There is a renewed focus on the Oakland budget after last week’s fireand commentary from the city’s fire chief. And that also means some uncertainty about exactly what cuts will be made as the city transitions to its emergency budget.
“If you take away five engines and the three engines that we normally don’t have, that’s eight engines that would have come first because of that fire,” Chief Damon Covington told a budget committee Tuesday. “Very little math will tell you that those homes on Campus Drive probably would have been lost, at the very least.”
It was a striking warning from Covington, telling members of the Oakland City Council that last week’s response to the Keller fire in the Oakland Hills is something that could suffer from the city’s emergency budget.
The council approved a budget in July built largely around the sale of the Oakland Coliseumwhere certain payments are expected within a certain period.
Since then the appointment has changed. The city will get more for the sale of the property, but the timeline doesn’t match what the budget originally requested, prompting the emergency budget, which does freeze five fire companies for nine months.
“So I did not vote for the budget and for this decision because I was exactly afraid of what is happening today,” said councilor Janani Ramachandran. “We have not received certain payments on time and now we will have to make cuts.”
Ramachandran said she would like to know which of these cuts are happening and when. Something she believes the city manager has been unclear about.
“What’s going to be implemented first? So in my perspective, this is an extremely reasonable question,” she said. “It’s not just me asking, it’s the people of Oakland asking.”
“So we are in very difficult times right now, but I refuse to actually take away resources from our public safety departments, like police and fire departments,” Mayor Sheng Thao said in an interview with CBS News Bay Area.
Thao said she hoped there would be no cuts to public safety and pushed back on the council.
“It’s in the contingency plan,” Thao said of the cuts. ‘And those decisions are made by the municipal council. The emergency plan was voted on by the city council. We all know that it is the city council that approves a budget. So for Councilman Ramachandran, and Councilman Reid, and Councilman Gallo to pretend like they don’t understand, it’s just playing politics. And I’m not willing to play those games and take resources away from police officers and firefighters.”
“It’s a very tough note when you have to cut a lot of money,” former Oakland City Manager Dan Lindheim told CBS News Bay Area.
Lindheim said the uncertainty surrounding the Coliseum sale doesn’t even touch on the city’s larger structural budget problems. But if significant cuts are required, retaining police and fire departments will become difficult.
“And since two-thirds of the general fund is police and fire, it’s going to be very difficult to deal with cuts that will be meaningful in restructuring their spending if they don’t touch public safety,” he said.
The mayor’s office said a quarterly budget report and next steps in the Coliseum deal will both provide more clarity on the cuts that need to be made, but these two developments come in November, meaning uncertainty about Oakland’s finances will linger in the coming elections.
Wilson Walker
