What would a better budget look like?

What would a better budget look like?

In truth, I do not know because a better budget will be the result of political compromise. 

The first thing we need for a better budget in Oakland is some chance of stability. 
To get that stability, we need serious, stable public support.
We need more than a squeak-by majority behind it. 

·         4 unpopular members of council and a deal with the mayor is not public support for a budget. 

·         A budget report that does not show the full amount of all the public debts and pension obligations, does not develop public trust.  

·         Manipulating the public and threatening to close 14 of 18 libraries and having our council meet in two closed door groups of four is not a budget process that we should be proud of. 

·         Dropping 80 police officers to get a compromise on pensions is not good relations with our public employees.  

This list could go on and on citing examples from almost all of the public departments and all kinds of disappointment with our elected official.  I’ll stop here with a question:  Do you think the public at large trusts the way our public officials are managing our public finances?  

All of these events are very hard on our public employees, many of whom have their jobs threatened every two years or less and word day to day in an atmosphere of hand to mouth, crisis to crisis thinking on the part of a management who gets little more than two years of planning offered to them.   

Jane Brunner, who is leaving the job that I want, (Council Member District 1) told the Piedmont Avenue Neighborhood Improvement League that this last budget was really a great step forward.  She felt that for the first time they were getting some kind of real information and numbers from city staff.  Jane has held this seat for 16 years or something like that.  I feel that if she feels that we have had too little information for the past fourteen years on our budget, then the budget process is more flawed than it looks and it looks bad.

What I see as a process leading to a better budget would be public approval, by a wide majority, of that new budget process in a referendum.  I would submit any reformed budget to the people for a vote.  Maybe what we need is some kind of budget convention, sort of like a charter convention or constitutional convention and then require that it pass with the same majority needed to authorize taxes.  If we are going to transform prior tax measures, we will need that majority to be legal.  

So given that, here are some ideas I would like to see discussed and addressed in a total budget review.

To start with, we need to raise taxes in a fairer and more predictable way.  I do not like the endless fees and the over complicated measures authorizing parcel taxes.  We could drop the parcel taxes and reform our business taxes, sales taxes and service fees in a way that cover’s our real costs.  I am open to all of it as long as it is fair, keeps residents in their homes and lets local business, especially small business, survive securely.  In a separate posting, I will stick my neck out and propose a different business tax.  My basic principal is that people making money should pay taxes accordingly and people who are not making money here should have some kind of security.  

Measures Y, Q and others like them need to be brought back into the fold as part of basic way we do business.  I believe in the dedicated funding commitments to community policing and our libraries, but not by this process.  A guaranteed percentage of general fund spending would probably be better.  A non-rider rule would also help so that such things as community policing would not be stuck paying 4 million dollars to the fire department (this is the current Measure Y).  

I have no idea why we do not spend our money AFTER we raise it.  What if we spent in 2012 based on what we took in during 2011 instead of what we hope to take in during 2013?  Somehow I fear that I am in danger of being taken to the border and expelled from the United States for saying such a thing, but it would make planning a “hecka” easier.  

And how about the business cycle?  It happens.  Capitalism is the system we live under in this country.  We have been having big downturns on a regular basis since well before the panic of 1893 and they should not be a cause for us to be unprepared or panic in 2012.  I make some jokes during forums that it is sad that the Green Party, the one party that puts people before profit, is the one brining up this very basic fact about our economy.  It is sad and a bit odd.  The “rainy day fund” that some discuss and a few have implemented can be the way we do this.   The definition of the growth/recession can be fixed to performance markers and the transition from good times to bad times, and the release of “rainy day” funds can be set by a pre determined formula at the beginning of each spending year.  

 During periods of high growth and heavier investment and more real-estate transactions is when we should NOT spend on upgrading our buildings, purchasing new resources, special public works or big projects.  During those times we should restrict government to basic services.  We can learn from recent history and never ever allow any of the real-estate transfer taxes to anything but the rainy day fund.  In good times, we should keep our libraries, parks, civic centers, programs running, pay our debts, and put sidewalk expansion, paving roads, development projects and such on hold.   

