.Rigging the Vote

The city of Oakland manipulated a recent election — possibly to obtain the outcome it wanted.

Elections are supposed to be sacrosanct. Voters cast their ballots and whoever gets the most votes wins. But in a little-noticed election this spring, Oakland city officials appear to have violated that sacred trust by rigging a vote in order to obtain the outcome they wanted.

The vote manipulation took place during the tabulation of ballots for a $12 million tax measure. The measure proposed to raise property taxes for all Oakland property owners to finance the city’s Landscaping and Lighting Assessment District. The LLAD, as it’s known in city circles, has been around since 1989 and currently generates about $18 million in annual property tax revenues. It pays for street lights, along with maintenance and upgrades of city parks. The proposed tax increase would have boosted annual revenues from the LLAD tax to about $30 million.

To understand how the vote was manipulated requires some background into how the city conducted the election. Instead of voters going to the polls, they cast ballots by mail. In addition, only Oakland property owners were allowed to vote in the election, because they were the only people directly affected by the measure. The ballots were sent out in April, and the city tallied the results in late May.

The election was not your typical one-person-one-vote affair. Instead, the city converted each ballot into a dollar amount. The value of each was dependent on how much the property owner would pay under the tax increase. For example, if a property owner was already paying $100 a year to the LLAD, and was to go up to $150, then the value of his or her ballot was $50.

The city last attempted to raise the LLAD tax in 2006, but it was defeated. Most property owners voted against it, but the real tipping point was the Oakland public school district, public records show. The proposed increase would have forced the school district to pay the city about $700,000 a year in new taxes. But Randy Ward, then state administrator for city schools, cast the district’s $700,000 worth of ballots against the tax increase. Ward, who is now the superintendent of San Diego County schools, said last week that he opposed the tax at the time because he believed the city should have made its own budget cutbacks before trying to take money needed to educate kids.

In the most recent election, however, the office of new state administrator of the school district, Vince Matthews, chose not to cast a ballot, even though it would cost the district $700,000 a year. His decision proved pivotal. Last month, the city council declared that the tax increase had passed 53 percent to 47 percent. As in 2006, most Oakland property owners voted against the new tax, but city officials said the measure won anyway because the Port of Oakland voted for it. The port’s votes were valued at $1,405,000, which gave the measure more than enough to win.

It turns out, however, that the city valued the port’s votes at nearly three times more than they should have been worth. And without that vote manipulation, the LLAD would have lost.

The questionable vote counting was first noticed by local activist David Mix, an opponent of the tax increase. Mix wrote a letter to the city last month protesting the overcounting of the port’s votes along with several other issues. When city officials ignored him, Mix turned to good-government activist Charles Pine, a recent candidate for the city council’s at-large seat.

Mix had obtained the raw voting data from the city, and after reviewing it, Pine concluded that the city had “tampered” with the port’s votes. Pine then posted on June 30 a report about his and Mix’s findings on the web site, Oakland Residents for Peaceful Neighborhoods, ORPN.org. The next day, Pine told Full Disclosure what he and Mix had found.

After some investigation, it seemed apparent that city officials had either made a huge mistake or had purposely overcounted the port’s votes. Mix and Pine uncovered port and city records — and I found more — that showed that the port’s votes should have been worth only about $553,000, not $1,405,000. The reason was simple: both city and port records show that the port was already scheduled to pay the city $852,000 this year in LLAD taxes, and that under the proposed increase, its taxes would go up by $553,000 to $1,405,000.

If the port’s votes had been counted as they should have, then the tax increase would have lost. The “yes” votes would have amounted to $2,378,697 compared to the “no” vote total of $2,826,991. Records from the 2006 election show that the city had overcounted the port’s votes then too, but it didn’t change the outcome because of the school district’s vote against the tax increase.

To find some answers, I called Joe Francisco of Francisco & Associates, a private engineering firm that conducted the election for the city. However, Francisco said last week that he had been instructed by city officials not to answer questions, and directed me to Jocelyn Combs of the city’s public works department. But Combs also refused to be interviewed for this story, and directed me to the office of City Attorney John Russo. However, Russo’s spokesman Alex Katz, said the office also had “no comment.”

Combs then called back and asked to have questions e-mailed to her. After I sent her several, she then responded in an e-mail on July 2 that the reason the port’s votes were counted as $1,405,000 was because the port, like all other public agencies, has been legally exempt from paying LLAD taxes. It’s only required to do so if a ballot measure like this one passes. I then wrote back to her, informing her of the port and city records that Mix, Pine, and I had uncovered that showed otherwise, including a 2006 report she co-authored that said the port had paid $777,251 in 2006 to the city for the LLAD. So how could the port be exempt from a tax that it has been paying for years?

