Even when Oakland's future looks so promising these days, beginning with the Swinging A's in 2014, this city continues to stumble badly on big initiatives that fail to materialize. Time and again, our political and civic leaders fail to rally and deliver step-changing tangible results, and the voters are left behind - whether it is a Measure Y to sustain police staffing levels, workable strategies to reduce crime, committing to push through major developments in West Oakland or facing facts about Howard Terminal versus Coliseum City.
Crime and the perception that Oakland can't or won't do anything about it is the thread that connects these four issues. This inability to deliver has sacrificed police manpower, hurt economic development across the city, delayed urban revival schemes in West Oakland, and cast doubt on grand, deep-pocket schemes like Coliseum City. It makes one wonder if our leaders really think Oakland can be great! Watch what they do, not what they say.
Lacking the political will to tackle crime has consequences beyond fear, injury and theft. Oakland has lost millions of dollars of retail spending to places like Emeryville and Walnut Creek because big retailers are reluctant to locate here. This retail leakage, estimated at about $1 billion a year, is what Oakland residents spent by shopping outside Oakland. It translates into more than $80 million in lost sales tax revenues that also go to Emeryville and Walnut Creek. Our tax dollars that could fund higher police staffing levels!
Measure Y was an attempt to provide additional funds to maintain minimum police staffing levels at 802 officers. Passed in 2004, it collected a parcel tax and parking assessments to generate $20 million a year to support police staffing. That stopped in 2010, when 80 police offcers were laid off and Oakland no longer met the minimum staffing requirement to collect the tax. How humiliating for us! Have our elected officials learned anything since then?
Now the city council wants to renew Measure Y, and this time, they hope it will turn out differently. This is a hot political potato, not just for the Council but for mayoral candidates with their different plans for increasing Oakland's police force to 800 or 900 officers or more. Here is where the rubber hits the road. Taxpayers funded Measure Y, violence prevention advocates received the funding they wanted, but police staffing plummeted, crime still dogs Oakland's reputation, and all this makes some big property investors wary of doing business here.
Civic leaders play a role in all of these threads of promise and despair as well. The mayors and city council members have been treading water over the West Oakland Specific Plan, and some 25 plans that preceded it, despite the best efforts of planners and community leaders to ask and answer what kind of housing, transport and new jobs could flourish there after the Cypress Freeway collapsed in the 1989 earthquake.
Just look at Howard Terminal and the close-minded greed of local businessmen who insist on seducing the public with glittering images of a new baseball stadium near Jack London Square, when they know that solution brings more problems and ignores others that will hurt Oakland far more than help it.
It's all very glamorous to see Don Knauss, Gary Rogers and Doug Boxer promote a downtown stadium, but they don't address the prohibitive costs of cleaning up a contaminated harbor site. They ignore the traffic and transit mayhem around a new ballpark that would draw 38,000 fans, cars, pedestrians and shuttle buses to an area without a nearby BART stop. DUH!! These conflicts arise from placing a Major League Baseball stadium inside a working port, but they just point to the pretty pictures and say Oakland can be like the Giants in San Francisco.
They prefer to ignore the fact that Oakland cannot afford infrastructure for two separate sports venues, that the city still carries $120 million bonded indebtedness for the Oracle Arena and Coliseum if Knauss, Rogers and Boxer persuade the A's to come downtown. The 50-acre Howard Terminal site in no way offers the scale of development, housing, jobs, retail and sports possibilities already proposed on the 800-acre site at Coliseum City.
I bring up all of these issues because The Chronicle's Chip Johnson wrote a column this week about Oakland City Council's current debate on extending Measure Y. He says the council wants to address the real issues about Measure Y this time. But he points out that the voters have been left behind before, and they know it. As he concludes, "if there is one thing Oakland residents want more than police on our streets, it's a government based on honesty, not deception, word games and personal political agendas."
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