Oakland Education Association Mayoral interview and questionnaire

Oakland Education Association Mayoral interview and questionnaire

bbalderston@earthlink.net
bolsonjo@yahoo.com



Dear Mr. Macleay,
This communication is sent on behalf of the Oakland Education Association's
Political Involvement Committee to all the Oakland mayoral candidates to invite you to an in-person interview and to request that you feel out a questionnaire which will help us in our endorsement process. We apologize that this has not been sent earlier but we have been reorganizing our PIC with the start of the new school year.
The date for the interview is Saturday, September 11th from 9 am to 2 pm. We are providing 20 minutes for each candidate. If you could select three time slots in order of preference, we could attempt to best accommodate you. The location for the interviews will be the CTA/OEA Regional Center at 1211 Embarcadero, Suite 204, Oakland. You can respond as to your availability by calling OEA President Betty Olson-Jones at
(510) 763-4020 (office) or (510) 866-3676 (cell).

In addition, there is a questionnaire you will see below which we would ask you to complete and return before the 11th, sent either to the OEA office (272 East 12th St., Oakland 94606) or on-line to: bolsonjo@yahoo.com

Thank you for your commitment and prompt responses.

For the OEA PIC,

Bill Balderston

Questionnaire for Oakland Mayor Candidates:

1. What is your background and are your qualifications to be Mayor?

My background is that of a trade school graduate, general machinist (19 years), trade school teacher and on the job training instructor. Since 1998 I have worked in computer network administration, starting as an employee, becoming self employed and currently a small business owner with 4 employees.

My qualifications for leadership in Oakland comes from 4 parts of my background.

I am a long time Oakland resident and civic volunteer. My sons are both born here and one is currently enrolled in Oakland public school. My business and my home are both located in a building I own here. Having come here 20 years ago, my life is fully committed to this community

As a world citizen I know much of the communities that make up our multicultural city. I speak both Spanish and Mandarin as well as four other languages. I have lived and worked in many other countries and have been exposed to a wide spectrum of what it is possible for us to do with out city. I have seen other possibilities and so have most of our immigrant residents.

As a working class person who has been able to return to school and obtain a college degree, start my own business and become a landlord I am part of how our economy works. My perspective of it is much more varied than probably anyone else running in this race. My knowledge of environmental issues, technical issues, engineering, recycling, construction, as well as service and retail allows me to understand the transit, development and industrial projects Oakland has involved itself in from the implementation side.

I bring to Oakland a life time of working for social justice and the environment. I have been project director of a small scale hydro project, I have worked in the environmental movement and I have been a community activist in Oakland for the past 10 years. This is not what a main stream political office holder calls being a politician, but it is the kind of politician that I have been. From that perspective I have a wide grasp of city issues as viewed from the resident point of view. That includes our crime problems, our school problems and our budget.


2. What are your main priorities for leading the city government of Oakland?

Restorative justice and community policing.
Whole community support to our schools.
Reform the budget process.
Reform the council districts and elections.


3. How do you see city policies and programs relating to the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), its students, parents and staff? How do you see your role as mayor in relation to the school?

I support the schools districts autonomous relationship to the mayor. I do not believe that a mayor should be getting involved in making educational policy.

That said, I think the city could do much more to help the schools. I would like to bring back out the failed promise to make better dual use of school infrastructure and build them into more of a civic center environment. I also feel that Oakland students would benefit from city programs that continued at school, before and after school and from the schools. Another area where I would share resources with the school would be to revamp our city wide volunteer organizing. In all these areas some good starts and some false starts have already taken place, what I would like to do different is to manage and support it better in a more central manner.

See the funding questions below for more


4. Would you advocate for canceling the OUSD debt to the state? How would you facilitate this?

YES and I would like to see an audit / investigation of the period of state control.

It is my firm belief that we need a mayor who would ADVOCATE for the city, schools especially, in a constituent service mode. Just as a resident goes to their member of council to get help dealing with some individual bureaucratic problem, the mayor should be the constituent advocate for the whole. The school district should count on the mayor to make a ruckus on our collective behalf.

In practice that would mean a mayor who was stepping outside of charter description of the job and making our issues part of EVERY negotiation with the county and state.

The current system of ADA funding allocations punishes districts with problems like ours. At the very least the formula should be modified to help us deal with truancy. I will advocate its modification all the time. It will become a major subject of every conversations with our state representatives, and I will reach out to the other cities who are also hurt by it and campaign for a change.

This change will not come easily and may not come in a single administration.

So at the same time I will join every effort that can get more funds to our schools NOW under current allocation rules. The Dellums fund raising machine should be retained and we should make it a major city priority to help our schools in every way.

The dual use I mentioned above is also a budget issue. We should think of investing on our public spaces. School libraries can be entwined with the public library system, school space can be entwined with park space and we can choose to have many of our programs start and stop on school ground. This is a way for our city to keep our services up and also make more resources available to the school system.

5. What new funding sources, both internal and external to the city, would you pursue? What strategies do you have for accessing these funds? What timetables do you project for obtaining these funds? Do you see a role for the Port of Oakland in expanding resources?

I can not answer this question and I do not believe that anyone can.
The City of Oakland is facing and will continue to face a major budget crisis.

