OAKLAND — Labor unions are spending vast sums of money to support the campaigns of Brenda Harbin-Forte and Ryan Richardson, the two candidates vying to be Oakland’s next city attorney in a blockbuster Nov. 5 showdown.
The spending could prove decisive for a race that has become enmeshed in the city’s increasingly toxic politics, despite the city attorney being a non-political office that advises the City Council on potential liabilities.
Until very recently, Harbin-Forte was officially the leader of a campaign to recall Mayor Sheng Thao and remains heavily involved even after stepping down to campaign. Her ascent to the office would be seen as part of a broader shift in Oakland toward more moderate politics.
Labor groups have noticed, with the Oakland police officers’ union — a prominent Thao opponent — giving $50,000 to Harbin-Forte, and the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council contributing another $150,000 into an outside committee created to support her.
The outside committee, Families for a Vibrant Oakland, has raised $427,000 since the start of this month. It is sponsored by a moderate political group, Abundance Network, which was founded by Jesse Pollak, a higher-up at the San Francisco cryptocurrency company Coinbase.
Richardson, meanwhile, is a deputy city attorney who won the endorsement of his boss, Barbara Parker, who has held Oakland’s top legal office since 2011 and is retiring after a long career with the city.
With a campaign focus on public transparency, Richardson has gone to lengths to depict Harbin-Forte as politicized, and a release from his camp described his opponent’s crypto-based financial backing as “dark money.”
“It sure seems like an attempt to buy the office at the last minute,” he said in a statement.
There do not appear to be any independent committees supporting Richardson, but a joint committee involved in his and City Councilmember Carroll Fife’s respective campaigns has received $150,000 from IFPTE Local 21, the major engineers’ union in Oakland.
The amount of outside money being spent for Harbin-Forte is particularly intense for a city attorney’s race. Parker’s re-election campaign in 2020 faced a challenge from a former deputy city attorney, Eli Ferran — a race that saw the two candidates raise lots of cash but no independent expenditures.
Outside spending far outstrips cash expenditures by candidates’ own campaigns and often plays a key role in determining election outcomes.
Harbin-Forte, for her part, doesn’t see a problem with it. She hasn’t been shy of branding herself in opposition to Thao, promising in interviews that residents won’t have to contend with a city run by the mayor under her legal advice because she’s confident voters in November will choose either one or the other.
“It’s not unusual in any political race for some money to be donated to the candidate of choice,” she contended in an interview.
Richardson did not respond to multiple interview requests.
In a lengthy section on his campaign website about public safety, Richardson says he “wholeheartedly agrees with your other city leaders that policing in Oakland must be part of a larger public safety and violence prevention system.”
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The police officers’ union, which has campaigned intensely in support of Thao’s recall, said through spokesperson Sam Singer that it believes Harbin-Forte will usher in an end to two decades of federal oversight of the Oakland Police Department.
“Ryan Richardson has been weak-kneed and not supported the police department,” Singer, a prominent critic of Thao, said in a statement.
Neither the regional carpenters’ union nor IFPTE Local 21 returned interview requests by deadline.
The ethics around accepting direct campaign contributions are also a subject of dispute.
After being questioned about a donation of $600 from an attorney, Jim Chanin, who is party to the ongoing legal settlement that has kept OPD under federal oversight, Richardson told this news organization he would redirect the money to a Common Cause fund.
Chanin defended the donation as important because of Harbin-Forte’s primary role as an Oakland political activist since she retired in 2019 from her job as an Alameda County Superior Court judge.
He also pointed out that his contribution is dwarfed by the spending of the police officers’ union, which is also a party to the longstanding legal settlement.
“Ordinarily I wouldn’t care who was the city attorney,” Chanin said in an interview. “But when I heard it was her, yeah, I gave him money — and I’m glad I did, because he’s a fair person.”
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at shomik@bayareanewsgroup.com.