Since 2023, Oakland has failed to publish a mandatory report that lists all the city’s contracts for goods and services that were authorized by the administration, without council oversight.

City law requires the council to approve all contracts above $250,000. But Oakland’s city administrator, Jestin Johnson, has the power to issue contracts up to that amount without informing the council and the public. The mandatory annual report is meant to provide transparency into these purchases. The report also requires Johnson and his team to explain if any contracts were issued without a competitive bidding process, and how many awards went to local businesses.

When we asked city officials about the missing reports for the years ending in June 2024 and June 2025 last summer, they assured us the delayed reports would be published in the fall of 2025. That didn’t happen. When we checked in again this week, the city said that the timeline had been pushed back again. 

“Finance staff have had to prioritize a number of agenda reports,” spokesperson Jean Walsh said in an email. “At this time we anticipate bringing the contract authority report to committee by the early spring.”

The last time Oakland published a contract report was October 2023. That report, which covered the fiscal year 2022-2023, documented scores of contracts tallying up to more than $10 million. 

City officials told us last year that the delay was caused by a “transition” with the person in charge of the report. The Contracts and Purchasing Bureau is now charged with generating this information, which appears to be part of the city’s efforts to centralize its contracting process. Officials also said that the city administrator is allowed to postpone releasing reports.  

In past years, the City Council examined these reports in public hearings and found errors and raised concerns about some contracts being awarded to non-local businesses. 

The contract report isn’t the only piece of financial information that has been withheld from the public. The Oakland Report recently noted that Oakland delayed the release of its annual report documenting the city’s revenues and expenditures for the previous fiscal year. And the Finance Department decided not to publish a report about the first quarter of financial data for the current fiscal year, citing limited data.

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