Oakland VP Jeff Levin Addresses City Council on Closure of Redevelopment

Local 21's Oakland VIce President, Jeff Levin, spoke to the Oakland City Council on January 25, 2012 about the closure and impact of Redevelopment Agencies.

The loss of redevelopment is devastating to the City, and will make it more difficult to promote economic development, transit-oriented smart growth, and affordable housing,  

It is also devastating for our members, who will find themselves unemployed with little more than 24 hours effective notice.

People who have devoted years of service to this city will be thrown out without even the decency of 10 days notice.   Having sent out 2,500 layoff notices, the City has give employees the following instructions:

If by Friday, February 3 you don’t receive a notice rescinding your layoff notice, don’t come to work on Monday, February 6. Assume instead that your employment with the City of Oakland has been terminated.

And if your message to your employees is that they are so unimportant that this is how you treat them, don’t be surprised when you discover that morale has been shattered and productivity has fallen. 

At the same time that you are busy adopting a schedule of enforceable obligations to protect projects and assets, you are completely disregarding your enforceable obligations to your employees as set forth in our contract and in the Civil Service Rules.    This process has made a mockery of the layoff provisions of our contract by providing insufficient notice, by withholding critical information from the union, and by interfering with our very ability to fairly represent our members.  Even a simple list of which positions are being cut – and which are filled versus vacant – wasn’t provided to the union until yesterday evening, and we still don’t have a seniority list that would show who is really affected.  

Despite what the City Administrator is telling you, this is not the only option.   There is nothing in the law that requires you to lay off people in the fashion you are doing.   There is nothing in the law that requires you to redesign the City’s organizational structure with no public consultation and no input from the workforce that will be asked to operate in the new environment.

You are also being asked to make wholesale changes to the City’s organizational structure, and yet even the most basic information has not been made public.    Does the new structure ensure a more effective delivery of services?   On February 6 – who will be here and who will be gone?    How can we tell when you don’t even have new Organizational Charts that outline how the City will be organized?  

You have alternatives.   You do not need to rush into wholesale layoffs.   We believe that the administration has seriously underestimated the amount of funds that the City can lawfully claim under the provisions of the redevelopment legislation.   We think the law is clear that your MOUs are themselves enforceable obligations, and if you’re unable to process layoffs until a couple of weeks after dissolution, you are able to claim funds to pay staff until you meet all the obligations in the MOUs.  

We also disagree with the assumption that there will be no new property tax revenue to the City this year or next, even though redevelopment is dissolved and the former tax increment is being distributed to the taxing entities.

But even if you don’t believe that more funding is available, you still have another alternative.  We have never asked you to use reserves to close a structural deficit.   But doesn’t it make sense to draw on a small portion of those reserves to extend the time long enough to give people proper notice, allow the proposed reorganization to be examined more closely, and provide for an orderly transition of responsibilities?

If you can use your reserves to cover the costs of using hundreds of police to break up Occupy Oakland, surely you can use a lesser amount to provide a softer landing for the employees that you are rushing to throw out onto the street.

Your mission statement says that employees are treated with fairness, dignity and respect.   But we are seeing none of that today.   These words aren’t worth the paper they are written on.

Shame on you.