It takes a lot of workers to pave Oakland’s roads, respond to fires, staff the libraries, among many other critical tasks, and the city has set aside money to pay people to do those jobs, but hundreds of city staff positions are unfilled, and city leaders aren’t on the same page about why.
Oakland is budgeted for 4,264 full-time positions, but the city has only filled 3,255 of those jobs, according to a new report. That’s roughly 1,000 jobs with no one on staff to get the work done.
Due to the city’s financial crunch, a couple of these 1,000 positions have been frozen, while others are encumbered, meaning they’re tied to funding for overtime and temporary staffing. But Oakland is authorized to fill 839 of those unfilled jobs.
The fact that it hasn’t leaves Oakland with a vacancy rate a shade under 20%.
Oakland councilmembers have been frustrated for years with the city’s seeming inability to hire more workers, and they laid bare their anger at a committee meeting on Tuesday.
“I think this is frankly disgraceful,” said District 4 Councilmember Janani Ramachandran, who heads the Finance Committee, noting that the numbers in the new report are the worst Oakland has seen in four years.
Oakland’s vacancy rate has been hovering between 17 and 19% since 2021, when it rose from 12% in May to 19% in October, propelled in no small part by the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Oakland isn’t the only city grappling with lots of empty municipal jobs. Other nearby cities, including Berkeley, Hayward, Fremont, and Richmond, have also seen their vacancy rates stay stubbornly high or get worse. But some cities appear to have turned the corner, including San Francisco and San Jose.
Many of the city’s departments with bleak staffing rates are small, like the Department of Workplace and Employment Standards, which is missing 11 of its 20 authorized staff roles, and the Police Commission, which is missing nine of its 23 jobs. However, two major departments with crucial roles for the city’s economy — Planning and Building, and OakDOT — both have staff vacancy rates hovering at or close to 30%.
At Tuesday’s council committee meeting, Ramachandran said many of the vacant positions are for workers who directly provide services to city residents, such as street sweepers. “This is the way the city is perceived with the public: that we are not trying to hire, that departments or HR have their own reasons they don’t want to hire, or only hire their friends,” she said.
Noting he and his colleagues were “trying to be as gentle as possible,” District 1 Councilmember Zac Unger said that in his nearly 30 years of working for the city, HR “has been the chokepoint and bottleneck and the department with the most difficulty.”
Unger said he appreciated how hard city staff work and apologized for his frustration. But he also emphasized that the response to many constituents who reach out to him about city services could boil down to, “Can’t do that because we don’t have the staff.”
“From policing to potholes, that could be my response,” Unger said. “We’re just trying to figure out how to crack this nut.”
Why can’t Oakland hire enough workers?
There are myriad reasons for Oakland’s staffing woes. But a big one is the capacity to hire more people. Human Resources, which is responsible for hiring new employees, has one of the worst vacancy rates in the city, with nearly 45% of its positions empty.
Another major issue is that departments aren’t submitting the paperwork necessary to HR to start hiring for specific positions. HR Director Mary Hao explained that 461 budgeted positions — roughly half the existing vacancies citywide — are unfilled because departments have failed to file paperwork.
District 2 Councilmember Charlene Wang called this number “jaw-dropping” and expressed confusion around why department heads aren’t taking action to hire the staff they need.
Wang said she spoke with the head of Economic and Workforce Development about the need to fill code enforcement positions, which are a priority to go after everything from vandalism to building safety issues. But these jobs aren’t even listed on the city’s website.
“This is the kind of thing I feel like we really need to dig into,” she said.
City Administrator Jestin Johnson told the councilmembers that HR has done a good job of centralizing some of its functions, but the city has some new department directors who may be unfamiliar with how the hiring process works.
“It’s really important for us to have this honest conversation,” Johnson said, adding that HR has done the work necessary to “bear a lot of fruit” in the future.
Ramachandran countered that it’s unfair to blame department heads and suggested miscommunication about the hiring process stems from HR.
This is not the first time Ramachandran has put the city’s hiring division in her crosshairs. In 2023, she helped reveal that the city had failed to take action on hundreds of applications for police communication dispatcher positions between 2022 and 2023, compounding staffing problems for the unit responsible for Oakland’s 911 system.
At-large Councilmember Rowena Brown said she hopes HR will prioritize hiring in its own department to maximize its resources. She also suggested HR consider investing in a social media plan to attract new talent to Oakland.
“I know that the second I posted an open position within my office, I received 54 shares within 30 minutes,” Brown said, adding that the city must consider innovative recruitment strategies to “eliminate this misconception that we aren’t hiring.”
Sorting out hiring is also important because Oakland is also bleeding staff. According to HR’s report, separations continue to outpace hires in Oakland, and the average time that workers stay with the city is decreasing. This trend is especially concerning for Oakland’s public safety departments. In fiscal year 2024-2025, Oakland had 380 separations. Thirty percent of those separations were of police officers. Another 13% of separations were members of the Fire Department.
Seth Olyer, the head of Oakland’s firefighter union, told the councilmembers that scores of vacancies have forced OFD members to forfeit days off, sick time, and vacation to meet mandatory staffing levels. Oakland needs to conduct immediate lateral classes to hire firefighters and paramedics from other jurisdictions, he said.
Firefighters are “going through divorces, they’re contemplating suicide,” Olyer said. “We’re at the breaking point.
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