Whenever the City Council wants to do something they don’t want us to know about, they hold what’s called a “closed session.” This is a secret meeting the public and the media are not allowed to attend. Whatever agreements are reached are hidden forever, never to be publicly revealed.
Most closed sessions are about sensitive litigation in which the city is being sued—for instance, a recent closed session concerned the lawsuit former Police Chief Armstrong has filed against the City of Oakland. As much as I’d love to know what happened in that one, I understand the need for privacy at this point. But other secret meetings are held on matters related to labor unions. In addition to the City Council members, attendees include union leaders and Oakland City Administrator Jestin Johnson. In recent weeks, labor unions at these secret meetings have included Services Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 21, and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1245.
Aren’t we, the taxpayers, entitled to know about these clandestine meetings? After all, whatever agreements are reached, we’re the ones that are going to have to pay for them. Well, the fact is that we, the taxpayers, are entitled to know, by law! Our guarantee is the Ralph M. Brown Act, which, according to the California Attorney-General, “ensures the public’s right to attend the meetings of public agencies, facilitates public participation in all phases of local government decision-making, and curbs misuse of the democratic process by secret legislation.” Under the Brown Act, “all meetings of local legislative bodies are open and public, and all persons are permitted to attend the meetings. Statutory exceptions authorizing closed sessions are construed narrowly, and the Brown Act sunshine law is construed liberally in favor of openness in conducting public business.”
What are these “statutory exceptions authorizing closed sessions”? The Brown Act specifically includes “conference[s] with labor negotiators” as lawful reasons for closed sessions. But, as the Attorney-General noted, such “Statutory exceptions authorizing closed sessions are construed narrowly.” The word “narrowly” thus comes under scrutiny. What does it mean? When no labor negotiations at all are ever made available to the public—which appears to be the case in Oakland--that is the opposite of “narrowly.” It is a broad conspiracy to keep the public in the dark.
In fact, we taxpayers and voters know nothing of the agreements reached between City Council members, who as politicians accept large amounts of money from unions in the form of cash or in-kind donations, and the unions themselves, who clearly would not make a campaign contribution to a politician unless there were some kind of quid pro quo involved. That is just a common-sense inference.
Are we right to be suspicious? Absolutely. It’s notoriously difficult to determine with any precision how much money these unions give to politicians, but there are ways to track it. The OpenSecrets website, for instance, found that, in the 2021-2022 campaign year, SEIU (not just local 1021) transferred some $23 million to various recipients, of which nearly $19 million were direct contributions. Not all this money went to candidates themselves; much of it went to P.R. companies managing their campaigns, and to shadowy DBAs (“Friends of the candidate”) that support candidates but proclaim that they are not officially associated with them.
Then there’s IFPTE Local 21, the engineers union. Given the secrecy, I’ve been unable to determine just how much money the branch has donated to local politicians, but they’ve been bigtime backers of Carroll Fife and Nikki Bas.
We can presume that IFPTE gets something for their dollars. For example, in July 2023, even as the budgets of Oakland and Alameda County were imploding, IFPTE negotiated 15% cost-of-living adjustments for their Alameda County members. At the same time, the union “won an across-the-board wage increase of 14% over three years for all members” in the City of Oakland, a remarkable raise in light of the impending fiscal cliff that, even 18 months ago, many foresaw.
We all want our city workers and contractors to earn a good living. But there’s something unsavory about secret union deals made by Carroll Fife and Nikki Bas, who accept union money while crafting legislation that rewards the unions--legislation the public never learns about, and that now, predictably, is bankrupting Oakland. Whatever is happening in these closed sessions, the implacable secrecy with which they’re conducted strongly implies that the City Council and Jestin Johnson, and by implication whoever is mayor, know they’re playing a down-and-dirty game.
I’m not asking for unions to be excluded from the negotiating process: not at all. But let these things be done in the spirit of the old New England Town Halls: openly, in the full light of day.
Steve Heimoff