Organizers of an effort to remove Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao from office say they have turned in a petition with more than 40,000 signatures to get a recall placed on a ballot.
Oakland United to Recall Sheng Thao (OUST) said they only need 24,644 valid signatures to qualify for an election and that they turned in the petition Wednesday, well before the July 22 deadline.
“What we learned from gathering these signatures so quickly in all of Oakland’s communities is that Thao is nearly universally unpopular,” recall leader Brenda Harbin-Forte said in a news release.
Harbin-Forte is a retired Alameda County Superior Court judge and former member of the Oakland Police Commission who Thao removed from the commission last year.
Supporters say the recall is justified for several reasons, including the city’s financial struggles, the way Thao fired former police chief LeRonne Armstrong and her administration’s mishandling of a state crime grant application that cost the city $15 million in lost funding.
OUST leaders also cite crime as a motivation for removing Thao, although Oakland Police Department year-to-date data shows crime is down 33 percent compared to last year, with most categories showing double-digit declines, including homicide, residential and commercial burglary and carjacking.
Still, OUST has disputed the accuracy of those statistics, saying they are incomplete in part due to people’s reluctance to report crime.
Thao said she won’t be distracted by the recall or “by the politics of out-of-town billionaires or special interests.”
“Whether it’s rebuilding Raimondi Park in West Oakland, making it possible for the Ballers to play (Tuesday) night’s home opener before a sellout crowd, or working with homegrown Oaklanders to make the most meaningful investments in East Oakland and the Coliseum area in generations; whether it’s the work we’ve done to reduce crime by 33 percent or balancing our city’s budget without layoffs or service cuts, we know that Oakland works best when we work together,” Thao said in an emailed statement.