Election 2010
After cancelling a public speech initially planned for Wednesday, Oakland mayor Ron Dellums presented his final State of the City address as a 68-page written document and a video posted on his official website.
In their first meeting since the November election, Oakland’s school board members reflected somberly on the near-passage of Measure L, the $195 property tax that would have raised $20 million per year for ten years, increasing salaries for school employees.
When Jean Quan chose to run for mayor this fall rather than for reelection to Oakland’s City Council, she left a vacuum in the city’s fourth municipal district, which she has represented on the council since 2003. Seven candidates vied for her seat, more than for any office on an Oaklander’s ballot other than the unprecedented ten-way race for mayor that Quan narrowly won. With Quan moving to City Hall and Libby Schaaf replacing her in January, the face of…
The last state of the city address by outgoing Oakland mayor Ron Dellums, scheduled for this Wednesday, was cancelled on Monday. Instead of a public speech, the mayor will deliver his closing remarks on his four year term in a speech posted online in text and video form.
A wave of applause and a flurry of camera flashes greeted Mayor-elect Jean Quan on Friday night at her celebratory dinner, marking the end of her campaign and the beginning of her transition to becoming Oakland’s first female and Asian American mayor. “Did we make history? We made history,” Quan said proudly to nearly 200 people who attended the dinner at King of King, a Chinese restaurant in East Oakland.
Oakland’s first experiment with ranked-choice voting, the system in which enough second and third-choice votes can propel a trailing candidate to victory, led to Jean Quan’s upset of former state Senator Don Perata. It also led to a robust argument about the system itself.
It was 10 o’ clock in the morning in Beijing when the announcement that Jean Quan had won the Oakland mayoral race came out. About two hours later, readers of sina.com, sohu.com and 163.com—the three largest Chinese portals, where millions of Chinese consume their daily news, could learn about the new mayor of a city 10,000 miles away.
“Miracle: third-generation Chinese American is Oakland’s new mayor” was the headline on the website of Qiaobao, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the U.S. Its front-page op-ed, using language even more emphatic than any from Quan’s campaign, read, “Jean Quan gloriously rewrites the political history of America.”
At a Thursday morning press conference, former state senator Don Perata conceded defeat in the race for Oakland mayor, saying that he was disappointed with the outcome of Oakland’s first ranked-choice election but would not contest the results.
City council member Jean Quan has become Oakland’s newest mayor, according to a provisional announcement made by the Alameda County Registrar of Voters Wednesday evening. After the official count ended, Quan received 50.98 percent of the vote, beating former state senator Don Perata, who garnered only 49.02 percent.