And we should spend when times are bad.  That is when those public projects will cost the least to do and when an injection of shorter term public jobs would do the most good.  It is also when it is least expensive to borrow money.  

I see it as an economic shock absorber.  Sort of a rainy day fund with a works project administration ready to start up on those rainy days.  

Now we can, and I will, work on these points one by one and see what kind of improvements we can get piece by piece.  That is the way we work on such issues now and the result is usually incomplete reforms that do not accomplish much but make day to day government even more complicated and paralyzed.

So I will also advocate that Budget Convention to give us a chance to work on a new budget and new budget process taking the big picture into account.

The alternative is to continue the current budget and budget process with our next budget crisis on schedule for 2013.  

Or?  Are there some other proposals?  

Don

campaign statement for the voter pamphlet

Don Macleay, Candidate for Oakland City Council, District 1,
 campaign statement for the voter pamphlet

On Council, I will address the crisis affecting Oakland youth in Education, Crime, Employment and Housing.  To reduce crime in Oakland, we need to exit the revolving door prison system, work on root causes, and make a place for ex-offenders in our community.  To build a city government that better serves us, we need stable money in our budget, and we must remove money and gerrymandering from our local elections with a budget and charter reform convention.  I offer the skills of an educated environmentalist, an industrial worker, and a business manager.  Over the 23 years that I have lived here raising my two sons, I have found that my mix of white and blue collar background connects me with many residents as does my life as a world citizen living abroad 15 years where I learned to speak French, Spanish, Italian, German and Mandarin.  http://oaklandgreens.org/don/

Open letter to District One for a grass roots council election

Friends, 

I have been talking with people in the community and have spoken with most of my fellow candidates for Oakland City Council District One and have found broad support for a grass roots campaign close to the people.  So I am writing this letter with three sets of suggestions on how to make that happen.

First the community needs to step forward and take the lead.  All of the grass roots groups can invite candidates to their regular meetings, hold mixers and/or forums, interview candidates etc.  By grass roots groups I mean everyone from the Friends of the Tool Library to Business Improvement Districts including the NCPC’s, PANIL, STAND, OCO and all the other friends of other libraries, and local groups.  This would be a good time for a local union or chamber of commerce to host an event and get their questions asked to the candidates too. 

Second, we need to make it easy and inexpensive to do.  Here are some things I saw two years ago that I think could help:

·         Just hold a mixer, pot luck food, minimal time for the candidates to introduce themselves and maximum time to meet and talk one on one. 

·         Only meet with a couple candidates at a time, easier to schedule, less of a production.

·         Hold a couple of small panels on the themes of interest to your group members instead of one big panel that crams too much in. 
Record your meetings with candidates and post them to Ustream for your members who could not make the meeting. 

·         Let the candidates speak.  Answering questions is fine, but at some point letting the candidates define what they (we) think is important. 

·         Invite a candidate or two to your regular meetings to be part of the agenda but only part of the agenda.  The candidates should commit to being there for your whole meeting and seeing what your groups regular business is.  Between now and November there is time to get to all of the candidates running to at least one meeting with some calm.

·         INVITE PRESS THAT MIGHT REALLY COME AND REPORT, that means people like http://oaklandlocal.com/ http://oaklandnorth.net/ and viewpoint@eddrick.net and our local neighborhood print. 

Third, all of us candidates need to make ourselves available.  Speaking with those fellow candidates I found at the Oakland Builders Alliance, I felt that all the candidates would like to have these close, grass roots meetings.  It is obvious that the grass roots groups will need to do the organizing and inviting.  The candidates need to make it clear when they will be available.  (for myself, see below)  I have copied all of them on this open letter.  

Don Macleay
don@oaklandgreens.org
510 290-1200
http://oaklandgreens.org/don/

 

Available for public events starting July 13^th
all Wednesdays and Thursdays afternoon or evenings.
Friday-Saturday-Sunday by Fridays 7/13, 7/27, 8/10, 8/24, 9/7, 9/21, 10/5, 10/19 and 11/2.

