In 2022, Oakland voters overwhelmingly approved sweeping changes to the city’s campaign finance law to reduce the influence of big money in elections.
The heart of Measure W was an initiative called Democracy Dollars. In a nutshell, the city would give qualifying voters vouchers worth $100 to give to political candidates of their choosing. The goal was to level the political playing field by giving lower-income residents the ability to financially support candidates. The measure also lowered how much money people can give to political campaigns to curb the influence of wealthy donors.
Democracy Dollar vouchers were supposed to flow into elections starting in 2024. But a budget crisis in 2023 prompted the mayor and city council to delay the initiative. This pattern repeated itself during the budget hashing of 2024.
The same thing is happening this year. But Oakland’s elected leaders are taking things a step further.
On Tuesday, the City Council voted 7-1 to approve a proposal that will increase how much money individuals and broad-based political committees can give to candidates (from $650 to $900, and $1,300 to $1,800 respectively). The council also agreed to temporarily extend the Limited Public Financing program, which provides small sums of government funds to candidates for campaign expenses. The LPF is not currently funded in the mayor’s proposed budget.
Additionally, the councilmembers voted to give themselves access to a lot more money through their officeholder accounts. Oakland electeds use these accounts to pay for almost everything, from meals and travel to donations to civic groups. The annual contribution cap for most councilmembers is $25,000; the council agreed to raise that cap to $75,000.
Councilmember Noel Gallo did not explain his position before casting the lone dissenting vote on this package.
The campaign finance changes, once approved by the council, will return Oakland to something akin to the landscape Measure W sought to change — one where “donors from outside of Oakland and Oakland residents in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods (have) disproportionate influence in choosing elected officials and potentially shaping policy outcomes over everyone else,” according to a 2020 report from the Oakland Public Ethics Commission.
The authors of the proposal – Council President Kevin Jenkins and Councilmembers Ken Houston and Janani Ramachandran – wrote that these changes are necessary so candidates can independently raise enough money to get their message out to voters without having to rely on independent expenditures from third parties. They also stressed that this change is temporary until Democracy Dollars can be implemented.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Ramachandran said that, as a former member of the ethics commission, she supports the initiative “and I hope this council in the future can identify funds” to put into play.
But the proposal’s most powerful author, Jenkins, took a more negative tone when he recently spoke with The Oaklandside about Democracy Dollars.
“It’s never going to be funded out of the general fund,” Jenkins said in an interview. “Either voters are going to pass, or someone is going to ask them to pass a parcel tax (to fund it) or we’re going to have to say Democracy Dollars isn’t going to happen.”
Councilmember Carroll Fife expressed concern about raising the contribution limits, saying that it felt like a conflict of interest, especially because two of the bill’s authors — Ramachandran and Jenkins — are up for reelection next year, and would therefore benefit from the raised limits.
Fife voted for the proposal after Jenkins agreed to work with her on an amendment to the legislation that would make these changes indefinite.
“I want us to be honest about Democracy Dollars,” Fife said. “We’re talking about sunsetting this program by 2029 and how we might have Democracy Dollars before then. That’s not going to happen in this budget climate.”
Democracy Dollars won’t happen without a ballot initiative
A coalition of good government organizations backed Measure W in 2022, including California Common Cause, Causa Justa, the League of Women Voters, Oakland Rising, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
There was virtually no protest from these groups as the council moved forward with its decision on Tuesday. But at least one of the stakeholders is disappointed.
“We worked on Measure W because we see the campaign finance system is broken,” David Shor, a program manager at Common Cause California, told The Oaklandside. “For everyday voters to actually have influence in deciding who our representatives are, we need policies that really center communities and working class families in Oakland over donors.
“These proposals fall short of that.”
In 2020, the ethics commission published a report that laid bare the disproportionate financing of the city’s political races by a small number of wealthy, white donors.
Looking at elections between 2014 and 2018, the PEC found that more than half of all campaign contributions came from sources out of town. For Oakland donors, 42% of contributions came from neighborhoods in the three zip codes that comprise residents with the highest median household income in the city; those zip codes are over 50% white. To put this another way: three zip codes contributed over $1 million to candidates in three elections; residents in the city’s three most diverse zip codes contributed over $136,000 during the same period.
“Candidate overreliance on major donors and special interests, can create an environment conducive to corruption, where candidates may trade future policy support for campaign support, or create the appearance thereof,” PEC staff wrote in a different more recent report.
To make Democracy Dollars a reality, Shor hopes the council will approve a ballot measure the ethics commission is working on. This measure would create a parcel tax to fund the PEC, including the Democracy Dollars initiative, which will take about $4 million dollars to fully implement.
The commission pushed a similar initiative last year that would have also raised money for other oversight agencies, including the auditor’s office and the investigative arm of the Oakland Police Commission. Then-Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas led the council in killing this proposal, saying that it could jeopardize the success of a proposed sales tax measure that was heading to the ballot in April 2025. At the time, Bas said she hoped the council would work with community groups to get the oversight funding measure on the ballot in 2026.
However, history may repeat itself. The two-year budget being considered by the council includes a $40 million parcel tax to help pay for public safety services. That measure, if approved by the council, would go before voters in 2026.
Councilmembers also agree to triple how much money they can raise for officeholder accounts
The council also approved a proposal to increase how much money local elected officials can raise through their officeholder accounts. Officials can use these accounts to pay for virtually all expenses, including meals, travel, hotels, and mailers. They can also donate to civic groups, which the sponsors of this legislation argued is the main reason for increasing the limits.
Here’s how the proposal approved on Tuesday will increase caps for the following offices:
- District councilmembers: from $25,000 to $75,000
- At-large councilmember: from $30,000 to $100,000
- Mayor: from $50,000 to $100,000
- City attorney: from $30,000 to $100,000
- City auditor: from $25,000 to $100,000
The council approved the changes to the officeholder accounts over objections from the Public Ethics Commission, which is charged with enforcing Oakland’s campaign finance rules and government transparency.
In a meeting a couple weeks ago, the commissioners questioned the need for raising caps so dramatically when electeds almost never hit the current contribution limits. Commissioners also pointed out that elected officials can already raise unlimited amounts of money for local groups through behested payments. Commissioner Ryan Micik raised concerns about how these accounts can be a vehicle for corruption. “They’ve been described as slush funds in certain cases,” he said.
In 1998, an Alameda County grand jury noted that “officeholder accounts seem to offer an unfair advantage to incumbents” and recommended eliminating them.
Fife was also troubled by this part of the proposal, which she claims some electeds have used to create quid pro quo arrangements with constituents.
“I’ve seen in the past where councilmembers have used their funds to pay community organizers that are then expected to work on their political campaigns,” Fife said. She still voted for the proposal.
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