The members of the board of Make Oakland Better Now! are disappointed that the Mayor and Administration have decided to lessen the budget deficit by using one-time revenues rather than dealing with the structural deficit that the City has been facing for a long time. However, we are very encouraged by the statements that the City Administrator and many of the City Council Members have made supporting a top-to-bottom analysis of where savings can be made, across departments, by reorganizing the City government to be leaner and more efficient. We support and applaud making Oakland city government leaner and more efficient because that means less paperwork for the citizens, less time wasted by inefficient processes, less pandering to what some think “ought to be done” and more emphasis on must be done. We recommend a Blue Ribbon Commission, made up of Oakland leaders, to look into the structure and work of the City and recommend structural changes. To reemphasize: structural change is not doing things like random hiring freezes. Structural change is making hard decisions: determining which functions can be no longer performed and how to .reduce the direct costs of providing necessary services.
Make Oakland Better Now! also endorses the SPUR recommendation that the Oakland City Council place on the ballot a charter amendment to create the office of the Independent Controller who would be responsible for managing the public’s money. We recognize that this is a longer discussion, but we do believe that if we had an Independent Controller in place this deficit could have been better planned for.
