OAKLAND — Just before the pandemic helped plunge the city into financial crisis, Oakland voters did what they usually do at the ballot box: approve a new tax, this one intended to maintain and improve the city’s various parks.
Three years later, the tax has accumulated millions of dollars, but a new audit finds the city also underspends the revenue each year — accumulating about $22 million in rolled-over balance at a time when fire-safety advocates describe Oakland’s parks as lacking maintenance and being at high risk for wildfires.
The audit, published last week, found that it’s also unclear if the money is being spent effectively, given that the city doesn’t take a “data-driven strategy” with clear baseline goals for what good park maintenance looks like.
It offers a look into how one of Oakland’s various tax measures — which are almost always approved by a large majority of voters — is actually performing amid a historic financial deficit that has left the city reeling.
While the tax revenue was intended to “decrease disparities in life outcomes of marginalized communities, address homelessness in and around the city parks and improve water quality by reducing litter, we found that the City did not have a
baseline to assess the effectiveness” of reaching those goals, the audit states.
City officials did not respond to a request for comment, but are expected to submit a written response to the audit’s recommendations. The report was compiled by Michael Houston, who stepped in as the acting city auditor after the last full-time auditor, Courtney Ruby, left her post in September.
Much of the underspending took place during the 2020-21 fiscal year, when the Public Works department had a “hard time filling new staff positions,” the audit found, ending up with just two out of 36 budged positions filled.
By the end of the next year, there were only 12 vacancies out of 39 positions, but the city has nonetheless continued to underspend revenue from the tax, known as Measure Q, which received 68% voter approval on the March 2020 election ballot.
As part of the measure, parcels of land with single-family homes are taxed a flat rate of $148 each year, while multi-family parcels pay about $101 per unit. The tax has raised from $25 million to $29 million in each of the last three fiscal years.
There isn’t enough data for whether the money is being spent in the most effective way, the audit states, noting that Public Works files reports “on the regularity of bathroom cleaning, field mowing, and litter pick up.”
Still, the audit found the city isn’t actually misspending the revenue it raised — mostly staying within the requirements of the ballot language.
“Of $7.2 million in expenditures,” the audit states, “we found about $10,000 in expenditures (or about 0.13 percent) misspent on Library, IT, and non-Measure Q projects. The low rate of misspending we found suggests the City has been effective in ensuring appropriate spending of Measure Q revenue.”
What could be done with all that leftover money? Measure Q’s language allows the city to change the requirements of how the revenue is spent in order “to meet urgent needs” during a moment of “extreme fiscal necessity.”
It’s unclear if the term “extreme” would extend to Oakland’s budget shortfall ongoing structural deficit, which reached historic proportions this year and forced the city to squeeze some departments, including by cutting spending in the Department of Violence Prevention and leaving the equivalent of 120 full-time police positions unfilled.
The deficit ran up to a stated $360 million after the city ran out of federal pandemic relief, misjudged its future revenues from certain taxes and started to feel the crunch of a lucrative cost-of-living adjustment signed for workers during a period of inflation that has since come crashing back down.