4 Comments

I wonder how far back the mismanagement goes? Are there any political leaders around today that haven’t contributed to the current crisis financial situation. Not to mention the loss of Oakland’s premiere status as one of a handful of cities with an NFL, NBA and MLB team. Notwithstanding the financial crisis, the status of the great city of Oakland needs a reboot after consistent decline from administration to administration to where we are today. I hope the new administration will consider including restoration of Oakland as a premiere destination in their long term planning.

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I'm supportive of the police and fire, but a Grand Jury report from 2019 showed how excessively high the OPD and OFD retirement and OPEB benefits were. The real problem is the overinfluence of public employees' unions on the Council races.

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Wildly inconsistent with your own Tim Gardner reports. Remember 2.5x inflation for over a decade? You assessed that at around $180 MILLION I recall. Compare to SF city employees, and city wide we are talking $250,000 average employee pay this year for Oakland, vs $200,000 est 2024 for SF city employees, and we have only 60% of the income per worker. This is on the order of $140 million to $170 million, depending on which employee count you use.

C’mon guys, this is the most shallow podcast I have heard recently. Read your own Oakland Reports, or read my posts on Nextdoor, to get the details.

Why don’t you even mention Zac Unger, head of the fire union, who has lead the charge on the increases for 18 years by one report, and has been reported by people involved to have typically had fire go first in these negotiations then level up.

Excessive pay for these workers IS a large part of why we pay high level taxes, but are about the worst staffed city in California. This discussion borders on misinformation, dismissing all this prior data and analysis and only focusing, it seems, on the last year or two.

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