Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao wants to freeze many of the roughly 300 vacant positions paid for by the city's General Fund to help balance the 2023-25 budget, her office said this week.
Freezing positions will also allow the city to avoid layoffs. About one-third of the frozen jobs would be sworn police roles.
"We had to make some tough choices in this budget but in the end, we not only avoided catastrophic closures and cuts, we made some investments in our shared future," Thao said in a statement."This is a roadmap to weathering this crisis, making us more resilient to future challenges and emerging stronger as a city."
"It's very much like shaking the sofa of loose coins," Leigh Hanson, the mayor's chief of staff, said Thursday. The proposal to freeze roughly 300 jobs will reduce the full-time equivalent positions in the Police Department by 93, reducing the department's authorized sworn staffing to 710 full-time equivalent roles.
Thao is also proposing to make civilian roles out of 16 police internal investigation positions. The new roles would be in the Police Commission's Community Police Review Agency to provide greater independent review of Oakland police misconduct. The mayor wants to add 10 full-time equivalent jobs to the Oakland Department of Transportation and 24 to the Oakland Head Start and Early Head Start programs.
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