5 quick questions about the Oakland Army Base project

Question one: if we do not have funds for pensions, police, libraries, parks and adult education, how is it we have a billion dollars for speculative real estate?

Question two: if this is such a good deal, then why does the private sector not provide the investment loans?

Question three: who will the clients for these warehouse center services be? Do we have any contracts lined up in any way?

Question four: is all the money at risk public funds? Has any private company invested in this schema?

Question five: given the city's exposure, why has it.been so hard to monopolize hiring?

http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_20892753/oakland-army-base-vote-scheduled-tuesday-night?refresh=no

Oakland businesses need a strong and stable city government.

Oakland businesses need a strong and stable city government.

The dialog between city government and the business community should lead to longer term planning.  The overall general framework of ordnances that define the local business environment needs to be workable and not change much or often.  Renters and home owners, investors, business operators, and city administrators need a predictable environment to make their own plans and thrive. The City Council members who will be good partners for the business community will drive a hard bargain, look at the general picture, practice active oversight and be the trusted representatives of the community. 

The instability must stop. We need to get our city budget out of the current hand-to-mouth, crisis-to-crisis mode.  We cannot be starting programs or hiring police, to stop them when balancing the budget and start them again after passing a ballot measure.  This instability hurts everyone.  

Our budget should take the business cycle into account. 
We need to tax when the economy is high and spend when it is low and have a plan for both. 

We need to tax fairly and more.  The Port of Oakland should contribute more to the operations of its local government.  Some others have also been over-favored by the tax structure while some have been hurt.  New building owners are burdened with the way property taxes punish the most recent investments (Prop. 13).  The city can restructure the way it raises business, property, sales and parcel taxes to compensate.  We need more revenue, but we need to collect it in a way that keeps local employment viable, helping people buy, rent (or rent out) real estate and invest in local business. 

We need clear zoning and permitting rules.  If an activity is allowed by the zoning of a building, then the permit should be simple.  We should also put a stop to constant zoning changes and the, current micro-detailed planning and zoning maps. The current process is unpredictable and expensive.   

The system has to become navigable.  We need to turn the city permitting process around so that the applicant has a case manager.  The case manager would navigate the system, know the full process and have the authority of a manger when they do it. 

We need to take care of what is working. We should reject all planning and projects that damage current employment in favor of development projects without contracted clients. We should never tear down one business in hopes of another.  We have a high vacancy rate and the city should be working hard to see those buildings go back into use.  Our planning should always support our significant service, non-profit and government sector.  All the jobs we have should be supported, valued and retained. 

The best thing that the City of Oakland can do for its business community is to improve the quality of our schools and reduce our chronic crime rate.  The current situation lowers our quality of life and takes down real estate values with it.  The city government needs to make the problems of crime, parolee recidivism, high school truancy, homelessness, substance abuse, unemployment, housing, urban pollution and asthma our top priorities.  These problems are deep rooted and common to urban centers across our country. Turning our crime and school problems around requires the full support of every aspect of all forms of local government.  Development projects, no matter how interesting, have to take a back seat if they are not helping the city deal with at least one of these issues in a significant way. 

Don Macleay,

Candidate for Oakland City Council, District One, November 2012

It is time for Measure Y to go.

If we are going to get any serious community policing and divert our young offenders into any kind of restorative justice programs, we need to stop wasting our time with our community-policing-through-regressive-parcel-tax Measure Y.  http://www.measurey.org/

We can also do without Measure B that we had to pass later to keep from losing the whole thing because the city did not meet the police staffing levels it promised.  

I am sure that some will be happy to hold up a laundry list of numbers lauding the accomplishments of Measure Y.  Unfortunately, Measure Y and the Measure Y way of doing things do not measure up. 

The reason that the Measure Y boosters and folk from “the inner” circle of influence hold up a laundry list of numbers lauding the accomplishments under Measure Y is because if you did not hear it from them, you would never know.  This is a crime in and of itself.  Much has been done and the ground work for many a good effort has been laid.  Why then do we always seem to be just at the beginning of our effort?  

