Oakland fire chief, councilmembers sound alarm on potential budget cuts
There is a renewed focus on the Oakland budget after last week's fire, and comments by the city's fire chief. And that includes some uncertainty over what, exactly, might be cut as the city now moves to its contingency budget.
"If you take five engines out of place and those three engines that we don't normally have, that's eight engines that would've been first due to that fire," Chief Damon Covington told a budget committee Tuesday. "Very little math will tell you that would've probably lost those homes on Campus Drive, at a minimum."
It was an attention grabbing warning from Covington, telling members of the Oakland City Council that last week's response to the Keller Fire in the Oakland Hills is the kind of thing that might suffer under the city's contingency budget.
Back in July, the council approved a budget built largely around the sale of the Oakland Coliseum, with certain payments expected in a certain period of time.
Since then, the deal has changed. The city is getting more for the sale of the property, but the timeline isn't what the budget originally called for, thus triggering the back-up, or contingency budget, which does include freezing of five fire companies for nine months.
"So I didn't vote for the budget and for this decision because I feared exactly what is happening today," explained Councilmember Janani Ramachandran. "We didn't get certain payments on time and now we're gonna have to make cuts."
Ramachandran said she would like to know which of these cuts are happening and when. Something she says the City Administrator has been unclear about.
"What's going to be implemented first? So in my perspective, this is an extremely reasonable question," she said. "It's not just me asking, it's Oakland residents asking."
"So we are in very dire times right now, but I refuse to actually take away resources from our public safety departments such as police and fire," Mayor Sheng Thao said in an interview with CBS News Bay Area.
Thao said she hoped to not see any cuts to public safety, and pushed back on the council.
"It's in the contingency plan," Thao said of the budget cuts. "And those decisions are made by the City Council. The contingency plan was voted on by the City Council. We all know that it is the City Council that passes a budget. So for Councilmember Ramachandran, and Councilmember Reid, and Councilmember Gallo to pretend like they don't understand, it's just playing political games. And I'm not willing to play those games and take away resources from police officers and firefighters."
"It's a very tricky nut if you have a large amount of money to cut," former Oakland City Manager Dan Lindheim told CBS News Bay Area.
Lindheim said the uncertainty surrounding the Coliseum sale doesn't even get to the city's larger structural budget issues. But if significant cuts are needed, preserving police and fire will be difficult.
"And since two-thirds of the general fund is police and fire, it's gonna be very hard to deal with cuts that are going to be meaningful for restructuring their spending if they don't touch public safety," he said.
The mayor's office said a quarterly budget report and the next steps in the Coliseum deal will both provide more clarity on what cuts should be made, but those two developments come in November, meaning the uncertainty over Oakland's finances will hang over the upcoming election.