Keller Fire puts Oakland's budget crisis in perspective

OAKLAND, Calif. (KRON) – Days after the Keller Fire, Oakland’s fire chief warned the city council that any suggestion of shutting down fire stations would have a detrimental impact on Oakland residents. 

Shutting down fire stations and cutting cops was back on the table in Tuesday’s meeting following a devastating report on the city’s budget. During a hearing this morning, council members were told the city not only overspent millions of dollars last year but is doing so again this year, and the budget requires immediate cuts to the tune of $63 million.  

The City of Oakland’s current budget crisis and what to do about it was best summed up by the city’s budget administrator Bradley Johnson.

“We provide more services than we can afford to provide. That is the factual statement of where we are as an organization. And so the hard decisions that we will need to make are which services at what level we will no longer provide in order to stay within our resources,” he said. 

Johnson was one of several city staffers to present the bleak numbers to members of the Oakland city council Tuesday morning. 

Oakland overspent last year by $ 80 million. Oakland is projected to overspend this fiscal year by $30 million. The city’s contingency budget has been triggered, requiring immediate cuts of $63 million. 

“Forty-five million of the contingency budget that was approved in the adopted budget in July is for police and fire. There is no way around, from what I’m hearing, that we will not have significant impacts that we have to make immediately to address these challenges with two of the most significant parts of helping our city to move forward with public safety,” Councilmember Treva Reid said. 

No decision was made Tuesday on what to cut, but Oakland’s fire chief warned council members if four or five fire stations had been closed when Friday’s Keller Fire broke out, there would have been a different result.

“So if you take five engines out of place, and those three engines that we don’t normally have, that’s eight engines that would have been first due to that fire, and we came within 200 yards of Campus Drive so you can see, very little math will tell you that we would have probably lost those homes on Campus Drive at a minimum,” said Oakland Fire Chief Damon Covington. 

Council president Nikki Fortunato Bas says she’s hopeful the city can find a way to increase revenue and reduce spending without making dramatic cuts to public safety. One key question is how to rein in the police department's $25 million in overspending on overtime.

“I want to make sure we can work with the resources we have and deploy them as effectively as possible. We want to keep our community safe. We have to respond more diligently and faster to 911 calls and solve more crimes, and so how can we do that better, and organize that deployment better to get those results and keep overtime in check?” she said. 

The council will discuss what cuts need to be made at their Nov. 19 meeting.