I do not think there has ever been a more cynical document produced by any Oakland government than the official Agenda for last Friday’s City Council meeting. It was written by the city’s Director of Finance, Bradley Johnson, to Elizabeth Lake, Acting City Administrator (after the permanent City Administrator, Jestin Johnson, stepped down in scandal). But this is not any ordinary intra-office memo. No, it was a carefully-choreographed pas de deux designed to give the City Council political cover for what they did on Friday: which was to cancel the results of an election, in order to get their hands on a slush fund to hand out to their union backers.
Specifically, they decided not to abide by the results of elections for Oakland Measures NN (2024), W (2022), Q (2020) and HH (2016). All four of those parcel taxes were passed by the voters; all four were quite specific in what they promised to do with the money raised. Instead, the City Council voted to nullify the results of the four elections, in a move that is unprecedented in my experience and shocking in its brazenness. The Council declared a State of Extreme Fiscal Necessity and The Existence Of A Severe And Unanticipated Financial Event (for the fourth time), in “Authorizing the use of one-time revenues to balance the Fiscal Year 2026-27 Midcycle Budget.”
What this means is that $33 million will not be made available for the purposes those Measures claimed it would be for, including police staffing and parks maintenance. Instead, the money will flow into Oakland’s vast, underground “general fund,” where Council members can disperse it to whomever they please—including their union funders.
“Nullification” has traditionally meant when individual States turn aside federal laws they don’t like. This inflamed the Civil Rights Movement, for instance, when George Wallace, the infamously segregationist Governor of Alabama, blocked the schoolhouse doors to prevent two Black students from entering, as had been ordered by President Kennedy. Dr. King was outraged by this act of nullification, and referred to it in his I Have a Dream speech.
Now, the Oakland City Council has lowered the bar for nullification, turning aside city laws they don’t like. This is an unprecedented assault on democracy. It means that citizens can no longer assume that things they vote for in elections will faithfully carried out. There will now be a huge, unanswered question hovering over every election with future ballot measures that call for additional taxes. How will we know the city will spend the money on what we, the voters, thought we were voting for?
Leftists talk a lot about Trump’s authoritarian impulses, and that is indeed a serious matter. But the Left itself is capable of anti-democratic (with a small “d”) dictatorship, and this nullifying the results of four elections about parcel taxes should shock us all. I’ve spoken to one City Council member and he/she explained their vote by arguing that, had the Council not so voted, things would be even worse. Their main argument was that the money that should have gone (through Measure NN) to hiring more cops will now instead go for police overtime. That seems fatuous to me. We’d need no overtime if OPD was properly staffed in the first place. The Council member said that money for additional cops is not a problem. “If 100 qualified police officers showed up today, we would have the money to hire them tomorrow.” That’s a pretty remarkable statement, one I’ve never heard a sitting City Council member make before. If the money really is there for more cops, then why does the anti-cop brigade—from B. Lee on down—insist that the reason Oakland doesn’t have a fully-staffed police department is because we’re broke?
Look, we now know that allegation is false. We don’t have a fully-staffed OPD because there are still enough City Council members who don’t want a fully-staffed OPD. Why? Ask Ms. Fife. Because SEIU has instructed them to never, ever support increasing the OPD budget. And like the good slaves they are, these City Council members bow and scrape to their union overlords, terrified of upsetting them.
Let’s get real: the entire system of ballot measures is broken. We must halt the corrupt practice of SEIU and other unions conspiring with the City Council to front their schemes and then paying to hire “citizen signature gatherers” and pretending it’s a spontaneous democratic movement of the voters. It’s anything but: it’s union money hiring druggies to pretend to be “concerned citizens.” (Over the weekend, I asked a signature gatherer who was sponsoring the “Raise the Minimum Wage” measure, and she didn’t even know.) We absolutely must crush in its infancy this rape of democracy whereby a City Council and Mayor can mandate the transfer of funds raised by a ballot measure to anything they prefer. We must hold officials, such as Janani Ramachandran who is the driving force behind this nightmare, accountable for their actions. Only when we make life really difficult for these scofflaws might they learn they cannot tinker with the voters with such indifference and expect not to be called out.
Steve Heimoff