In an effort to blunt the very strong support the Oakland Police Officers Association is giving my campaign for City Attorney, Barbara Parker has gotten another surrogate, former Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker, to sign another attack email.

Tucker’s email questions my leadership on public safety in Oakland. I certainly understand why Wayne Tucker would sign something like that. One of the many ways I’ve provided leadership on public safety in Oakland was to challenge him when he was Police Chief because he failed to produce a Crime Reduction Strategy and he failed to reduce crime.

I had to do my own national public safety best practices study and I was the first one to recommend Oakland adopt CompStat and CeaseFire.

Wayne Tucker’s response to my criticisms was to resign.

I’ll challenge any City leader who is doing a bad job in Oakland. That’s why I’m running for City Attorney. It’s because current appointed City Attorney Barbara Parker is doing such a bad job.

• In violation of the City Charter she hires outside law firms, on her say so alone, to do her work and attorneys from those firms fund her campaign.
• Her office either lost or hid a report that was a key piece of evidence in one police officer’s case.
• The Federal Judge appointed to review the Oakland Police Department has criticized the poor quality of her Office’s legal work and filings.
• Her office operates inefficiently and bureaucratically, taking way too long to complete needed legal work.

The list goes on and on.

So, if you want the real story on who takes action to improve public safety in Oakland and who will provide real professional leadership in the City Attorney’s Office, ask the cops on the street. Ask the Oakland Police Officers Association. Don’t ask a failed former Police Chief who had to resign in disgrace because he couldn’t get the job done.

Jane

Full Report (pdf)

Unlike every other Department in Oakland City Government, the appointed City Attorney allocates the millions of dollars (over $6 million last year and close to $4 million this year) in outside contracts to law firms with no transparency, no review, and no oversight. In addition the City Attorney recommends lucrative settlements with law firms who are suing the city. To accept money from these sources is, in fact, the essence of “pay to play.

Every other significant City contract goes through a public review process and comes to the City Council for approval. The City Attorney’s Office refuses to do this. Oakland City Councilmember Desley Brooks has questioned this practice for more than a year and has demanded that the appointed City Attorney explain her procedure for contracting out. The appointed City Attorney has refused to respond to this request.

So we are left with a situation in which there is no transparency in the awarding of contracts to outside law firms. The appointed City Attorney makes the decision with no public review, no City Council involvement, and no oversight. That’s why she is open to the charge of Pay to Play when her campaign receives $35,000 in campaign contributions from the attorneys in law firms that have received millions of dollars of contracts on her say so alone.

You may have seen the Matier and Ross Column in the Chronicle yesterday discussing the appointed City Attorney’s conflict of interest in soliciting and taking the maximum in campaign contributions from attorney John Burris and his family.  John Burris is suing and threatening to sue Oakland in a variety of cases right now, including seeking to get a federal judge to take over the Oakland Police Force in relation to the Negotiated Settlement Agreement arising from the Rider’s case.

If the appointed City Attorney really wanted to address this serious problem, she would bring forward a policy proposal to:

• Establish a transparent public process for awarding contracts to outside law firms.
• Prohibit accepting campaign contributions from the attorneys at outside law firms that receive contracts from the City Attorney’s Office or that are suing the City of Oakland.

It’s time to end Pay to Play in the City Attorney’s Office.

Thank you for your support,

Jane Brunner

That’s ‘Pay to Play’ and it’s wrong!

Outside attorneys who receive contracts from the City Attorney’s office are the key financial contributors to my opponent’s campaign. In campaign filings, the Appointed City Attorney has disclosed that she received a total of over $34,000 from attorneys at law firms who received more than $8.7 million in outside contracts from the City Attorney’s Office in the past three years.  That is over 28% of her total campaign contributions, and that doesn’t include the campaign contributions that she has received from law firms that she has settled with.

While Oakland faces severe budget shortages, the City Attorney’s Office spends over $32 million in taxpayer money.  They have 70 employees and 35 attorneys, yet they spent over $6 million last year to contract out their legal work to outside attorneys. And still, they settle cases that should be fought and lose cases that should be won.

Now we see the very attorneys who benefited greatly from these contracts and these settlements contributing to the election campaign of the Appointed City Attorney. For too long attorneys and outside law firms have looked to Oakland as a cash cow – an easy mark for contracts and settlements.  As City Attorney, I will dramatically reduce the use of outside law firms. The savings can go to add more police, fix pot holes, or expand after-school programs.

It’s time to end ‘Pay to Play’ in the City Attorney’s Office. As City Attorney, I will do just that.

Thank you for your support,

Jane Brunner

In their announcement, Barry Donelan, President of OPOA, stated that “Jane Brunner is Oakland Police Officers’ choice for City attorney.  She is experienced at analyzing complex issues and cutting through bureaucracy to get things done.  In America’s 4th most dangerous city, our police and our citizens need leaders like Jane Brunner who are experienced problem solvers.”

I look forward to working with the police union and community activists to make sure our City is safe.  I am honored to have the OPOA’s endorsement.

Oakland Action:  On July 3, 2012, the Oakland City Council unanimously passed my motion to instruct the Oakland City Administrator to terminate a toxic financial derivative called an “interest rate swap” between Oakland and Goldman Sachs within 60 days and without termination fees or penalties.  If Goldman Sachs refuses, then Oakland will stop doing business with Goldman Sachs for future transactions.

The San Francisco Chronicle published an Opinion Editorial that I wrote on July 17^th describing Oakland’s action.

