2009 is quickly coming to a close, and if things keep going the way they have been, it looks like we’re going to end the year with a substantially lower number of reported crimes than last year.

When compared to the same date in 2008, reported crimes have been down pretty much all year, and that trend continues here, with overall reports down a little under 13%. It’s not the 26% drop we were looking at in February, but it is significant.

It’s not all good news, though. Take a look at the second row. Aggravated assaults are now up from last year. As happy as I am that fewer cars are being stolen, I also find it extremely disheartening to just watch Oakland’s violence problem get worse and worse and worse every damn year. The new Police Chief at least seems to feel some sense of urgency about this problem, so hopefully we will see a reversal of that trend in 2010. For now, it’s just depressing.

Anyway, as always, the numbers come from the Oakland Police Department’s daily crime reports. The numbers above reflect data as of November 12th:

As we saw last week, Oakland’s budget problems are ongoing. The City is currently anticipating an $18.87 million deficit in the General Purpose Fund by the end of the year (plus a $25.4 million shortfall next year) due to a combination of revenue shortfalls and overspending.

The City Council will hold a special meeting at 4 PM on Tuesday (PDF), before the regular Council meeting at 6 to figure out what to do about it.

So staff’s budget balancing recommendations are out (PDF), and the…um…good news, I guess, depending on how you look at it, is no more service cuts.

Instead, the City would use one-time revenues to deal with this year’s shortfall and figure out what to do about the future later. At this point, if we were to deal with the reductions by cutting more, it would mean basically cutting the amount of money from the General Fund going to departments other than police and fire basically in half. This being an election year, nobody of course wants to do that. As the report (PDF) says:

Additional reductions to departmental appropriations would mean drastic cuts in City services. Although fiscal prudence absolutely dictates that the City fundamentally address these recurring GPF shortfalls, doing so now within such a short timeframe would be very disruptive to the services Oakland residents and taxpayers expect from their City government. Eventually, program reductions may need to be considered by the City Council.

Okay, so we’ll just leave the giant WTF over that “may” aside for now and just look at what’s being proposed.

The City can come up with $6.62 million in one-time money by pillaging some funds that happen to have available balances, including money from an insurance settlement after the earthquake ($3.2 million), the telecommunications land use fund ($0.5 million) that can be used for park maintenance, the Parks and Recreation self-sustaining fund ($0.5 million), and Measure Q ($1.5 million), which can be used to maintain library services while reducing the Library’s General Fund appropriation to $9.06 million, the minimum permitted by Measure Q.

So that still leaves us with what, $12.5 million to come up with? Staff proposes raising another $11.6 million by selling off City property, like the Kaiser Convention Center and the Scotlan Convention Center. If, of course, they can find anyone to buy them.

The remaining deficit would be closed by forcing towing companies to start collecting our existing 18.5% parking tax on towed cars and leasing as yet unspecified City property to cell phone companies for them to put cell phone towers on.

As far as options for next year goes, we could issue bonds against the revenue from our parking garages (we’d get $15 million now and have to pay $3.2 million back for the next 20 years). Or we could give someone a 50 year lease on all the City-owned garages. They’d get to collect all the garage revenue for the lease period, and we’d get an upfront payment that we could use to prevent immediate cuts.

Then, of course, there’s taxes. The report includes a number of options for taxes that could be placed on the June ballot (not sure where the money we’re supposed to save by doing instant runoff voting comes into these calculations), including a 0.5% increase in the Utility Users Tax ($2.56 million a year), a 0.25% Sales Tax hike ($5.6 million a year), and a new $91/year public safety parcel tax $12.8 million a year).

And that’s it for now. The Council will take up the proposal on Tuesday at 4. Catch the action at City Hall, or from the comfort of your own home on KTOP.

Condo conversions were a big controversy a few years ago, but since then, have pretty much faded off the radar of everyone but professional affordable housing activists and developers. Now the issue is back, sort of.

Councilmembers Pat Kernighan and Rebecca Kaplan have introduced a proposal to make some changes to Oakland’s condo conversion rules (PDF), which will be considered at today’s Community and Economic Development Committee meeting (PDF).

