An intra-Oakland legal battle is playing out in Alameda County Superior Court over election costs.
The city of Oakland filed a lawsuit on Friday accusing the Oakland Unified School District, or OUSD, of not paying a share of election costs for recent school board elections. The complaint names the district and 10 unnamed individuals as defendants.
The school district hasn’t paid any costs for elections since the 2008 general election because of an oversight by the city that wasn’t noticed until October 2023. The city then sought reimbursement for the last few elections dating back to 2020.
The school district has outstanding invoices from the city of about $1.5 million, according to the civil complaint filed by Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker.
The city is seeking reimbursement for some of the cost of general elections in 2020 and 2022, as well as a special election in 2023 to fill a vacancy in the school board’s District 5 seat.
“This special election, which came at a cost of nearly $600,000, was required only because the OUSD Board of Education declined to appoint a provisional board member and instead chose to proceed by special election,” the complaint said.
Election costs are not mentioned in the Oakland City Charter, but the Charter’s section 404 refers to the California Education Code section 5227, which says that school districts must pay a proportionate cost of elections in which the district’s board of education participates. The proportion is based on how many seats and propositions are otherwise on the ballot.
The city is seeking a court order to force the district to pay the outstanding amount, make a clear legal finding that it is the district’s responsibility to pay for a share of the cost when its school board directors are up for election, and then an injunction forcing it to do so going forward. It also seeks repayment of attorney’s fees and any other relief the court commands.
In seeking relief through the courts, the City Attorney Parker said in the complaint that negotiations between the two parties had failed.
“Despite the City’s good faith efforts to resolve this matter informally and although OUSD initially appeared to be amenable to properly consider their legal obligations and responsibility to pay their fair share of election costs, those settlement negotiations did not resolve the underlying disputes and the City formally terminated negotiations on September 10, 2024,” the complaint reads.