The City Council got its first chance on Thursday to review a plan that would bring about sweeping changes to Oakland government, primarily by strengthening the mayor’s power. The initial reception suggests the plan will not sail smoothly through the council and onto voters’ ballots.
Mayor Barbara Lee’s working group, established last summer, has proposed turning Oakland into a more traditional “strong mayor” city, like San Francisco. The mayor would gain the power to veto City Council votes, including the budget, and would oversee the city administration more directly.
The working group’s proposal would also strengthen the City Council, creating a new legislative analysis office. This office would help councilmembers research and propose policies without relying on work done by the city administration and mayor, who could be in conflict. The measure would also create a mechanism to review and increase officials’ salaries, and give the council the ability to override the mayor’s veto.
The at-large seat on the City Council would also be eliminated to make the mayor the sole citywide leader and to return the council to an odd-numbered body to avoid tie votes.
“We need someone to lead decisively; that is what people were telling us over and over again,” said League of Women Voters of Oakland board member Gail Wallace, one of the facilitators of Lee’s task force, at a city meeting Thursday. She said the proposal would create “a balance of an executive and legislative branch within the government.”
If not the strong mayor model, the mayor’s working group offered a runner-up idea: a true “council-manager” system, where the mayor would become a regular voting member of the City Council. The council would then hire a city manager to oversee daily operations.
The group’s overall point: pick one system or another, and get rid of the in-between.
Many people in Oakland think the city’s current structure of government, where neither the mayor nor the City Council has ultimate authority, creates confusion, inefficiencies, and a lack of accountability.
Some councilmembers raise concerns about the ‘strong mayor’ model
The proposal would eliminate the at-large seat on City Council. The current occupant, Rowena Brown, is not in favor. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for The Oaklandside
Councilmembers Kevin Jenkins and Janani Ramachandran set aside time at Thursday’s meeting of the council’s Rules and Legislation Committee to discuss the working group’s plan. No vote was held, and not all councilmembers were present.
Because it would change Oakland’s city charter, voters would have the final say on the “strong mayor” proposal. But first, the City Council has to vote to put it — or a different measure of their choosing — on the November ballot. Alternatively, a group of citizens could launch an initiative to place it there, but that’s a costly and challenging process.
At-large Councilmember Rowena Brown would be most affected by the proposal, which suggests eliminating her job entirely, not in the middle of her term.
“I don’t think that in our day and age, in this moment, we should be at all reducing overall representation,” Brown said. “It is the whole reason why I ran for the at-large seat. It had to do with the glaring observation of how communities, both in East and West Oakland, have been underrepresented for decades.”
She challenged the working group’s “talking points,” saying she’d never encountered any confusion between her role and the mayor’s. Instead of eliminating a seat to get an odd number of representatives, she suggested, items with tie votes could simply fail.
Councilmember Ken Houston said he will ultimately defer to his constituents, but he personally doesn’t like the strong mayor model.
Under the current structure, councilmembers can’t direct city staff to do things, and the proposed reform would reinforce this prohibition. Houston said this has frustrated him.
“I’m tired of going outside of my scope, of doing things I should be doing because we’re not able to do it because I’m a councilmember,” Houston said Thursday. “I’m tired of going to remove a car myself. I’m tired of relocating an encampment myself, and that the city administrator reports to the mayor but doesn’t report to us a council.”
Jenkins and Ramachandran, the other officials present at Thursday’s meeting, did not indicate where they stand.
In his district newsletter in February, Councilmember Zac Unger wrote there’s “real merit” in switching to a system that either strengthens the mayor’s power or the council’s power, rather than sticking with a messy hybrid model.
“I lean towards a stronger city council,” he wrote. “Shocking, huh? I’m being a little glib, but it’s hard not to think of the old maxim that ‘where you stand depends on where you sit.’”
If the city goes in the strong mayor direction, Unger said, there would need to be clearer checks on the mayor’s power, like giving the council an independent legislative analysis staff and retaining an elected city attorney, rather than a lawyer hired by the mayor.
Another group is pushing a ‘third option’
Independent of Lee’s task force, a group led by former City Administrator Steve Falk has also been exploring charter reform and came to entirely different conclusions.
They’ve proposed a “third option,” where the mayor would serve as the chair of the City Council but hold veto power. The council would hire a city manager, who’d lead the administration.
Speaking to the committee on Thursday, Falk noted that the vast majority of California cities have council-manager structures and that it’s not in vogue to vest more power with the mayor these days.
“Study after study after study has proven that professionally managed cities with a powerful city council are more transparent, more responsive, more effective and more efficient, and far less corrupt,” Falk said.
Around 20 public speakers told the committee they oppose a strong mayor system, with a number promoting the hybrid third option.
Brown and Houston expressed interest in the third option, too.
Former Mayor Libby Schaaf came to support the working group’s strong mayor proposal. The envisioned system is similar to what existed briefly under Mayor Jerry Brown, she noted.
“You might not remember Jerry Brown had veto power because he hardly ever used it,” Schaaf said. “The council had a lot of power. In my experience, it is actually when the council and the mayor had the best collaboration, and the council office’s constituent work, which was my passion when I worked in the council offices, actually got done. There was more responsiveness from the administration.”
The “option three” presented by Falk’s group is just another “fuzzy” hybrid system, she said.
A poll commissioned by Lee’s working group found broad support for its strong mayor proposal. The March poll of 600 likely voters, conducted by David Binder Research, found that 58% to 63% of respondents supported the proposal, depending on what information they received about it.
“These numbers send a clear message: Oaklanders want accountability, and they want a city government that can actually get things done,” said Lee in a press release about the findings.
Other recent surveys have found similar support. A new group called the East Bay Polling Institute found that 64% of respondents supported a strong mayor system. Another poll by Oakland’s Chamber of Commerce found 61% in support of a strong mayor system.
However, there are discrepancies among these polls on other topics. For example, the new poll commissioned by the working group found that 62% of likely voters ranked Lee’s job performance high, whereas the East Bay Polling Institute found that 37% of voters rated her job performance positively.
Ramachandran said the full City Council will soon get a chance to hear the working group’s proposal and weigh in, along with more members of the public, but no date has been selected yet.
Meanwhile, Falk said in a newsletter that his group is now working to find a councilmember to pitch the “third option” to their colleagues.
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