In the wake of Sheng Thao’s recall, at least seven people are now running to be Oakland’s next mayor. Each promises to turn the city around, but it’s unlikely that the new mayor — whoever it is — will be successful. Why? Because the city’s flawed charter — the core voter-approved document that controls who does what in City Hall — won’t allow it.
San Francisco has a strong-mayor form of government. San Jose has a more traditional council-oversight system that leaves administration to a professional city manager. Oakland has a hybrid structure that leaves no one in charge.
How bad is Oakland’s charter?
Let us count the ways.
• First, the mayor is essentially powerless.
In Oakland, the mayor does not attend City Council meetings (except to break a tie), has no veto power on legislative or budget matters, and does not supervise or set goals for department heads.
That’s right: Oakland’s mayor doesn’t vote on civic policies, control the budget, or oversee the city’s daily operations. Oakland voters, however, think the mayor does all those things and blame her for failing budgets, high crime rates, potholed streets and homeless people in their neighborhoods.
Welcome to Oakland, where the city charter limits the mayor’s executive authority and neuters her policy impact. Absent these powers, the mayor can bluff a bully pulpit but, in reality, serves as a combination of volunteer coordinator, chief fundraiser, public information officer and head cheerleader — important roles, but not the empowered executive that people imagine.
If it seems that, year after year, Oakland mayors are powerless and ineffective, that’s because they are. It’s hard to be effective when you have such little authority. And it’s profoundly frustrating for every person elected to the city’s highest-profile office.
• Second, the city administrator has divided loyalties.
According to the charter, Oakland’s city administrator is hired by the mayor with City Council confirmation but serves at the pleasure of the mayor. So, as a matter of self-preservation, he is inclined to steer the city’s day-to-day operations to support her agenda. But — and this is critical — it is the councilmembers who approve the budget and so, in order to get anything done, the city administrator must also assuage their interests.
Those councilmembers, however, are often politically opposed to the mayor or plan to run against her in the next election and are not necessarily interested in helping her succeed. Indeed, they sometimes pass legislation and budgets that directly contradict the mayor’s priorities (this happened to Libby Schaaf in 2021 when the City Council diverted $18.4 million from her Police Department budget proposal to fund violence prevention and social services), leaving the city administrator torn between delivering his boss’ priorities or the City Council’s.
• Third, the City Council is disconnected and frustrated.
In most California cities, the City Council supervises the city administrator/manager and city attorney. Not in Oakland. While the City Council does approve policy and budgets, Oakland’s councilmembers justifiably complain that the city’s charter gives the council little or no role in selecting, evaluating, directing or terminating the work of any line employees, including the city administrator and city attorney.
As a result, councilmembers are divorced from Oakland’s day-to-day operations but still blamed by voters when things go wrong. Councilmembers spend valuable time discussing programs and making policies, but when their orders are poorly implemented or ignored, there’s little that councilmembers can do about it. The result: councilmember frustration and reduced staff accountability.
• Fourth, the city attorney is conflicted.
Oakland’s charter orders that the city attorney be independently elected by voters, not appointed by the City Council or mayor. The job is to advise and defend the municipal corporation, but the city attorney also has an obvious self-interest in keeping voters satisfied enough to get reelected. This dual incentive creates the potential for profound conflicts, particularly when the city attorney considers cases that pit resident interests (say, in having safe streets) against the municipal corporation (which can’t afford to fix all the failed streets). This is a common occurrence.
Furthermore, because the city attorney is independently elected and not supervised by the City Council, she is free to select what her office will work on regardless of what the mayor, council or professional staff want or need. Few California cities operate this way (for good reason), and a disconnected system like this would be unheard of in any private corporation.
No one in charge
The bottom line is that, in Oakland, regardless of whom voters elect in the upcoming special election, the mayor will be weak, the councilmembers frustrated, the city administrator torn, and the city attorney conflicted. This inherent and inevitable dysfunction is baked into the system via the charter document, and it keeps Oakland from approaching its full potential.
It wasn’t always this bad.