Groundwork should have led to some serious building and results by this time.  But there is little happening at a size that is being felt on the street.  Many do not know what Measure Y is, others have not even heard of it.  In the course of talking to residents and asking for their vote, I have only heard a few positive reports on Measure Y programs.  Most tell me that they only have a vague idea of what it is about and have not seen any effects.  The rate of robberies, shootings and truancy bear this out. The numbers of our young people entering the criminal justice system year after year is hardly changed. 

This is after how many years?  How can we call it a success?  

The measures that matter tell the same old sad story.  We still have our revolving door, vicious circle of mercilessness around the courts, prison and parole system.  Measure Y in a year does not help as many people who fall into this trap in a week.  We still have large numbers of people who will not cooperate with the police, even in the case of the murder of their own family members.  According to Oakland Police Capitan Anthony Toribio in 2010 about half the families of murder victims would not cooperate with the police investigation.  

And this Spring, like all Oakland Springs, fully half of the youth who should be getting their High School Diploma will not.  That is a measure of failure on our part and a measure of trouble yet to come. 

The jobs of working with our neighborhoods and the jobs of organizing our neighborhoods are always the ones that get the ax first.  If there is a budget problem, they cut the community police officers, if there is a protest against Wall Street, they cut back on community services, and it seems like some in our police force are looking for ANY excuse not to do community policing.  They seem to find that excuse quickly and our political leadership seems to get them back on track slowly.  

One of the biggest problems with the Measure Y way of doing things is that we have no stability.  We lost a lot of ground when we cut the police staff, we lost it again at the last budget, we lost it at Occupy and we continue to see community police officer assignments and community organizing stop, restart and change personnel every semester.  Every time we start and then stop and then restart a program, we have to start a lot of the work as if it were new.  That adds up to lost money, lost trained people and worst of all, lost public willingness to get involved.  

What program can be effective with that kind of instability? 

We spend more time and attention managing Measure Y than we spend on organizing community policing.  We have nobody assigned to implementing restorative justice.  What we do have is a great big pool of money and some requests for proposals that brings the unwanted attention of opportunists and instant self-appointed experts with homemade programs.  Some are good, some are amateurish.  We need to address root causes of our social problems that cause high crime, not hold procurement fairs for a bunch of small outside projects that do not give us the numbers and quality we need.  

I also want Measure Y to go because so much of it is not about Community Policing.   

It is about the Fire Department, it is about school discipline, it is about police staffing levels (thus Measure B) and it is all about all the little political deals that made the “successful politics” needed to get it passed.  This house of cards is unstable and it has fallen more than it has done good work.  People voted for a lot that had nothing to do with community policing when then voted for Measure Y.  

The “smart politics” keeps us from having a smart policy on crime and a smart policy on budgeting.

Community policing and restorative justice is our city policy; we need to enforce it in management.

The job of community organizing should be part of how we do business in our city.  It should be led by civilians and it needs to be intentionally reaching out to whole neighborhoods across race and income differences.  We should really be thinking of how to get our grass roots neighborhoods empowered.  They need to have resources to distribute. We need to engage the difficult social changes we will need to stop the cycle of chronic crime.  If we are going to organize the neighborhoods better than the current (unelected) Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council model then we need to stop telling neighborhoods what to do and let our communities act on their/our own telling us what they need.  Otherwise we will only continue to have token grass roots democracy without many backers or any effective power.  

The job of restorative justice needs to be a real job.  To start with we should review every case BEFORE we hand it to the DA’s office for prosecution.  We have the power, through our police enforcement, not to press charges and we should use it.  EVERY time we arrest someone in Oakland we should review the situation and see if we can deal with them locally.  

Restorative justice is about a lot of things, but first and foremost it is about restoring the damage done.  

SUCCESS=  A local offender on a path to reform and making amends to their victims staying in the community and in school.