Basically, sometimes apartment building owners decide they don’t want to own an apartment anymore and would like to turn their building into condominiums and sell the units off individually. In Oakland, however, this is not the easiest thing to do for most buildings. A 1981 law, designed to ensure a robust supply of rental housing, prohibits the conversion of an apartment building greater than four units into condominiums unless you have something called “conversion rights.”

In practice, conversion rights are a little silly. Basically, when someone builds a new apartment building, each unit gives them one conversion right. Then if someone else wants to convert their apartment building into condos, they go and buy the conversion rights needed to do so. So if I have a 20 unit apartment building I want to turn into condos, I have to go find someone who built at least 20 rental units and buy the conversion rights from him. In certain parts of the City, you can only buy conversion rights from buildings that are in the same area. The idea is, again, to guarantee that we preserve an adequate supply of rental housing, and to protect tenants from displacement if their apartments are converted.

The proposal (PDF) introduced by Councilmembers Kernighan and Kaplan would create a “Pilot Program” that allows up to 300 units in “higher rent” apartment buildings (buildings where the average rent for new tenants in the past two years has been over $2100 a month) to be converted over a period of two years without purchasing conversion rights. Instead, the building owner would pay the City a $15,000 per-unit fee for the conversions. Then after two years, it would be over.

Existing tenants in the buildings that want to convert would all have to be offered a rent controlled lifetime lease and units where tenants choose to take the lifetime lease could not be sold. If tenants choose to move instead of taking the lifetime lease, they wouldn’t get any money to help pay re-location costs. If tenants want to buy their apartment as a condo, they would get a 10% discount.

The fees paid to the City for the conversion rights would go to rehab of existing affordable housing. Additionally, the proposal would create more money for the City by creating a bunch of new condos, which will each be paying property taxes, transfer tax when they are sold, and parcel taxes.

There are two other features of the proposal, which I won’t get into that much right now. One would make it easier to convert some Tenant-in-Common properties to condos, and the other would clarify existing law to make it clear that if you build a new rental apartment building and then decide you want to convert it to condos, you’re allowed to use your own conversion rights to do so.

Anyway, Councilmembers Jane Brunner, Nancy Nadel, and Jean Quan do not like the proposal, and have introduced one of their own. Unlike Councilmembers Kernighan and Kaplan, they do not offer any explanation their rationale or analysis of the impacts of their proposed legislation. Instead, they submitted a simple chart outlining the highlights of some plan they want staff to turn into legislation. You can read the whole thing here (PDF). The key points are:

• Expand existing condo conversion ordinance so that it applies to buildings of 4 units or less, which it currently does not
• Cap conversions at 150 units per year and 150 units per Council district over 5 years
• 6 months notification, 15% discount, lifetime leases and first right of refusal for purchase for existing tenants in buildings to be converted
• The same inclusionary zoning proposal that keeps coming up before the Council and failing

The plan proposed by Councilmembers Brunner, Nadel, and Quan is not really worth commenting on now. I have written extensively in the past about inclusionary zoning, which is a tired, counterproductive, and failed concept (and appears to now be illegal for rental housing, although rental IZ is not part of their current proposal), and also totally irrelevant to the condo conversion issue currently on the table.

As for the limited conversion proposal from Councilmembers Kernighan and Kaplan, I find little to complain about. A supplemental report from CEDA staff (PDF) raises some legitimate questions about the proposed definition of “higher rent buildings” and potential obstacles to assessing the proposed impact fee, and those issues certainly deserve further discussion at Committee.

The report further criticizes the proposal for acting in isolation, instead of being part of a “comprehensive housing strategy,” which I think is just ridiculous. No, this isn’t a comprehensive housing strategy, it’s limited legislation intended to address limited issues, which is just fine. Not every single thing the City does has to be part of some overarching, long-term plan to address some giant issue. When you insist on doing things that way, nothing ever gets done.