High Stakes: This is the first time any city or other public agency has taken this kind of action and the stakes are very high.  When the Oakland Coalition to Stop Goldman Sachs asked me to introduce this legislation, I was delighted to do it.  One of the reasons I’m running for City Attorney is to be able to implement exactly this type of action.   Without it, Oakland will be paying $4 million a year up to a total of $15.57 million to Goldman Sachs with no corresponding benefit.  These funds could be used for additional police, city services, or after school programs.

Multiply that by the thousands of cities and other public agencies involved in this type of transaction and it’s enough money to make it worthwhile for us all to learn how an interest rate swap works.

Interest Rate Swaps:  Here’s how.  Government agencies fund major projects by issuing bonds with either fixed or variable interest rates.  Variable interest rate bonds (like a variable interest rate home mortgage) have lower interest rates initially, but they carry the risk of much higher rates later on.  Banks invented the interest rate swap to limit the risk of soaring interest rates. Government agencies pay a fixed rate to the banks and the banks pay the variable rate back to the agencies.  When the variable rate is above the fixed rate, then the agency benefits.  When the fixed rate is higher, then the bank benefits.

That would all be fine, except that, as part of the banking industry bailout, the federal government has aggressively driven interest rates down to near zero, and they are expected to stay near zero.  To make matters worse, a dozen banks are under investigation for artificially lowering the LIBOR rate that determines the variable interest rate on many of these deals, including Oakland’s.  This means that Goldman Sachs is making little or no payment back to Oakland and Oakland has to pay Goldman Sachs 5.6775% a year on over $100 million in bonds through to 2021.

Huge Market:  According to Dollars and Sense, U.S. banks have an outstanding $202 trillion in interest rate derivative contracts and five banks dominate this market:  JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC. “Together they control $150 trillion of the $154 trillion of interest rate swaps sold by U.S. banks. A large chunk of this business is made up of ‘over the counter’ swap contracts with local governments.”

Justice for Cities:  The banks sold these interest rate swaps to cities as a way to save money in the market conditions that had prevailed for decades.  That all changed with the recent recession.  The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and other federal actions pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the banks to, among other things, help them off load troubled assets.

In addition, the federal government slashed interest rates to help bail out the banks, so that banks would make lower cost loans. However, instead of passing these savings on, Goldman Sachs and the other banks are profiting from continuing to charge artificially high interest payments on these interest rates swaps.  The result is that billions of dollars are being illegitimately taken from cash starved cities to inflate bank profits and bankers’ bonuses.

The federal bailout should have incorporated mechanisms to make sure the banks passed on the assistance they received.  Instead, the banks got bailed out, but the cities were left holding the bag.  It is past time to correct this injustice.  Main Street deserves the same kind of assistance that the Wall Street received.  It’s time for cities to take their own action to make sure they get what they deserve.

Oakland has taken a first step.  We hope this will become a national movement.

$1 Billion Dollar Development:

4,800 Jobs: The Oakland Army Base development is expected to produce over 2,800 construction jobs in the near term and 2,000 permanent jobs.  Over the long-term, the development is projected to generate $80 million annually in revenues to the City in the form of business taxes and lease payments. The development will also benefit the environment.  Now goods will be offloaded from ships directly to Oakland’s logistics facilities. Previously the goods would have been transported by truck to logistics centers in the central valley.

Eighteen months ago, I was asked to chair the Army Base Community Benefits Task Force, which included East and West Oakland community members, community-based organizations, unions, and contractors.  After a long and occasionally difficult process, this Task Force unanimously adopted a Framework for Community Benefits to ensure that good jobs will go to Oakland residents. The City Council subsequently adopted this Framework unanimously and the City used the framework as guidance for negotiations with the developers.

I strongly advocate using Oakland’s newfound budget flexibility to rebuild the City’s police force. The Mayor’s Office has recommended that the budget include one police academy in addition to the one already scheduled for this summer.  I am proposing that the City budget for two additional police academies for a total of three over the next twelve months.

The reason I am advocating for three police academies is that Oakland currently loses about 4 police officers each month due to attrition (retirement or moving to another police force).  In order to push police numbers above the current level, the City needs to bring in new police officers aggressively to stay ahead of the attrition rate.  Each academy produces approximately 40 new police officers on the streets.  With the rate that officers are leaving the force, two academies will only put the City ahead by 15 officers from where we are now.  My proposal to add a third academy during the next twelve months will boost the police force by approximately 40 officers.

I also suggest that the City give something back to civilian City employees who sacrificed 10% of their salaries to bridge a $58 million shortfall in the 2011/2012 budget.  Civilian employees currently have 20 days of mandatory furlough imposed on them for the coming fiscal year as a cost-saving measure (each furlough day saves the City approximately $300,000).  I think that the City can afford to eliminate 2 of those furlough days and put City workers back to work on behalf of Oakland’s residents and businesses.

Please let me know your budget priorities and what you suggest that the City Council should fund.  If you want to participate in the budget adoption process, please come to the public hearing on Monday, June 18^th at 6:00 p.m., with a final vote on Thursday, June 28^th starting at 5:00 p.m.

North Oakland Summer Picnic

Save the Date, Sunday, July 15th

Save the Date, Sunday, July 15^th, for the North Oakland Summer Picnic.  This will be the last picnic sponsored by our City Council office.  As usual, the firefighters will be grilling up a storm at Lake Temescal.   It’s a great place to enjoy the company of your North Oakland neighbors.  See you there!