A coalition of Oakland municipal employee unions are calling on city leaders to protect jobs and services in the face of a massive budget deficit.
During a news conference on the steps of Oakland City Hall on Monday morning, labor leaders claimed the city’s current fiscal crisis has been a long time coming and is the result of mismanagement from multiple administrations, among other things.
“As we all know, Oakland is facing a budget deficit, one that mirrors a nationwide trend where cities and municipalities are grappling with declining revenues in the face of rising interest rates and an economy still recovering from the pandemic,” said Oakland IT worker Julian Ware, president of IFPTE Local 21.
“On top of this, Oakland’s deficit is a product of years of mismanagement and a pattern of overspending,” Ware said. “This didn’t start today. This didn’t start last year, didn’t start the year before that. It started terms before that.”
The city is currently facing an estimated $115 million one-year budget shortfall that, when added to the money required to restore its emergency reserve fund, will require a total of about $143 million to erase, according to a recent city finance department report.
The unions — including SEIU 1021, IAFF Local 55, IFPTE Local 21 and IBEW Local 1245 — are proposing a “roadmap to a sustainable budget,” which recommends cutting police overtime by $24 million to $52 million, staffing up parking enforcement and other revenue-generating departments, reducing “non-service” spending and cutting the growth in senior management’s pay by up to $8 million, among other things.
The proposal will result in $142 million to $204 million in potential new revenue and savings, which would be enough to close the city’s budget gap, according to the union’s report.
“The administration’s answer is slashing vital services again, including $34 million from fire services,” Ware said. “This is not acceptable and that is why today we’re calling for our neighbors and leaders to rally around a sustainable budget road map.”
Antoinette Blue, a 911 dispatcher and president of the Oakland chapter of SEIU 1021, said the city needs to hire an independent auditor to comb through its fiscal life and budget process to get a clear accounting of the numbers being presented.
“There’s no way that our administration can sit up here and say that they want a safe and clean Oakland and then turn around and balance their budget on the backs of the workers that perform the services that these members of the community need,” Blue said.
While the union coalition represents a powerfully influential voice in city politics, Oakland’s police union is noticeably absent from the alliance, which says the city can’t balance its budget without reining in police spending.
The Oakland Police Officers Association, for its part, has also been calling on the city to hire an independent auditor to review its finances for years, according to OPOA President Huy Nguyen.
“The Oakland Police Officers Union will not accept any cuts until we know the extent of the city’s debt. We demand the soon-to-be-ex-mayor and council majority hire an independent financial expert to make short term and long-term recommendations,” Nguyen said. “The city hired an outside expert in 2011 when it faced a fiscal challenge and the OPOA took a leadership role in addressing and resolving the crisis. We demand the city do the same again.”
The unions’ demands come amid the Oakland City Council’s efforts to grapple with its daunting budget shortfall.
This is not acceptable and that is why today we’re calling for our neighbors and leaders to rally around a sustainable budget road map.
Julian Ware, president of IFPTE Local 21
On Tuesday, councilmembers will be presented with a report from the city’s finance department that details Oakland’s budget woes — an early version of which said, “immediate action is necessary to maintain the solvency of the General Purpose Fund and avoid the Chapter 9 (bankruptcy) process.”
“Failure to take dramatic and immediate steps to reduce expenditures will almost certainly result in insolvency,” according to the report dated Nov. 8.
On Monday, however, Nguyen said that language has been removed from the report and replaced with less-dramatic phrasing.
“The City first publishes that it’s heading toward bankruptcy and may have to declare a fiscal emergency, but then alters and removes that very language online to sanitize the true state of Oakland’s fiscal mismanagement,” Nguyen said. “There should be an investigation into how and who made these changes.”
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