Oakland Candidates for Mayor, City Council Speak at Forum Ahead of April Special Election

Candidates for Oakland’s next mayor and an open City Council seat shared their visions for the city’s future at a forum in downtown Oakland on Tuesday night. The discussion focused on housing development, transit and public safety, with some sparring among mayoral candidates.

The special election, set for April 15, became necessary after voters recalled former Mayor Sheng Thao and elected former District 2 Oakland City Councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors last November.

During the mayoral portion of the forum, three of the seven candidates — former Rep. Barbara Lee, former Oakland City Councilmember Loren Taylor and former city staffer Renia Webb — gave their perspectives on the state of the city.

Asked about her plan for combatting homelessness and drug addiction, Lee said she would favor looking into piloting a universal basic income program for unsheltered residents needing jobs. She also expressed an interest in reviewing Oakland’s city charter, which outlines a hybrid government that critics say strips the mayor of the ability to enact any real agenda.

“The structural issues here in Oakland didn’t just start as it relates to the budget,” Lee said. “I believe we need to have a charter review. Oakland’s not a strong mayor form of government, nor a strong city administrator; we need the citizens, the residents, the voters of Oakland to decide — do they want a strong mayor or do they want another form of government?”

Lee has previously said she would bring experience and unity to the city following more than 25 years in Congress. She reiterated that message to reporters ahead of the mayoral candidate panel.

“Oakland needs somebody who can bring the city together, and I have been able to form coalitions and alliances and really have the ability to bring public and private partnerships to Oakland because that’s what we need,” Lee said.

In his opening remarks, Taylor said unity without action doesn’t deliver the results Oakland needs.

“Oakland is broken,” Taylor, who narrowly lost to Thao in the 2022 mayoral election, said. “We have a lot of challenges here. A lot of complex challenges that have been around for decades. Doing the same old, same old, and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, and it is not going to get us where we need to go.”

In January, Thao was indicted on federal bribery, fraud and conspiracy charges in what federal prosecutors have described as an alleged corruption scheme involving her longtime boyfriend, Andre Jones; the CEO of Oakland’s curbside recycling provider, David Duong; and his son, Andy Duong.

Webb, who was Thao’s chief of staff while she was on the city council and continued working for her during her transition to the mayor’s office in late 2022, has alleged she witnessed unethical behavior on the job.

“We have to have a complete overhaul,” Webb said. “We’ve been wasting millions, hundreds of millions of dollars these last couple of years. Faking. Putting bandaids. Time’s up on that game.”

At one point, Webb seized an opportunity to criticize Taylor’s involvement in a task force launched in 2020 that intended to reconstruct the city’s public safety system and brainstorm alternative responses to calls for service. A goal of the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, which Taylor co-led with then-councilmember Bas, was to slash Oakland Police Department funding by 50%.

“You see the impacts that crime has on our city,” Webb said. “And it’s interesting that Mr. Loren Taylor would bring up Reimagining because part of that that he authored was to cut our police force by 50%. That’s not acceptable or OK. Public safety is on our mind, and we’re not going to play with it.”

Taylor did not address the criticism during the forum. In a follow-up interview, he called the allegation that he wanted to defund the police “completely false.”

“I did agree to co-chair a committee with Councilmember Bas. She was pushing for the 50%, and I agreed to it because I was able to insert the fact that we would protect public safety above all else,” Taylor said. “That’s why we didn’t actually get to a reduction goal, because of my fight to ensure that safety of residents was No. 1.”

“I never agreed to that budget reduction. I agreed to allowing it to be a goal, among others,” Taylor added. “That was the compromise that we needed in order to move the entire city and dialogue forward.”

Three of the candidates vying for Bas’ former seat, including downtown business owner Kanitha Matoury, EPA civil rights advisor Charlene Wang and housing policy director Kara Murray-Badal, answered questions about bike lanes, the possibility of a new BART station in the district and what they would do to ensure housing availability and make streets in Oakland feel safer. District 2 includes the Chinatown, Lakeshore and San Antonio neighborhoods.

“I almost don’t recognize Oakland’s Chinatown today,” said Wang, who ran unsuccessfully for the at-large city council seat in last year’s election. “It is so different. There is not that sense of safety. It’s a ghost town. The businesses are boarded up at 3 p.m. And so that is a lot of what drives me is just how much Oakland and the whole district has changed in many ways.”

Murray-Badal, the director of Housing Venture Lab, an accelerator that supports entrepreneurs with ideas for how to make housing more equitable, said the possibility of making San Antonio another transit hub was promising.

“I think, obviously, we have the Brooklyn Basin area, which is amazing, and building more housing there has been really exciting, but there is no good transit in and out of it, and so, we’ve lost the transit-oriented part of that,” Murray-Badal said. “And so I think there are so many opportunities across the district to do housing.”

Matoury, who owns Howden Market, an artisan grocery shop in downtown Oakland, said she thinks the city is at a critical point.

“We need adults in the house,” Matoury said. “We don’t want a bunch of children with credit cards running around, charging things up. You want someone with a little life experience. The next couple years, I’m not going to lie, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be tough.

Three additional candidates for the seat — property manager Paula F.L. Thomas, Rev. Kenneth Anderson and Harold Lowe, a financial planner and consultant who ran for the seat in 2022 — did not attend.

A representative of Greenbelt Alliance told KQED the group reached out to every candidate who had filed a statement of organization, known as Form 410, by Jan. 31 and had contact information on their website.