INTERIM OAKLAND MAYOR KEVIN JENKINS has announced that he will be submitting his budget proposal four days late.
The established deadline for any Oakland mayor to submit a budget is May 1, which gives the City Council two months to make amendments and adjustments, with final approval set for June 30, one day before the start of the new fiscal year.
Wednesday evening, the city issued a statement saying Jenkins will turn in his budget proposal on Monday.
“The city is in a period of transition following the recent election, and the decision to push the release date back by four days is to allow for the briefing and input of incoming elected officials and other key stakeholders,” according to the statement.
This appears to be in reference to Barbara Lee, who won a special mayoral election on April 15, and Charlene Wang, who won the District 2 City Council seat in the same contest.
Lee will replace Jenkins, who is standing in for former mayor Sheng Thao, who was ousted in a November recall election. Wang will replace former councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas, who was elected to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors in November.
Jenkins’ much anticipated two-year, roughly $2.3 billion budget is expected to address the city’s daunting $280 million deficit.
This is on the heels of an earlier budget crisis that forced the council to close a roughly $129 million funding gap using layoffs and service cuts.
It was following that process that the city’s bond rating was reduced by the nation’s leading credit rating agencies, making its ability to borrow money and issue bonds more expensive.
In its February message downgrading Oakland’s rating two notches, from ‘AA+’ to ‘AA-’, S&P said the city’s long-term structural deficits are worrisome.
“The rating reflects our view of Oakland’s significant structural budgetary imbalance for fiscal 2025 largely driven by public safety overspending, the city’s recent deficit in fiscal 2024, and forecast structural imbalance through fiscal 2028,” according to S&P’s statement.
“Although city leadership has taken action to bridge the budget gap in the current year, in our view, the extent of the fiscal impact such actions will have is either uncertain or one-time in nature, particularly given the limited flexibility Oakland has to cut public safety expenditures both for fire and police,” the company said.
Typically, fire and police spending account for up to 65 percent or more of the city’s general fund.
Jenkins’ yet-to-be-released plan to tackle that structural deficit was developed during a particularly chaotic chapter for Oakland’s leadership, starting with the successful recall election that removed Thao from office.
When Thao left in December, Fortunato Bas held the office for a few weeks before taking her seat on the county board.
When Fortunato Bas left, Jenkins, who was then the City Council president, stepped in to replace her until Lee, who won the election to replace Thao, could be sworn in — which is expected sometime in mid-May.
Turmoil in mayor’s office
Jenkins’ budget process might also have been made more difficult after he fired most of the staff working in the mayor’s office in early April, including chief of staff Leigh Hanson.
Hanson and the other staffers were holdovers from Thao’s administration and were helping Jenkins maintain a semblance of administrative stability during the tumultuous transition.
She was fired after the release of documents tied to the federal corruption investigation into Thao, one of which is a handwritten note from Hanson in which she allegedly refers to a campaign strategy using Black people as “tokens” — although she has said it was referring to the opposition’s practice, not Thao’s.
Spokespeople for Jenkins, Lee and City Council president Noel Gallo didn’t immediately return requests for comment.