A major part of my program is to advocate for a budget convention and revamp both the budget and the budget process. The results of that convention I will bring to the voters. My job as mayor will be to lead the budget reform movement and process, not to micro manage it.


6. What services, especially around jobs, housing and health care, would you stress? Is expansion of programs possible? How would you deal with potential cuts in services?

I will resist service cuts. As I stated above, I will continue to seek funds inside the existing framework while at the same time request changes from the State to provide relief to the city.

When I speak of re-organizing I am including the hundreds of contractors providing city services. There is also a half billion redevelopment budget being spent here. I will set up an administration that pushes very hard on the conditions applied to those contracts such as local hire, affordable housing and local contracting. Considering the amount of money involved, there should be more flexibility if we put the whole system on the table, but it still we be very hard to make sure our public needs stay funded.

Yes it is possible to expand some programs, but there will be some cuts in pet projects and speculative development in favor of public programs and infrastructure.


7. What is the potential impact of the "Oak to Ninth" project on downtown Oakland? Are there other projects involving more "green development" that you could envision?

I was opposed to Oak to Ninth and continue to have serious doubts. The most important one is that the current EIR says that freeway pollution at the site is above acceptable levels, whatever acceptable means. Maybe the down economy has done us a favor here and we have a chance to reconsider the best use of that land.

I am very much in favor of development and Green standards. My focus will be more on conversion of the existing buildings in our city and bringing Green Development into the regular permit and planning process.

The Brower Building in Berkeley is a good example of what our building codes should look like. I think Oakland is ready to embrace the future and just make environmentally sound policies part and parcel of how we do our building, renovations, large projects and not need to be in some kind of special category. There is really not a need to authorize other methods in our building code and we need to make the permit process for retrofitting existing real estate realistic.

Not part of your question, but probably part of the answer is the Zoning and Planning required to make more walkable neighborhoods. (and this involves the schools as civic center). The least polluting transit method is the one you never take. We need a Green vision as part of our vision for our neighborhoods and then we need to stick by it.

8. What are your ideas on the funding for and practices of the Oakland Police Department? How does this relate to restorative justice? How does it relate to truancy?

The police have 4 social problems dropped on their laps that cause a major portion of what becomes crime. They are:
Truancy
Homelessness
Parolee recidivism.
Substance abuse.

These problems are better handled by social workers than police officers.
(Of course all 4 can be symptoms of other problems, but that is for the social workers.)

In the example of truancy, a school based civilian city employee based out of the neighborhood school will be much more effective than a police officer reaching out to these families.

And it costs less. Much less. The Byzantine aspects of our budget need to be changed because we seemed to be trapped choosing the more expensive, less effective method due to lack of funds. I have heard the explanations and I continue to want budget reform.

Restorative Justice gets thrown around to mean a lot of different things.
I prefer the McRae methods of community sentencing.
In our schools what I see is a need to help youth take responsibility for their actions to the community and to their victims and for the community to keep these young people here to make their amends and AWAY from our criminal justice and prison system which is doing no good at all. This is not always possible, but when it is, it has proven to be as effective as criminal court as its LOWEST result. It usually does better and again it ALWAYS costs less.

I am a strong advocate of restorative justice.

9. What are your feelings on the role of public sector unions? Have you ever been a union member and acted in a union leadership role?

I have been an IAM member from when I first became a Journeyman machinist in Vancouver back in 1981. I am still a member. My last shop job I was the Shop Steward. My first ever political activity was to organize a union in the plastics manufacture where I worked in Montreal in 1979.

I do not know a lot about public sector unions. I was in one, but not in the US.
My main feeling is that is natural and normal for any worker to be organized and represented.
Of course that right has been seriously eroded in our country and I am one of those people who stands up for unions and people’s rights to be in them. I will be no different as mayor.

10. What main endorsements from individuals and organizations have you obtained?

I am the official candidate of the Green Party endorsed by the city and county branch.

11. What are the sources of funding for your campaign?

We are a grass roots group. We do not accept big money. Almost all of our campaign materials, website, online resources and such are produced by our volunteers.

12. What are ways to have ongoing communications and to plug-in to your campaign should we endorse you?

If you should endorse me you will be the first labor organization to do so.
And I would be VERY honored.
My campaign manager, myself and our core volunteers are all local activists and we are very available all the time. Our support of the union movement and our support for Oakland teachers is not in any way dependant on who supports us. Support of Labor is one of our core values.

I will welcome open communications between myself and the Green Party with labor no matter who you endorse. As a community leader I consider that a responsibility. If elected mayor then all the more so.

13. Any final thoughts?

I was expecting more questions about the teachers and schools.

So, please let me say a few things. While I think a mayor should stay out of running schools, we should not be blind to what is going on.

I am opposed to all this convoluted high stakes testing.
It is great that our students have better grades, but this is not way to evaluate students, teachers and schools. I do not like the pressures it puts on schools and I feel that EDUCATION suffers.

I do not think that there is a bad teacher crisis. Too much concern has been places on teacher performance with the sub text that bad teachers are to blame for our bad schools.

Maybe if we funded the schools well, had good music, sports, and other social programs, smaller class sizes, more support staff, more and better school health clinics with schools in safe neighborhoods then we could look at the teacher performance and test scores. We are not there but I am very ready to try THAT experiment.