The next day, Combs responded with a convoluted statement, which essentially said that because the port was not legally required to pay the tax, and had only voluntarily agreed to pay it, then it wasn’t a tax. As a result, the city had decided that the port’s legal tax burden under the LLAD had been zero, meaning that with the proposed increase, the port’s vote was worth the entire $1,405,000.

When told of Combs’ explanation that the tax wasn’t really a tax, even though the port had been paying it all along, Pine summed up his frustration: “If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck, it’s a duck. Only in this case it’s spelled with an ‘F’ instead of a ‘D.'”

Oakland officials overwhelming supported the tax increase in large part because without it, the city would have faced a $9.8 million budget shortfall. Indeed, the tax increase appeared to make sense. Heavily used city parks constantly need to be maintained and spruced up. Opponents, however, argued that the city is inefficient and wasteful and should be able to do the job with the tax revenues it already collects.

Regardless, the city’s reasoning for overcounting the port’s votes is disingenuous at best. The port has been paying the tax for years, and as a result, the value of its ballot should have been based on the increase it would be paying under the measure — just as it was for every other property owner who was paying the tax. I voted for the tax, and I wish it had won. But in this case it obviously didn’t. And the city shouldn’t be in the business of manipulating vote tabulations in order to achieve the outcome it desires.

Council President Ignacio De La Fuente told Full Disclosure last week that the council plans to discuss the LLAD vote and the “allegations” made about it during its closed session meeting on July 15. Let’s hope the council does the right thing and admits that most property owners in the city who cast ballots voted against the LLAD, and as a result, it didn’t win. It’s not worth violating the public’s trust in elections.

Redevelopment Deal, Part II

At the same closed-door meeting, the council also plans to discuss a proposed deal for the city to purchase some property in East Oakland. As Full Disclosure reported last month (see “Profiting from Redevelopment,” June 18), the city’s redevelopment agency plans to purchase property on Seminary Avenue from Dan Mayorga for $1.45 million even though Mayorga only paid $380,000 for the same property in October 2007. Mayorga is one of the city’s highest paid contractors and is a friend of De La Fuente.

The city had been interested in buying the property for a few years, but was unable to strike a deal with its previous owner, Luther Patrick. Oakland’s real estate manager Frank Fanelli said Patrick had been a “flake,” while Patrick said he wanted to sell to the city, but that city officials had “held me up.” Then just as Patrick’s property was about to go into foreclosure last fall, Mayorga bought it out from under the city and is now demanding that it pay 382 percent more than what he paid for it.

Neither De La Fuente nor Mayorga returned phone calls seeking comment for the story before it was published, but after it came out, the council president called and said he had done nothing improper. Fanelli had said that when he asked Mayorga how he learned about the property and the city’s interest in it, Mayorga “couldn’t explain it.” But De La Fuente denied tipping off Mayorga about the property.

Mayorga also finally returned my phone calls and said he wasn’t tipped off by De La Fuente or anyone else. He said he learned about the property last year when he saw it on his way home from work. Mayorga said that when he contacted Patrick, Patrick was represented by a real estate agent and the property was on the market. Patrick, however, denied that.

When asked the name of Patrick’s agent, Mayorga said it was someone named “Martinez” from San Francisco, but that he couldn’t remember more. He also said that Patrick was later represented by two real estate agents from the Prudential brokerage on Grand Avenue in Oakland, including one named “Teak.” Mayorga said he couldn’t remember the name of the other agent. When Full Disclosure called the Prudential office on Grand, a representative said they had never heard of anyone by the name of “Teak.”

The council actually approved the property deal with Mayorga last month. But then after our story came out, De La Fuente said he wanted the deal investigated. The proposed deal also stands to benefit the church attended by Councilwoman Desley Brooks, the First African Methodist Episcopal. The church owns property next to Mayorga’s and now wants to sell it to the city. And because the city is planning to pay Mayorga more than what his property is worth, the church stands to make a sizable profit on its land as well.

City officials have defended the $1.45 million price tag, but the city’s own appraisal of the Mayorga property has serious defects. It’s based on out-of-date “comparable” sales and on the notion that Mayorga put $300,000 to $400,000 in improvements to the property. However, public records show that Mayorga never got permits for those improvements, so they are worthless to the city.

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