Frustrated Oaklanders prioritize the basics: a clean, safe, affordable city

Oakland’s Budget Advisory Commission released the results of its bi-annual survey. It showed broad frustration with city governance, and agreement on priorities.

Mike Forbes is a resident of Oakland and a volunteer member of the Oakland’s Budget Advisory Commission. He contributed this post as a representative of the commission.

As required by its charter, the City of Oakland Budget Advisory Commission (BAC) conducts a survey to understand community needs as part of the biennial budget process. The recently completed survey showed broad dissatisfaction with the city’s services, and broad alignment around three key priorities: a safe, clean, affordable city.

The BAC was pleased to see a high level of engagement and response across the city, with almost 7,000 respondents. That is nearly five times higher response rate than previous surveys. The BAC conveys its deep gratitude to the Oakland community for its passion and participation.

The results were presented on March 7 to the Oakland City Council and are being used by both the mayor and city council to craft Oakland’s next biennial budget. The presentation document summarizes citywide themes, while the appendix breaks down results in detail by district, age group (with a focus on youth and people over 65), and people living outdoors (unhoused).

Here we highlight key themes and address a few questions received from the community on the survey purpose and design.

Themes

Oaklanders are not happy. Dissatisfaction with city management and leadership was at a record high—about 80% are somewhat or very dissatisfied with how city government is providing services.

There is broad alignment across Oakland on priorities. From ‘the hills’ to ‘the flats’ and east to west, people are largely looking for the same things. Their three top priorities were:

1. Improving public safety – 63%. (45% asked for quicker response times.)

2. Creating a cleaner city – 55%.

3. Providing access to more affordable housing – 39%.

Across all of these themes, it’s clear in the qualitative responses that people are looking for better delivery of basic services such as: police that arrive in a timely manner when a crime occurs; fixing potholes and removing trash / graffiti; getting homeless off the street and connected to services with dignity.

When we asked people to make choices, they showed they were open to cutting funding in other areas. When forced to make a choice, 54% would cut funding for libraries and 38% would reduce funding for arts organizations.

There are some differences between segments of the population, and we dive deeper into those both in the main deck commentary as well as the appendix. For example, cutting police overtime is a theme across most groups, but not with everyone— some residents are less concerned about reducing overtime and are more supportive of providing funding to sweep encampments. There are also differences by age group; for example, people under 18 are more concerned about affordable housing. While such differences are important, the broad priorities and themes are consistent across groups.

Revenue increases can also help alleviate budget stress, but our survey showed that the sales tax proposal is far from a ‘clear pass.’ While this survey did not focus on likely voters, only 31% responded in favor of a tax increase, with 44% answering ‘no’ and 25% undecided. Based on this, the city should not assume a near-term boost in revenues to solve the budget crisis—at least not in so far as those coming from a sales tax. On the other hand many responded in open ended questions that they were open to less regressive taxes

What’s next?

City leadership must now make difficult choices to implement a balanced budget. Council members will be publishing their budget priorities on or around March 15, and the BAC will be submitting guidance, based on this survey and other data, as part of the process.

We also note that the survey generated a lot of spirited discussion in the comments and chat forum of Oakland Report. We address a few of those here:.

• Were city funds used on this survey? In the past, the Council earmarked about $50K for a professional consultant to conduct the survey. Due to the budget crisis this funding was eliminated, so BAC members took it upon themselves to conduct the survey at no charge to the City. We are grateful for input from Oakland staff, community organizations such as SPUR, and other cities. We are open to criticism, but please remember that we are ‘regular folks’ and had to balance this work with our ‘regular jobs’.

• Why didn’t the survey ask more questions / go into more detail? We designed a survey to reach all of Oakland, which meant sacrificing some level of depth in order to reach the most people. First, people are far less likely to complete a survey if it has more than 10 questions or takes more than 7 minutes. Second, Oakland is a city of vast educational and language differences. English is not the first language for 37% of Oaklanders, and 54% of Oaklanders have a high school diploma or less. Because of this, we wanted to keep the survey as simple as possible. That said, feedback is always welcome and we hope to improve the survey in future years.

If there are more questions or thoughts please use the comments section, and we will do our best to address them.

Tags: Budget