Oakland’s Measure E Tax Is Failing, Threatening a Push to Boost Ailing City Services

In the run-up to the election, Lee had warned that if Measure E failed, Oakland’s city services could further deteriorate.

“I am less than one year in office, and it’s crystal clear to me that we as a city do lack the resources to provide the basic services that residents need and deserve,” Lee said during a press conference announcing her 2026 budget plan last month.

She had pinned increases in fire and police funding, investments in preventing illegal dumping, and maintenance of state-funded homelessness services on an estimated $34 million in annual revenue that the tax would have generated.

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The revenue from a $192 annual residential parcel tax would have been used to replace outdated equipment that the city said is significantly beyond its useful life and in danger of failing, including five fire engines, two ladder trucks and two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.

It 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 continued to lag after Alameda County’s latest batch of election results on Monday afternoon, with 54% of votes against it. It needed a simple majority to pass.

Additional returns are expected Friday, but city officials are mostly considering the measure defeated.

“The voters of Oakland sent a clear message with the defeat of Measure E. It is abundantly clear that residents expect City Hall to do a more efficient and effective job of delivering services with the resources we already have,” City Council President Kevin Jenkins said in a statement Tuesday, as he and other members of the council’s budget team proposed a slate of amendments to Lee’s budget plan, counting out Measure E funding.

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.

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.”