For more than 65 years (1931 to 1998), Oakland had a council-manager form of government, where the City Council served as the municipal board of directors, with the mayor acting as chair and spokesperson. The council met a few times monthly to make policy decisions but otherwise hired a professionally trained chief executive to manage the city’s day-to-day operations.
If the potholes weren’t filled or the traffic signals weren’t working, the City Council could fire its city manager with a simple majority vote. The Council also hired a city attorney who viewed the City Council and city manager as their client and focused only on the municipal corporation’s interests. Under the council-manager system, the lines of authority and accountability were clear and the remedy for poor performance was obvious.
Gramps was right when he said that, back in the day, the city used to work better.
But Oakland’s mayors didn’t like it. After being blamed for every municipal malfunction, frustrated by their lack of authority, and jealous of their powerful and unelected city manager, a string of Oakland mayors asked voters to change the charter and institute a strong-mayor government that mimicked big-city peers like San Francisco. These attempts failed in 1984 and 1996, but finally gained approval in 1998 when Jerry Brown used his unique star power and gravitas to pass Measure X.
But Measure X didn’t go all the way.
Instead of creating a true strong-mayor plan, it delivered an unorthodox hybrid of the strong-mayor and council-manager systems — but with the strength of neither. Crafted, perhaps, as a reaction to the city’s checkered history with political power, Jerry Brown’s Measure X charter prevents any single person from wielding too much power. The result? A city where nobody is in charge and no one is thus accountable. All Oaklanders are worse off as a result.
Necessary change
This isn’t a new insight. In 2021, SPUR — the nonprofit San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association — called out these issues in a thorough but overlooked study. The SPUR report states, bluntly, that “under Oakland’s current hybrid governance system, it is challenging for the mayor to deliver any agenda,” and that Oakland’s “government (has) failed to meet the needs of Oaklanders.”
The city’s looming bankruptcy threat and Thao’s recall only serve to confirm SPUR’s conclusions. Looking forward, the SPUR report recommends that Oakland voters once again change the charter, but this time with an amendment that abandons the city’s ineffective hybrid system in favor of a true strong-mayor plan.
I disagree.
Rather than ceding more power to an elected mayor who may or may not be sufficiently competent to manage Oakland’s complex $2 billion annual operation, the city would be better off by reverting to the professional city manager form of government that served it well for nearly seven decades.
This wouldn’t be unusual or unprecedented. Many of America’s highest-performing big cities, including Phoenix, San Antonio, Charlotte, Austin, Boulder and Dallas employ the council-manager system. Likewise, 97% of California’s cities — including San Jose and Long Beach — have a council-manager government.
Why? Because their residents appreciate its efficient corporate-style structure, aligned incentives, and professional and experienced chief executive. They also see that council-manager governments are more effective, efficient, responsive and ethical than strong-mayor systems. They understand that accountability and performance flourish in a streamlined council-manager system where everyone knows who’s responsible for what.
Oakland sits at the center of every Bay Area map. Oakland is the only Bay Area city with BART stations, an Amtrak station, an international port and an airport. Oakland’s got the perfect climate, livable neighborhoods, a beautiful and vibrant and historic downtown, redwood groves and a saltwater lake. Oakland is the city of diversity and dance and music and art and business and culture. Oakland is home of the Black Panthers; the Paramount Theater, the Fox Theater and Yoshi’s; and of Kaiser Permanente and Clorox. With all these advantages, Oakland should be the undisputed jewel of the Bay Area.
But it is not.
Instead, Oakland is handcuffed by its flawed charter. Charter reform, admittedly, isn’t the sexiest of issues. It doesn’t grab your eyeballs or raise your hackles. And, to be sure, a new charter alone won’t be sufficient to ameliorate Oakland’s many challenges: homelessness, policing, dumping, a high employee cost structure, potholes and a budget crisis — to name just a few.
But it is necessary. Absolutely necessary.
Unless and until voters amend Oakland’s messed-up charter and restore a transparent, responsive, efficient, effective and ethical operation to City Hall, The Town won’t reach its potential and rightful place as the gleaming, talented, brilliant, multicultural center of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Steven Falk is an Oakland resident and longtime city manager. He has twice served as Oakland’s interim city administrator and lectures on city management and public finance at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.