Sure, I think it might be a little silly to go to all this trouble basically so one luxury apartment building can be converted into condos, but that’s really the fault of the people trying to tack all these other issues onto something limited and very specific. Like six people forwarded me this “action alert” from EBHO yesterday that hysterically claims:

The Oakland People’s Housing Coalition (OPHC) opposes Councilmember Kernighan’s condo conversion proposal as a bad deal for the city and a bad deal for tenants and affordable housing. Their proposal, if adopted, would create no new housing and would threaten displacement for low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

It doesn’t explain how, of course. The purpose of the condo conversion ordinance is to protect the supply of rental housing that is within the means of most people, and whether you agree with that goal or not, it’s hard to see how the poor renter in Oakland are going to be harmed by having ultra-expensive apartment buildings on the Lake become ultra-expensive condo buildings on the Lake. The protections for building’s existing tenants seem sufficient to me, although some form of relocation assistance would be nice and I don’t think too burdensome for the building owner.

The deplorable condition of much of Oakland’s affordable rental housing is as serious an issue as the supply, and to the extent that this proposal can supply some funds for rehabilitation, I think it’s a good thing. Additionally, the City’s revenue problems are not going away anytime in the near future, and this also provides a way to bring in more money for the City (PDF) (I think the estimates in that document are probably a little inflated, but the point remains that it’s a significant amount of money).

The Community and Economic Development Committee meets at 2 PM this afternoon. If you can’t make it down to City Hall, you can always catch it on KTOP, Comcast cable Channel 10 and available streaming online. I will be tweeting the meeting, so for real-time updates, you can always check out twitter.com/vsmoothe or follow the #oakmtg hashtag to get updates from others as well. (If anyone else tweets it, that is. Sometimes I’m the only one.)

Monday night, I attended the Town Hall meeting with Oakland’s new Police Chief, Anthony Batts, at Prescott Elementary in West Oakland. It was okay.

I did enjoy listening to Batts speak, but everything else about the night was annoying. Before the Chief started talking, we had to listen to a long series of speeches about how great the Mayor is and a bunch of self-congratulatory nonsense about the Mayor’s task forces and how amazing they are. Personally, I think it’s kind of pathetic if three years into your term, the best accomplishment you can point to is something that nobody ever really cared about and that happened before you even started, but that’s just me.

The Mayor promised to give Batts a brief introduction, and then talked for like half an hour about how great he is, and how he’s been such a great Mayor, and great Oakland is doing, and so on and so on, to the point I made myself dizzy trying to get my head around how it is even possible for someone to be so completely disconnected with reality. Anyway. Eventually he got around to letting the Chief talk, but only after forcing everyone to sit through a stunningly boring litany of all the ways Oakland and Long Beach are similar (highlight: we both have an airport).

The Chief promised to keep his remarks short so there would be plenty of time for questions, and he totally did not do that at all, but nobody minded (well, some people probably did, but not me), because he is just such an engaging speaker. He didn’t say much about his plans for Oakland – it was all pretty general, stuff about his background and why he decided to come to Oakland. Apparently his remarks last night at the OPOA/UNCO event were a little more interesting, but since I wasn’t there, I’ll leave it for readers who were to share their impressions in the comments.

At the end of the Town Hall meeting on Monday, there was time for questions, but the whole thing was just impossibly poorly coordinated, and instead of hearing the Chief answer people’s questions, we listened to a series of people ramble at length about whatever their pet project is. In a few cases, the diatribes were punctuated with a half-hearted question (”Blah blah blah, me, blah blah blah, I’m so great, blah blah blah, this organization I work with is so great and everyone should come to their event next week, blah blah blah blah. And so, do you think we should have more police officers on the street?”), but mostly it was just people babbling at the room in general and the Chief didn’t really have an opportunity to say much in response. It was kind of disappointing. I ended up leaving early cause I was just so irritated.

Anyway, there will be two more Town Halls where you can hear the Chief talk – one on Monday from 6:30 to 8 at Cesar Chavez Educational Center (2825 International Boulevard) and another on Wednesday, November 18th, again from 6:30 to 8, at the Tassafaronga Recreation Center (975 85th Avenue). I’d advise showing up a little late so you don’t have to endure the Dellums campaign rally, and unless they restructure the way they do the Q&A, it’s probably not worth sitting through that part either, but I do recommend going just to watch Batts, who is extremely impressive.

