17 hours ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Oakland, a city desperate for improvement, looks to charter reform for help
Steve Falk has been talking to people all over Oakland about his plan to make the city's government work better. Perhaps no one crystallized Oakland's problems to him better than the unidentified City Council member who said: 'In Oakland, the buck stops nowhere.'
Falk has lived that dynamic. The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Public Policy lecturer has worked for 39 years as a city manager in six California cities, including two stints each in Richmond and Oakland.
'This city is more dysfunctional than any other city I worked for,' Falk said earlier this year. 'It's because of the charter.'
And now he wants to fix it as a leader of the Oakland Charter Reform Project, which sounds like the nerdiest, most boring thing imaginable, but it could be one of the best fixes that new Mayor Barbara Lee and the City Council could adopt. Much of the work being discussed was explored in a 2021 report on Oakland 's government by the policy think tank SPUR.
Oakland's government is structured like the federal government's tripartite system of checks and balances, which is OK for a nation of 340 million, but not for a medium-size city of 436,000 that's trying to move quickly to fix potholes and provide public safety. Under the current system, the mayor only appoints the city administrator, holds no veto power and does not supervise, evaluate or set goals for city departments. The city attorney is an elected position, which the SPUR report said blurs who they are supposed to represent. The City Council, meanwhile, doesn't select, direct, oversee or evaluate the city administrator or any department heads, leaving members and their constituents frustrated when city workers don't carry out their policy directions.
Plus, as Falk wrote recently on the Oakland Charter Reform Project's Substack, 'it has resulted in high turnover of the professional city administrator (six in the last five years!), which, in turn, negatively impacts the city's budget, workplace culture, and operations.'
Oakland residents aren't happy, either. Last October, 75% said the city was on the 'wrong track,' up 10 points from 2022, according to the annual survey.
Council Member Janani Ramachandran told me that when her constituents ask her, 'Why can't you fill my pothole, council member?' she replies, 'Well, I'm prohibited by the charter from directing staff, and I have no authority over city administrator. I don't even have the power to fire him in my role on council.'
'Right now,' Ramachandran said, 'the buck is being passed from one part of the city to another, to another on every other issue.'
Ramachadran said the need for charter reform 'speaks to the dysfunction that a lot of Oakland residents are seeing right now, and why they feel like they can't have a voice in the process.'
Lee is on board with improving the charter, too, though she wants to hear from the community first. Part of her plan for her first 100 days in office includes appointing 'a task force of League of Women Voters, ethics and good government experts to modernize Oakland's Charter and strengthen government accountability.'
Ramachandran told me that in the next week or two, she will introduce a resolution to create that task force, which will spend months gathering community input all over Oakland and creating a reform plan to put on the June 2026 ballot. Lee, Ramachadran, City Council President Kevin Jenkins and Falk's team met last week to discuss changing the charter.
Getting voters on board will not be easy, as this can be dense, wonky stuff. City leaders will need to spend a lot of time educating Oaklanders over the next year about how changing the way city government is structured could make it work better. (It helps that this is happening during the Ezra Klein-supercharged 'Abundance' moment of the political zeitgeist, which is challenging Democratic-led cities to show that they can accomplish something beyond virtue signaling.) Ramachadran, who frequently explains legislation on Tiktok and Instagram posts, conceded that charter reform will test the limits of her explanatory abilities. Hell, talking about charter reform might melt TikTok.
'Often the problem with these kinds of citywide initiatives and ballot measures that don't necessarily reflect what the average voter knows or understands is we're not speaking their language,' Ramachandran said. 'Usually, politicians and people that write these ballot measures are talking to people already involved in politics. You know, the people involved in the League of Women Voters and the neighborhood council leadership, not the 21-year-old from down the street or 55-year-old who only votes every four years.'
Ramachadran said she is keeping an open mind about what system would be the best for Oakland and will let public input be her guide. She and Falk agree that the answer isn't the current system.
Oakland's system is an outlier in California. Falk said 97% of cities have a council-manager form of government. Under this system, the council sets policy and supervises an appointed city manager who oversees daily operations. The mayor is selected from among the council members and serves as its president, leads meetings and holds a vote equal to other members. The city attorney is appointed by the council, not elected, and represents one client: the municipal government. Cities including San Jose, Long Beach and Riverside employ a similar system.
Falk proposes tweaking this system slightly. He calls it a 'unitary strong mayor plan' — to give the mayor some form of a veto, which likely would be one of the most contentious provisions debated over the next year. But he believes it would make the mayor and council more responsive to residents and more nimble.
'That new power to vote — if paired with veto power — would make (the mayor's position) the most powerful mayor Oakland has seen in over a century,' Falk and his team wrote on Substack.
Empowering a mayor like that comes with a potential downside, Falk acknowledged:
'A mayoral veto centralizes tremendous civic power in one individual. A mayor with a veto could diminish the city council's role in policymaking and, in so doing, generate resentment among council members and community groups who feel their influence is reduced. A veto could also be abused by the mayor to block popular legislation for personal or political reasons.'
But mayors in six of California's top 17 cities have veto power.
That will get worked out over the next year. What is indisputable is that change is needed.
As Ramachandran said, 'There's no one magic (move) here that's going to solve Oakland's dysfunction. But I really believe this is going to be a major piece to starting to break down that dysfunction.'
