In dozens of meetings and workshops over the past year, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee has been building consensus among residents for a charter amendment that would expand mayoral authority - giving the mayor greater power to deliver on campaign promises and bring more accountability to city government.
But it appears she may not have the backing of the group most crucial to getting the reform across the finish line: the City Council.
Amending the city's charter requires voter approval, and the most direct path is for the council to place the measure on the ballot.
Council President Kevin Jenkins said he wants voters to have two options - Lee's strong-mayor reform, and an alternative backed by a former Oakland city administrator that would preserve the council's strength.
"I'm interested in bridging the gap by putting two options on the ballot," Jenkins said. "We need to give voters a choice on how Oakland's government will work going forward."
Most California cities operate under one of two models: a council-manager system, in which an elected council sets policy and appoints a city manager to handle day-to-day operations, or a strong-mayor system, in which the mayor holds veto power and appoints core city officials.
Oakland currently falls somewhere in between. The mayor acts as chief executive and appoints the city administrator, but cannot vote on council matters except to break ties. She proposes a budget, but ultimately council makes a final decision on it. The city administrator manages city departments and reports to the mayor, yet is also charged with implementing the council's directives.
Since the model changed when Jerry Brown became mayor in 1999, it is rare to even see the city's top elected official attend council meetings.
Lee is advocating for a stronger mayoral role. It's a position she arrived at after months of working group sessions led by the League of Women Voters and government think tank SPUR. In their proposal, the mayor would gain greater control over the city's bureaucracy and veto power over legislation and budgets, which the council could still override with a two-thirds majority.
The council would also gain new tools: an independent budget and legislative analyst office, and subpoena authority to compel witness testimony. San Francisco, for example, recently used its power to compel the former leaders of the San Francisco Parks Alliance to testify about the nonprofit's collapse
A spokesperson for Lee declined to comment on Jenkins' idea of competing ballot measures, but pointed to positive polling from SPUR that shows that 58% percent of 600 Oakland voters surveyed said they were in favor of key tenets of Lee's proposal.
It's rare that elected officials want to see their own powers weakened, and Oakland's council is no exception.
During a Thursday committee meeting, Council Members Ken Houston and Rowena Brown voiced their support for a so-called "third option" - a hybrid that would largely preserve the status quo, but the mayor would attend council meetings, help shape policy and hold veto power, without fully consolidating executive authority. In an interview, Council Member Zac Unger said that he remains "open-minded" about Oakland's system of governance, but isn't opposed to voters getting a say.
That "third option" is being advocated for by the longtime Bay Area city manager-for-hire Steven Falk, who served two three-month stints in Oakland. Though Falk originally pushed for a straightforward council-manager system like those in place in Sunnyvale, Hayward and Redwood City, he said his group, The Oakland Charter Reform Project, recently amended its stance, finding that "Oakland could benefit from a central figure that serves as a check" on the council, Falk said.
But political scientist Corey Cook, who studies electoral reform and served on Lee's charter reform working group, has warned that another hybrid model would simply repeat Oakland's past mistakes.
"This is how we got here in Oakland - by putting together this mishmash of systems that doesn't actually work," Cook said. "Why would we do that again?"
Oakland's current structure has been in place since 1998, when voters approved a change to the charter pushed by Brown, who was between stints as California's governor. The change established a council president and centralized executive power while also making certain concessions to the council. Those same tensions are resurfacing nearly three decades later.
Falk, though, says that hybrid models are common - pointing to cities like Berkeley, San Jose and Long Beach that have their own variations of a council-manager system. Forcing voters to choose one or the other is a "false dichotomy," he said.
"Cities rarely choose the pure version of any one of these systems, and choose a mix that benefits their city," said Falk, who has worked as a city manager in Lafayette and Richmond.
The deadline to qualify a new measure for the June 2 primary ballot has already passed, meaning the earliest any reform could go before voters is November 2026 - the same election in which Oakland will choose a new mayor and three new city council members. If the council fails to act, voters could put their own initiative on the ballot, but it would require 25,083 signatures of registered voters to make the fall ballot.
"All of these systems provide advantages and disadvantages," Cook said. "There's no perfect system that exists."
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