The office of Oakland’s city auditor released a report Tuesday on the city’s failure to apply for an anti-retail theft grant in 2023, placing the blame on several factors including the lack of organizational leadership as well as poor interdepartmental coordination.
The report described the failure as a lost opportunity for Oakland to fund critically-needed staff and equipment, though it added that the grant money was by no means guaranteed. Of the police agencies that successfully applied for the grant, only 33% were awarded it.
It also noted that the city of Oakland had successfully secured grants for other projects in the same fiscal year, with the city receiving $31.9 million and the police department receiving $6.1 million in funding.
In this case, both the Oakland Police Department and the city’s Economic and Workforce Development team worked on applications for the Organized Retail Theft Prevention Grant Program — initially without knowledge of the other’s efforts.
Both agencies would eventually begin coordinating their efforts around 11 days before the grant’s July 7, 2023 due date, according to the report. The teams said they tried to submit the completed application in the minutes leading up to the deadline but ran into technical issues.
Emails exchanged by the team that day reflected those technical frustrations, but the auditor was not able to independently confirm that each team did indeed upload their portion of the application.
Prior reporting by NBC Bay Area reflected a feeling from staffers within both the Oakland city administration and the police department that the other was to blame. The audit, however, noted problems on both sides and described the failure as one of “deeper organizational problems with this particular grant application process.”
The report argues this stemmed from four factors:
- Lack of organizational leadership
- Lack of project management
- Poor interdepartmental communication and coordinating
- Lack of a grant management policy
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As a result, the auditor gave two recommendations to the city: (1) that it should create and implement a citywide grants management policy; and (2) this policy should require the city administrator to approve of grants involving multiple departments and also appoint an executive sponsor for such a project.
The city administration, according to the report, agreed with these recommendations and has developed a plan to implement them.
Read about the report in greater detail below or in full here.
What is the Organized Retail Theft Prevention Grant Program?
The grant, also known as the ORTP, was created as a part of California’s Budget Act of 2022. The bill describes it as a competitive grant intended to support law enforcement agencies in responding to “organized retail theft, motor vehicle or motor vehicle accessory theft, or cargo theft.”
The bill made the ORTP the purview of the Board of State and Community Corrections, which is also known as the BSCC. The BSCC released its proposal instruction packet for the grant on April 14, 2023, where it set the proposal due date at 5 p.m. on July 7, 2023. In all, the ORTP offered a total of over $242 million in funding.
As the ORTP was a competitive grant, funding was not guaranteed to applicants. The ORTP was awarded to 38 grantees out of 114 applications — equaling 33%, as noted in Oakland’s audit report.
10 Bay Area police agencies did receive the grant, including: the Campbell Police Department, Daly City Police Department, Fremont Police Department, Newark Police Department, Palo Alto Police Department, San Francisco Police Department, San Jose Police Department, San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, San Ramon Police Department and the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office.
A timeline of events
The report laid out a complete timeline of both OPD’s and the Economic and Workforce Development, also known as EWD, team’s efforts to apply for the ORTP.
The city of Oakland was initially made aware of the grant on April 25, 2023, when a firm contracted with the city emailed it with information on several public safety grants, which included the ORTP. In an email exchange with the EWD deputy director the following day, the interim police chief said that OPD should be able to handle the grant proposal.
The report outlines OPD staff communicating about the grant over email through the month of May, with a police lieutenant later reporting that they were assigned the project on Jun. 8. With about 30 days before the deadline, emails show the lieutenant collecting data, obtaining letters of support and identifying potential vendors for equipment.
Just days prior to the lieutenant being assigned the project, on Jun. 5, an EWD staff member learned of the grant and began working on a proposal. The staffer worked on the proposal through Jun. 19, when they contacted OPD regarding the grant. OPD then confirmed that it was already working on an application and the two departments began coordinating their efforts on Jun. 21.
Teams with both departments worked to submit the application up until the 5 p.m. deadline on June 7, 2023. The report describes an attempt to submit the completed application starting at around 4 p.m. that day — but both teams saying that they then ran into technical problems.
Minutes after the 5 p.m. deadline, a EWD staff member emailed the BSCC to report that they had tried unsuccessfully to submit the proposal prior to the deadline. It is unclear if the BSCC responded.
The auditor did reach out to the BSCC to confirm this version of events, although the agency said it used an third-party platform for the applications and could only see successfully submitted applications. The third-party could only tell BSCC that an account linked to the city of Oakland last accessed the platform on the day of the deadline.
The report’s findings and recommendations
Although the report noted a number of individual failures, it argued the overall issue was an organizational one. As noted before, the report identified four factors which led to the failure.
The first was lack of organizational leadership, especially in an interdepartmental project The auditor said the the responsibility for grant applications ultimately landed on the administrative side, meaning that Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao could have directed the city administrator to have prioritized the grant.
At the same time, though, it also argued that OPD leadership had initially accepted responsibility for the grant and should have done more to ensure the the application’s success.
The second was the lack of project management. In the report, the auditor writes that although several people were working on the grant, no one was actually in charge. It characterized the resulting effort as “disjointed.” It notes that best practices for grant submission is to have a project manager who can organized and manage the process.
The third was the poor interdepartmental coordination. It said the EWD staffer working on the project showed initiative, but failed to immediately reach out to OPD who would ultimately be making use of the money. Similarly, it argued OPD could have been more deliberate in setting the terms for the collaboration.
Finally, it noted that the city of Oakland does not have an overall grants management policy, which could have provided clarity and guidance throughout the whole project.
In response to this, the report made the recommendations noted at the top of this article. The city of Oakland, the auditor wrote, had already seen those recommendations and planned to implement them.
