As Oakland teeters on the edge of insolvency, voters will pick a replacement for recalled Mayor Sheng Thao and select a new councilmember to fill a vacancy in District 2.
Of the 10 mayoral candidates in the April 15 special election, only former Rep. Barbara Lee has the political clout needed to unify the city’s fractured leadership.
In District 2, Charlene Wang stands out among six candidates for her strong community support combined with a realistic approach to the city’s financial challenges and an emphasis on public safety.
It’s time for responsible leaders in City Hall who will address the city’s fiscal crisis and serious shortage of police. Oakland needs leaders willing to make tough decisions rather than dig a deeper financial hole.
The fiscal mess
The financial crisis has been a decade in the making.
Related: Editorial: Oakland’s Measure A would duplicate taxes residents already pay
Under Mayor Libby Schaaf, who took office in 2015, Oakland added more than 500 city employees, a 13% increase it could not afford. When Schaaf left, the city was facing a massive structural budget deficit driven by accelerating wages, public employee retirement costs and tax revenue effects from the COVID pandemic.
Then Thao, starting in 2023, failed to address the problem. Rather than pressing for necessary cuts, she appeased her labor backers by proposing use of one-time revenues from property sales to close what was described as the largest budget deficit in city history.
By fall 2024, with Thao fighting unsuccessfully to keep her job and the one-time revenues never materializing, city officials had to start making cuts, which eventually included laying off 42 city employees and reneging on promises to voters to increase the number of cops on the streets.
But those stopgap measures didn’t address the underlying problem: The city faces a nearly $140 million annual structural deficit starting next fiscal year for the city’s general fund, City Administrator Jestin Johnson and Finance Director Erin Roseman warned in a Feb. 20 memo. That’s an ongoing revenue shortfall of roughly 15% of projected expenditures.
Most candidates in the mayoral and council races talk of closing the gap by stimulating new business revenue. That’s fantasy. Improving Oakland’s business climate will take time and hangs on city leaders’ ability to first address concerns about public safety.
The city’s population-adjusted crime rate far exceeds that of the other two major Bay Area cities, San Francisco and San Jose. And the badly understaffed Oakland Police Department is near the lowest number of sworn officers in a decade, with response times remaining unconscionably long.
It’s little wonder that residents are on edge and business leaders are reluctant to invest. A survey of likely voters last fall found 69% of likely voters wanted more police, and half felt less safe than a year or two earlier.
Mayor: Barbara Lee
Ten candidates are vying to replace Thao, whose recall was backed by 61% of city voters and who was subsequently indicted on federal corruption charges. Only two candidates, Lee and former Councilmember Loren Taylor, are serious contenders.
Lee represented the city in Congress for nearly 27 years before giving up her seat last year to make an unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate. In building her mayoral campaign, she has attracted support from labor leaders who championed Thao’s mayoral tenure and recall backers who drove her from office.
To be successful, Lee will need to similarly bridge divides on the City Council. That’s because the powers of Oakland’s mayor are limited. While the mayor proposes a city budget, it’s the eight members of the council who make the final decision. The mayor only votes in case of a tie.
So the mayor’s ability to right the city’s finances will depend largely on her power of persuasion. And her time frame will be narrow because the fiscal picture is so dire and the mayoral term is so short. The winner of this election will serve only the remainder of Thao’s term, through the end of next year.
Lee says she would be interested in seeking a full four-year term in November 2026. Let’s first see if she can bring financial stability to the city.
Everything must be on the table, Lee says, adding that the city must look at bringing in new revenues and “layoffs would be the last resort.” We hope that’s just political posturing because the city cannot bring in new revenues quickly enough to solve its budget crisis. No meaningful solution can avoid layoffs and/or significant concessions from the city’s labor unions.
Taylor understands that — perhaps better than Lee. But after narrowly losing to Thao in the 2022 mayoral election, he has failed this time to mount a strong campaign or build the coalition of supporters he would need to govern effectively.
Throughout the recall campaign, Taylor was adamant that he would run again if Thao were removed from office. Yet when the time came, he was surprisingly unprepared as Lee built her politically diverse campaign coalition.
Whether Lee is willing to make the tough financial decisions necessary remains to be seen. But she’s the candidate who is best politically prepared to meet the moment.
District 2: Charlene Wang
In Oakland City Council District 2, voters will select a replacement for Nikki Fortunato Bas, who was elected to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
The District 2 vacancy was created by the election in November of Nikki Fortunato Bas to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
Bas, a favorite of the city’s powerful public employee labor unions representing workers outside the Police and Fire departments, was politically aligned with Thao.
In 2020, Bas advocated for cutting the Police Department budget by 50%, a proposal that was fortunately never carried out. As the council president starting in 2021, she was a key driver of the failed budgeting that brought the city to the current financial precipice.
Now voters in District 2 — which stretches from Jack London Square to the south side of Piedmont — have an opportunity to help politically temper the City Council by replacing Bas with someone who takes public safety and budget-balancing seriously.
In the six-person field, there are three candidates with solid handles on the gravity of the situation: Charlene Wang, Harold Lowe and Kanitha Matoury. In the city’s ranked choice voting, we recommend them for the first, second and third votes, respectively.
Wang, an East Bay native, is a special adviser to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice. She’s an environmental engineer with a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard.
She says Oakland leaders need to address the budget deficit — which she has a solid handle on — while prioritizing key public services such as public safety, which she correctly identifies as a social justice issue and key to revitalizing the city’s business environment.
She’s realistic about the tough choices that must be made but sagely notes, “Every time we delay making hard decisions, it leads to harsher cuts down the line.”
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Lowe, a financial planner and diversity, equity and inclusion consultant, has a similarly realistic handle on the city’s finances. Matoury, owner of Howden Market in Uptown Oakland, understands firsthand the challenges of running a business in the city.
The other candidates are: Paula Thomas, a former Sacramento radio station owner; Kenneth Anderson, senior pastor of Williams Chapel Baptist Church; and Kara Murray-Badal, who selects recipients of seed money from UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.
Murray-Badal, with strong labor backing and the support of Bas, is Wang’s leading opponent. Murray-Badel struggled to answer questions about police staffing levels and could not recall whether she voted in November to support an increase in the city tax for public safety.
For council candidates committed to public safety and seriously addressing the city’s budget shortfall, the best choices are, in order, Wang, Lowe and Matoury.
