Oakland’s Measure E Tax in Trouble, Threatening a Push to Boost Ailing City Services

She had pinned many of her budget aspirations — to increase fire and police funding, make investments in preventing illegal dumping, and maintain state-funded homelessness services — on an estimated $34 million in annual revenue that the tax would generate.

Measure E, she told voters in May, is “the difference between maintaining the status quo and actually moving the needle.”

The revenue from a $192 annual residential parcel tax would have been used to replace outdated equipment that the city said is significantly beyond its useful life and in danger of failing, including five fire engines, two ladder trucks and two ambulances. It also would have maintained 190 temporary emergency shelter beds that will be taken offline this summer due to state funding cuts.

Firefighter union president Seth Olyer said his crew’s engine is 30 years old and has triple the recommended amount of service time for a piece of front-line equipment.

“It has more time in the Fire Department than I do, and I’m considered an old guy,” he said. The International Association of Firefighters Local 55, which represents Oakland, is one of the unions that funded and backed Measure E.

“The very real concern is that we’re unable to respond … because of aging equipment and aging fire apparatus,” Olyer told KQED.

The push for Measure E came as Lee laid out her midcycle budget plan, meant to ensure the city stays on track with its biennial goals laid out in 2025. Earlier this year, the city projected it would fall $40 million short of the funding needed to maintain its approved budget.

Oakland has long maintained a structural budget deficit, spending more than it generates. And in recent years, it has lost at least $24 million in federal funding from the Trump administration and $5 million more in state homelessness funding.

Lee said her team patched this year’s budget hole by freezing vacant positions and reducing contract services, but Measure E would have funded sorely needed cleanliness and public safety resources laid out in the mayor’s spending plan.

Measure E was also projected to fund 52 full-time equivalent positions, including 10 violence interrupters; 19 staffers to address homeless encampments, illegal dumping and park maintenance; and 22 sworn police officers.

Joshua Rauh, a finance professor at Stanford University, said that without those police positions specifically, the city could also risk revenue from another parcel tax it passed in 2024.

Measure NN, which generates approximately $47 million a year for public safety expenses, includes a provision that if the city doesn’t budget for a minimum of 700 sworn police officers, the collection of the tax would be suspended for that fiscal year.

City Councilmember Janani Ramachandran, who heads Oakland’s finance committee, said the council plans to vote on a declaration of fiscal necessity that would allow it to collect the revenue without complying with the sworn officer minimum this year. She said the city won’t meet that target because of a “recruitment and retention issue.”

The budget currently includes 678 sworn officer positions, but the Police Department’s latest tally shows that 68 of those are vacant.

Measure E also would have funded an additional police academy meant to boost recruitment. The biennial budget funded five, two of which have already occurred.

The measure was trailing in early returns throughout election night, and after Alameda County’s latest batch of election results on Friday afternoon, it continued to lag with 55% of votes against it. It needs a simple majority to pass. Additional returns are expected Monday and Friday next week.

Rauh said the result mirrors tax propositions struggling or failing across the state — including San Francisco business tax Measures C and D.

But he and Ramachandran also noted that Oaklanders, specifically, are discontent with how the city has managed some of the state’s highest local taxes.

Former Councilmember Loren Taylor, who ran for mayor against Lee last year, said Measure E’s initial vote split reflects a lack of trust in city government.

“However this count concludes, Oakland has sent a message that cannot be undone by a final tally,” he said in a statement. “A community this divided on whether to extend trust to its own government is a community demanding to be heard.”

Ramachandran acknowledged the city’s record of financial mismanagement, including a 2024 fiasco that resulted in closed fire stations and staff layoffs after $63 million in budgeted revenue from the sale of the Oakland Coliseum didn’t materialize. That sale still isn’t final.

“That’s still the reputation of the city, that [it] wants to spend, spend, spend and put together a million programs that go shallow, not deep into solving these problems,” Ramachandran said.

She said the current council has taken steps to reprioritize spending more effectively, but “that’s a massive shift that not all voters see yet, understandably.”