Government
Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee announced Friday that the city would deploy crews to clean up illegal dumping sites during weekends. The weekend crews will respond quicker to residents’ trash complaints, Lee said. Her announcement comes amid increased pressure from advocacy groups and residents who say officials need to do more to clean up the trash littering the city. “As Mayor, I want all of us to build an Oakland where our streets reflect the dignity, pride, and resilience of this…
Hundreds of people — from toddlers to teenagers to seniors and everyone in between — spilled into Oakland Technical High School’s auditorium Sunday to learn how to resist the rise of authoritarianism under President Donald Trump. Nearly 1,000 people attended Get Ready: Noncooperation Training by Bay Resistance, a group advocating for racial, economic, climate and gender justice. Some participants sat on the floor or filed into overflow rooms. The session was meant to energize and inspire people as well as…
Oakland City Council’s Finance Committee on Tuesday discussed how to structure a proposed property tax increase that would help balance out a $265 million shortfall projected by the end of the fiscal year in June. The discussion comes three months after the City Council passed a $4.36 billion two-year budget that cut vacant positions and tightened spending to address the deficit. With voter trust on the line and services at risk, the city faces a high-stakes balancing act: raise new…
Oakland leaders closed a $265 million city budget deficit by cutting spending across many departments and programs earlier this month in what Councilmember Zac Unger called a “nobody’s happy budget.” But one controversial area of spending is seeing a substantial increase in the new budget: police overtime. Over the last decade, the Oakland Police Department has consistently overspent its overtime budget by tens of millions of dollars each year. Last year, as the city’s fiscal crisis deepened, the police department overspent…
“The Stakes” is a UC Berkeley Journalism project on executive orders and actions affecting Californians and their communities. After turning 66 in January, Oakland preschool teacher Rosa Carranza applied for Social Security benefits, receiving $1,126 a month in February and March. But in April, an alarming letter arrived in the mail from the Social Security Administration. “Based on the information we have, we cannot pay benefits beginning March 2025,” the letter said. “We cannot pay you benefits because you are…
“The Stakes” is a UC Berkeley Journalism project on executive orders and actions affecting Californians and their communities. Since President Donald Trump took office in January, Jessie Papalia has felt the panic and confusion among her students and their families at Bridges Academy Elementary in Oakland, a dual-language school with many students who have recently arrived in the United States. “The first week was rough. I had kids asking me if they could sleep at school because they were too…
Former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao has been charged by the federal government of using her office to enrich herself, her boyfriend and Oakland contractors David and Andy Duong. The eight-count indictment, which was handed down by an Oakland grand jury on Jan. 9 and unsealed Friday, contends that a few weeks before she was elected mayor in 2022, Thao committed to helping David and Andy Duong extend the recycling contract their company, California Waste Solutions, had with the city, and worked…
Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s tenure officially ended Tuesday, when Oakland City Council certified the November election results that included the vote to recall her. The local elections were complicated this year by two successful recalls, the second involving Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price; the inclusion of 16- and 17-year-olds in voting for Oakland Unified School Board candidates; and lingering questions about ranked-choice voting after errors in the 2022 election tally prompted a lawsuit and a change after the vote…
When Cherry Chan moved back to Oakland last year after living in Hawaii, she found a city that was struggling with a host of social issues, among them, brazen property crime. Chan works at a shoe shop in Oakland’s Montclair neighborhood, where she says she often sees car break-ins. “It’s become like the wild west,” she said. Early this year, In-N-Out Burger closed its location near Oakland International Airport “due to ongoing issues with crime.” Then Denny’s Restaurant followed suit. Shop owners…