But if you can’t make it to either of those (or if you can, but are still left curious afterwards), I have another opportunity for you.

The Oakland Tribune Editorial Board will be sitting down to talk to the Chief in a couple weeks. Naturally, we’re all bubbling over with our own questions, but what we really want is to make sure that our interview reflects what readers want to know. So we’re soliciting questions from the community.

Big picture stuff is welcome, but we’re also looking for questions based on your experiences in your own neighborhood. Just anything you want to know, basically. We’ll collect all the questions we receive, pick out the best ones, and ask as many as we have time for. You can send in your question via the contact form here, or just leave a comment on this post.

We’re really interested in what you want to know. So please, start firing away.

Do you guys remember back in June when the Council was putting together the budget? And they kept talking about how this is just a temporary solution, and that they would be back constantly making more cuts, and adjusting this and that. Council President Jane Brunner, a couple of times, called it a “rolling budget” and at one point suggested it just be a standing item at every meeting.

That probably would have been overkill. Still, it would be nice to see the Council take the City’s ongoing budget problem a little more seriously instead of just pretending like it doesn’t exist until they all of a sudden have to scramble to cut enormous sums of money. There’s a lot of room in the City for long-term efficiencies and money-saving measures, but getting there takes time and planning. It’s impossible to be surgical about cuts if you’re only thinking about the budget when you absolutely have to.

Anyway, to everyone’s great delight, I’m sure, they have to start looking at it again. The first quarter revenue and expenditure figures are now in (PDF), and will be presented to the Council’s Finance and Management Committee (PDF) next Tuesday. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, but the news isn’t good:

In the General Purpose Fund (1010), a deficit of $18.9 million is projected by year end. The deficit is comprised of a revenue shortfall of $10.08 million, projected overspending of $4.29 million plus $4.5 million in projected Coliseum ticket surcharge revenue that may not be realized.

The majority of the overspending comes from the Police Department, on track to go $3 million over budget due to greater than planned for overtime costs, and the revenue shortfalls come from, well, pretty much everywhere. Property tax is looking to come in $0.36 million lower than anticipated, sales tax receipts are projected to be short $6.74 million, and then we’ve got expected shortfalls of $1.66 million in hotel tax, $0.96 million in parking tax and $0.36 in interest income. That sales tax shortfall, BTW, is based on January-March receipts, in case anyone was planning on using parking tickets as the culprit here.

The report includes updates on the status (PDF) of the budget balancing measures adopted by the Council this summer. Most have been implemented, although there are of course a few notable exceptions – nearly $300,000 was scored as savings by moving 4 Neighborhood Service Coordinators out of the General Fund so they could be paid by a grant instead, but then we didn’t end up getting the grant funding after all. And of course there’s the $800,000 of parking tax revenue at the Coliseum and aforementioned $4.5 million from the 10% Coliseum/Arena ticket fee that we haven’t been able to collect so far, and may not be able to collect at all.

A sheet illustrating projected spending by department (PDF) shows pretty much everyone except for the Police Department and, of course, the Mayor’s Office, on track to meet their currently assigned budget.

But with almost $19 million in projected shortfall already, it looks like it’s going to be another grim year in Oakland. Where are they going to find the money? We’ll get a sense of that on November 17th, when the Council meets to discuss potential budget balancing measures.

I have this friend who’s always making fun of my affinity for what he calls “19th century entertainment.” For him, parades, fireworks, and festivals are a relic of a time when people didn’t have the internet, cable TV, or Wiis to entertain them. I think that’s sad.

I love parades. I love fireworks. And, OMG, do I love festivals. A family friendly good time isn’t always the easiest thing to find in Oakland, and a festival offers that. And particularly in a city like Oakland, which often feels incredibly fragmented, so full of all these huge, wildly different groups of people whose lives somehow never manage to intersect, events that draw a citywide audience are just so refreshing. And in years like this, where so many people are struggling so deeply, and the torrent of bad, then worse, then even worse news often seems just endless, the totally free good time offered by these sorts of community celebrations becomes even more essential. Plus, how can you not love it any time major streets are blocked off from cars?