Mayor Jean Quan hopes to unify Oakland's "two cities"

When she took office in January, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan had a laundry list of promises to make good on, and ideas to make reality. To talk about her progress and goals for the city of Oakland, Mayor Quan joined KALW’s Holly Kernan by phone.

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HOLLY KERNAN: You’ve been very open to the press, particularly in contrast to former Mayor Ron Dellums. But how are you balancing being available and getting all of the things that you need to get done, done?

MAYOR JEAN QUAN: I think my sleep is losing ground here! (laughs) I thought it was specifically important, and particularly in the first few months, to show that I was willing to be available to the media. And I haven’t turned down a single interview, including the Skyline High School staff. So, obviously when things get tougher, we’re trying to now contain it to certain times. So now I’m doing a weekly briefing – this is something that Gavin Newsom did, we understand fairly [successfully]. And that helps because the media knows on long-range stories, or stories that are not immediate in the cycle, that they can reach me weekly and sometimes save up their questions. Sometimes we pre-anticipate the issues, so we’ve had major briefings on the redevelopment zone and the free enterprise in Oakland which is being threatened. We had a briefing on the federal cuts as soon as we heard what was being proposed in Congress, even before Barbara Lee got to have hers! So we’ve been also trying to anticipate.

KERNAN: And you want to be known as the “peoples’ mayor.” What does that mean to you?

QUAN: I don’t know if I ever said that. That is a phrase that people are describing. I am trying to build government from the grassroots up. I think government can’t do everything, and there’s a lot of needs in this city, so it has to be a partnership with the community and local government. And after this next year, probably will now be our fifth straight year of budget cuts. The city government’s going to continue to shrink, and we need to, if anything, have a larger response for our kids and for the poor who are going to be particularly hit by both the federal cuts and the state cuts, and as a result of that, local cuts.

KERNAN: And one of the local cuts that has hit particularly hard is that the city had to lay off 80 police officers last summer. Oakland has big public safety issues and budget deficits. What are your priorities for public safety, and can I ask you in the context of how you’re dealing with some personality conflicts, with your relationship with Police Chief Anthony Batts or City Attorney John Russo?

QUAN: You ask Anthony Batts – he doesn’t think that we have conflicts.

KERNAN: Okay, well City Attorney John Russo?

QUAN: (laughs) You know John is John – I try not to comment on him. Comments have been coming from him, not from me. The only comment you see in the media is a response to the media.

KERNAN: Let’s get back to public safety.

QUAN: Public safety … we pretty much were able to, in four years of cuts, avoid any police department cuts for the first three years. Last year the cuts were just so deep for the first time in California state history – property taxes for us, and I think most cities, went down rather than up. So we had to do across-the-board cuts. Even with the cuts, crime in Oakland is down four years in a row. And so we have to better use resources. We are keeping the level of patrol – that is the police officers – on the street at 300, no matter what happens. And that means that we may have to eliminate some of the administrative jobs, we may have to eliminate some of the long-term investigations to keep the patrol numbers up. So that won’t change.

What we can change is that we can civilianize some of the positions so that more officers will be on the street. We can improve the relationship between the community and particularly the beat officers. And we can make sure that all officers are assigned to some kind of zone to make sure that they are more familiar with the community, that the community knows who they are, that they know the community better.

KERNAN: You know, I was struck by the fact that our system is very crisis-based, and in one of your recent town halls, a young person, a 16-year-old, said that there’s this narrow focus on youth who are in trouble, and that can really short-change kids who are doing well. She said that, “I don’t think it’s fair or right that if you do bad, you’re in the juvenile justice system. There are all kinds of opportunities for you. But if you’re just on the right path, there’s nothing for you.” How would you address that?

QUAN: Actually, I know Aliyah, but I would say that actually a lot of the summer youth jobs go to just regular kids. And there are a lot of kids that do well in Oakland. And so I think she asked for a particular agency, and yes, we have set aside jobs for kids who are getting out on probation and for kids who are in trouble. And sometimes it seems like the specialized, more highly-publicized programs aren’t available to regular kids, but it’s not necessarily like … at that school that we were talking about – yes we have mentors for kids who are truant, but the kids who are mentors are high school students who are actually doing pretty well. So it’s a hard thing and the city – we’ve put aside for the first time from a policymaker’s point of view, often we didn’t target money to the kids most in trouble, so that’s actually a relatively new phenomenon. Most of the budget of the city goes to Kids First programs or after school programs and mostly deal with kids who are in school. And the program she was talking about was particularly for kids who are dropping out of school.

KERNAN: And your predecessor Mayor Dellums hoped to create Oakland as a model city. Before him, when Jerry Brown was Mayor of Oakland, he wanted to bring 10,000 new residents to the downtown area. When you leave office, what do you hope your legacy will be? What stamps do you want to leave on Oakland?

QUAN: Well, Jerry always tells me, “Do something small and practicable and definable and that’s the most important thing, and people will remember that” – or remember what you didn’t do or did do.

I think there’s no simple one phrase. I think Oakland is a city of amazing promise and that I think that we can make sure that there are no longer what I would call two cities: Oakland on one hand is one of the best-educated metropolitan areas in the country. On the other hand, we have only 30% of our African American males graduating from high school. We have some of the most beautiful environmental areas in the country – great weather, central location, beautiful enclaves of environment from redwoods to even a little volcanic area to beautiful coastal marshes. And on the other hand, I’ve got industrial lands and areas that have to be renovated, and I’m fighting to keep the redevelopment dollars, to keep them productive.

So what I guess I would like to see is a more unified and prosperous city and the end of the story of two cities and to hope to have hope for all of the young residents of the city. 

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