Oakland City Council Adopts Balanced Budget Investing in Public Safety and Core Services
Oakland (Special to ZennieReport.com) – The Oakland City Council voted Wednesday, June 11, to adopt a balanced two-year budget for Fiscal Years 2025-2027. The budget will take effect July 1 and funds City services for the next two years.
Mayor Barbara Lee stated:
I worked closely on this budget with City Council President Kevin Jenkins and a unified City leadership to ensure it reflected many of my goals in my 10-point plan for my first 100 days in office – beginning with passing a balanced budget.
It allocates funding for clean streets, reliable fire protection, and decisive blight and illegal-dumping cleanup — echoing point 5 from that plan, which called for strengthened blight crews and aggressive action with the DA’s office.
It also advances our public-safety goals by paving a responsible path to reach 700 sworn officers as voters approved in Measure NN, prioritizing Ceasefire and the Department of Violence Prevention and funds vegetation-management crews in high-fire zones — advancing point 3 on supporting fire services through this budget.
In addition, the budget delivers on good-governance priorities from the plan — empowering charter modernization and contract audits (points 9 and 10) — and provides targeted tax relief and permitting streamlining to help small businesses (point 7). I also want to thank the council for including $3 million in funds for business incentives, another $1 million for economic activation zones, and an additional $1 million for community safety ambassadors in business corridors across the city.
Even with the budget challenges, I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together.
The City Administration wishes to thank the City Council for their incredible dedication, leadership, and partnership through this process. We also thank the thousands of community members who participated in this process. Over the last several months community members have participated in educational workshops, written letters and made phone calls to their representatives, attended Council meetings, and several hundred participated in person at community budget forums held in every Council district. The City also wishes to thank the Budget Advisory Commission, the League of Women Voters, and SPUR, who have been critical community partners supporting the budget process in several key efforts including the budget forums.
The final budget makes amendments to a proposed budget released by the Mayor’s Office on May 5. Highlights of the final adopted budget include:
Public Safety:
- Police and Fire Academies: One sworn fire academy in each fiscal year, and five police academies over the two years of the budget. Council also added funding for OPD outreach to increase academy participation and successful graduation. The police academies are a component of a multi-year strategy to achieve the sworn officer count required under Measure NN.
- Police Staffing: This budget funds a total of 678 sworn police in both fiscal years. This is larger than the average number of officers that the City expects to have working over the course of those two fiscal years. FY 2025-26 is the first year of a multi-year plan to hire and fund the minimum number of officers under Measure NN, which is 700.
- Police Overtime: The budget provides for overtime in the amounts of $33.6 million in year one and $38.2 million in year two. Overtime will be used for backfilling 911 response, investigations of violent crime, special operations such as supporting City fairs and festivals, and responding to sideshows.
- Fire Companies: This budget provides for the operation of all 25 Fire Engine companies throughout the City and all Fire truck companies. One short-term brown out remains anticipated for 90 days during the winter seasons of the budget.
- Violence Prevention: This budget maintains and expands investments in the Department of Violence Prevention with resources from the General Purpose Fund and Measure NN to enhance capacity for dealing with those most likely to commit violent crimes. The budget right sizes DVP contracts and grants within the amounts required under Measure NN and focuses them on the strategies which drive reductions in violence.
- The Council added $1.4M for Citywide sideshow prevention costs and $600,000 for additional removal of abandoned autos.
Illegal Dumping:
- This budget maintains current key investments in illegal dumping crews, encampment clean-up crews, abandoned auto enforcement, and environmental enforcement officers to address the problems of dirty streets and public spaces.
- The Council added $1M in funding for illegal dumping enforcement technology including cameras, drones, and review of footage and data collected.
- The Council added two additional civilian Environmental Enforcement Officers to the team investigating and enforcing against illegal dumping.
Economic Revitalization:
- The Council added $3M for a Business Incentives Program.
- The Council added $1M to create Economic Opportunity Zones.
- The Council added back a special events permits coordinator position.
- The City’s permitting processes work with an IT platform called Accela; Council added $3M to improve those systems. This gives the City the ability to work toward getting all City permits on the same database of record, to assist toward the goals of permit streamlining.
Fiscal Stability:
- The Council allocated $2M in reserves in the case of Sate or Federal grant reductions.
- Roadmap to Fiscal Health: This budget will be accompanied by a medium-term roadmap to fiscal health which will layout the steps needed to stabilize the City finances, obtain reliable service delivery, and secure access to the bond market. This roadmap will include a return to compliance with all adopted ballot measures without waiving maintenance of effort requirements. Work with the City Council on this effort is already underway and the Administration anticipates bringing a report forward in July.
- One-Time Revenues: For the past several years (since FY 2019-20), the City has relied on significant outside one-time revenue to balance the GPF and other Funds. These included both CARES and ARPA funding, GPF Fund Balance, and Projected Land Sales of the Raiders’ Training Facility and Coliseum. This budget breaks from this past practice in that GPF is balanced without use of one-time revenues for ongoing purposes. The budget makes limited use of one-time funds in various restricted funds (consistent with their requirements) but this usage is also greatly reduced in compared to prior budgets.
Staff will now process the Council’s direction and produce a final budget book, which will be published on the City’s website at www.oaklandca.gov/budget later in June.