to 1,200 officers by re-prioritizing how the City Council approaches the budget.
He said he would add officers by, in part, getting the city’s municipal employee unions to agree to permanent concessions on benefits under the threat of layoffs and bankruptcy and working to pass a large parcel tax in order to help fix the city’s structural budget problems.
He would also work to pass a charter amendment to protect parcel tax money from being spent on things other than what they are intended for.
He supports Ceasefire and would focus MACRO solely on East Oakland, with the possibility of a future expansion, but would also push to eliminate all “unmonitored anti-violence programs” and spend half the resulting savings on afterschool tutoring for Oakland Unified School District students.
“I would pretty much sunset all of them and ask them to prove that they are effective,” Raphael said.
He opposes Measure NN and signed a rebuttal argument on the ballot in part because he says it doesn’t prohibit the City Council from spending the money “almost any way they want.”
He supports the focus Measure MM has on fire prevention as opposed to building more firehouses and “doesn’t oppose” Measure OO, although he is critical of the way the Public Ethics Commission conducts its business.
“As someone who’s been subpoenaed by the Public Ethics Commission in regards to my work on the on the recall of Mayor Thao, I can tell you despite all their seeming independence from elected officials that ain’t how they operate,” Raphael said.
The PEC is investigating Foundational Oakland Unites, for which Raphael is the chief financial officer, and Oakland United to Recall Sheng Thao, for alleged potential campaign finance violations.
“They fast-tracked allegations against our recall that have largely evaporated, mostly it’s down to a couple of technicalities,” he said.
Raphael has raised about $10,000 in campaign contributions and his endorsements include Brenda Harbin-Forte, who was a leader in the Thao recall effort and is now a candidate for Oakland city attorney.
He is also supported by two former assistant city auditors, BART Board Director Debora Allen and former Oakland city councilmember Pat Kernighan.
“Central to my platform is we should stop trying to do things that are attempting to fix massive societal problems that are far beyond the ability of a poor city like Oakland make a dent in,” he said.
Edward Frank
Unlike Unger and Raphael, the third candidate in the race Edward Frank doesn’t list public safety as one of his top priorities but rather emphasizes the need to support the city’s “most vulnerable populations,” particularly the elderly and school-aged children.
“I’d like for us to invest more in our young people by bolstering the Department of Parks, Recreation and Youth Development, get kids lined up with youth mentorship, setting them up with a sense of agency, a pride in Oakland,” Frank said.
A stay-at-home dad who runs a small bread baking business, Frank has been an active leader in his kids’ elementary school parent teacher group but admits he’s still learning the ins and outs of local government and politics.
He said he’s got a knack for bringing people of various backgrounds together to work toward a common goal.
“I know that if elected to the City Council, I’m willing to step up, learn, lead and bring people to the table with opinions different than my own,” he said.
He said he is in favor of increased renter protections and city efforts to build more affordable housing.
“People are one flat tire away from homelessness and as a city we shouldn’t allow that to happen,” Frank said.
He said he supports Measure NN because it replaces and increases an existing parcel tax to fund public safety but shares the League of Women Voters’ concerns about the lack of public input on the measure, the reduction in the number of oversight commissioners and limited clarity about the four-year violence reduction plans.
Frank also supports Measure MM and Measure OO but opposes the Thao and Price recalls, mainly on the grounds that they are intensely disruptive to the process of governing.
“I’d love to see democracy play out, let her serve her term,” Frank said of the mayoral recall. “These recalls are expensive. They take a lot of time and resources.”
He said he is running a purposely unconventional campaign, doesn’t list any endorsements on his website and plans to spend less than $2,000 on his bid to replace Kalb.
“I don’t believe democracy should be A or B, let’s get another voice in there,” Frank said. “I’m bringing a set of values to this race and people have a lot of respect for that.”
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