FAILURE= Every young person we needlessly send to jail where they get no rehabilitation services and only learn to become more criminal than before and to then be released to a parole system that offers them nothing and cannot keep track of them.  

That FAILURE is the system we have now.  Measure Y notwithstanding.

There is no shortcut to common sense and a common cause on crime.  Measure Y is a gimmick and it has failed because it is a gimmick.  There seems to be quite a bit of consensus about changing how we fight crime and the causes of crime and how we deal with a person caught up in crime.  Otherwise we would not have voted for Measure Y.  Most of us want what Measure Y was SUPPOSED to do. 

We need to make community policing, restorative justice and community organizing part of how we do business as a whole.  Any real improvement will be a difficult process of social change.  We have started this process and made a lot of progress.  We now need to make that progress in the quantity and quality needed to reach the whole of our community. 

Send cash so a woman can get her children back

 Send cash so a woman can get her children back

Friday my friend had her children taken away because she attended a picnic in Mosswood Park in support of the Occupy movement here in Oakland, California. 

I read the “emergency protective order” myself, minus the actual declaration which they did not include, and she is not allowed to see her children and will not even get a day in court until April 23rd.  

There was no warning, no proper filing of papers, nothing.  Her ex just filed like a thief in the dark and snuck the kids out of the school.  She arrived to find them gone.  The school had seen the restraining order, but she had not, nobody was there to serve her or explain anything.  The only cause written on the paper was that she had attended this event at Mosswood Park, which was a picnic in a nice family park with a playground near my house.  We take my kid and her kids to this park all the time. 

First things first, she has no money and she now needs money to hire an experience family law specialist. So send her some cash to “KC”. C/O Don Macleay, P.O. Box 20299, Oakland CA, 94620.  I will give her the letters unopened.  If each of us gives a small amount, we can get her legal fees quickly. If you can give a larger amount, please do so. If you need more information to donate you can contact me.  

I know a lot about this case and I know the children.  It is for them that I am not naming names. They have been having a hard enough time as it is.  Being snatched away from their mom is probably the most hurtful thing anyone could have done to them. She has been their principle caregiver all their lives and they are too old not to be deeply hurt by what their father has just done to them.

My father was a court officer.  When my own divorce nightmare was unfolding he told me that “the system is vulnerable to those willing to perjure themselves” My father was an honorable man who would never perjure himself and I do not think he understood that many do not have those ethics. 

Translation?  Alameda Family Court is a liar's paradise.  Every document you sign says “under penalty of perjury” on it.  I have yet to hear of one case, or an instance in a case, where that was enforced.

In this case, we have a person who has no qualms telling lies in court or anywhere else.  I first met him as somebody else’s boyfriend BEFORE the younger of these two children was fathered. Since I have watched this case I have seen him run the kind of marijuana grow that gives medical grows a bad name.  He has told every kind of contradictory story in court and he has tried to attack this woman by distorting her medical history and her sexuality.  I also know his other two ex’s and their children.  One is trying to get him to pay his support and the other has recently stopped doing their custody exchange in the police stations. 

Not only does lying work well in Alameda Family Court, so does slander and smear campaigns. This is now the third time he is slandering this woman to take the kids for himself and this time he is using her politics.

Let us be very clear about something.  The kids were not ever in any danger at the picnic at Mosswood Park or at any other Occupy support action.  Despite how it is getting spun in the press, most of Occupy Oakland was more like a street fair than a protest movement.  For a while there was a Children’s Village with a play tent.  The children were separated from any confrontations in both space and time.  

Our family courts and family services are a disgrace.  Just speaking for myself and not about this case, I have no faith in the system.  It urgently needs an outside audit of the judgments, the mediation, Child Protective Services and the outside contractors who are the “evaluators” and “counseling services”. 

For this reason alone we should be helping my friend out.  No woman should become the victim of an abusive husband who can game the system to abuse her again in Family Court. 

In this case he is using her politics against her to take her children away.  If you do not feel personally threatened by that, then I would suggest that there is something you did not understand.

-- Don Macleay dmacleay@earthlink.net 510 290-1200