As Oakland grapples with a $177 million budget deficit, councilmembers are on edge as they try to make that up.
Less than 24 hours from when they are supposed to vote on a budget to balance the deficit they were presented with a slew of new options. Janani Ramachandran, an Oakland city councilmember, said that's unacceptable.
“I’m feeling frankly terrified at our options in front of us,” Ramachandran said. “Are we making irresponsible choices today and kicking the can down the road to whoever is on city council next year or are we going to start to make hard choices now?”
Ramachandran said she believes the other options should have been presented with Mayor Sheng Thao’s original budget.
One new option would include Mayor Thao’s original budget with additional cuts if the city can’t finalize its portion of the coliseum sale come September. The other would call for $63 million in cuts that would mainly freeze Oakland Police Department and Fire Department resources.
“My firm belief there is absolutely no chance that the sale is finalized and goes through and most important that the money goes through to hit city coffers in time to be utilized in this budget,” Ramachandran said.
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Noel Gallo, another councilmember for the city, said he blames the current administration for the budget issues.
“We're poorly managed. All of us are,” he said. “The management of our financial conditions is really not at the level that it should be. We've known about the crisis before, but we [allowed] it to get to this point.”
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Dan Lindheim, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley and former Oakland councilmember, said he warned the current administration of a potential downfall caused by the loss of $55 million in real-estate transfer tax.
“The bad thing about it is in good news it brings in a lot of revenue and in bad years it collapses. Prudence says do not build it into your budget,” he said. “We imposed that back during the great recission but every year after I left the council kept raising that level.”
As the current council weighs their options, both Gallo and Ramachandran said cutting public saftey funds is not an option.
“We're facing a challenge financially, and my understanding in the next year is going to be worse,” Gallo said. “What do I do today? I don't want to go bankrupt, but for me, public safety is still the number one issue.”
Councilmembers will meet Friday to vote on the budget, but conversations have the potential to be extended into next week.
