Mayor’s budget would move parking collections from Transportation to Finance

After months of internal battles, public concern from staff, and even some accusations of previous impropriety, Oakland’s city government has decided to move some parking tasks currently managed by the city’s Department of Transportation, such as revenue collection, to the Finance Department. The changes are outlined in Mayor Barbara Lee’s proposed budget, which was released in late May.

The reorganization is more modest than previously proposed.

According to Kent Bravo, the public information officer for OakDOT, the duties affected in the move include citation payments, meter collections, and parking garage management. Parking policy, parking enforcement, and abandoned auto removal will remain in the hands of DOT.

“These proposals reflect months of discussion with the relevant departments and labor leaders, and will align Oakland’s parking functions with departmental expertise,” Bravo said.

If the City Council adopts the changes as part of the budget, they will take effect on July 1.

Finance director Bradley Johnson has argued that moving parking enforcement to finance was important for increasing ticket revenue and improving collection efficiency. This claim was vigorously challenged by dozens of OakDOT staff members, including Michael Ford, the department’s former director of parking operations.

In a rowdy City Council meeting in February, Ford said that city revenues were “strong and growing” and that the abandoned autos division was performing its work “efficiently and quickly,” leading to “high morale” for members of his staff. Two months earlier, he had written a letter to the mayor and provided an analysis of the proposed plan, saying that staffers were “appalled” by it and that it would be tantamount to dismantling the department. If the city wanted to speed up collections, Ford and other OakDOT personnel said at the time, they could simply hire more people to staff that understaffed, overworked operation. Ford also said that housing collections inside the transportation department prevented “people in power” from waiving illegal parking citations or obtaining other parking privileges, which he claimed several people had requested in the past. Ford did not provide specific details about who in the city had asked him for these kinds of favors.

In October, when the finance department first sought to take over parking operations, the Oakland Business Improvement District Alliance also sent out a letter in support of OakDOT, noting the rise in collections and improved parking operations over the last few years.

According to city staffers with knowledge of the conversations inside City Hall, who asked not to be named for fear of professional reprisal, Lee heard about the pushback and asked the Finance Department to further explain in detail its reasoning for requesting the move. In the February City Council meeting, District 3 Councilmember Charlene Wang also requested a formal analysis of the potential impact of the move. The finance team, the sources said, did not provide a satisfactory answer to Mayor Lee.

Ultimately, the finance department proposed a less significant reorganization, shifting a smaller number of parking department tasks to finance operations. The new plan moves 13 parking enforcement positions from OakDOT to finance, instead of the 100 or so the department originally planned. Four new positions, including two managers and two collections officers, will be created to boost collections operations. According to an April 27 email from Jamie Parks, the deputy director of OakDOT, which The Oaklandside has reviewed, the two managers appointed to lead collections inside finance are Danita Lee, a veteran staffer of the department, as the interim deputy parking manager, and Dina Banks, as interim parking supervisor for the Parking Mobility Assistance Center, the office that manages parking tickets and passes.

The same email said that Ira Christian, a parking operations supervisor since 2014, was also recently appointed Interim Parking Manager, overseeing parking enforcement, among other tasks, within OakDOT.

The previous plan would have returned abandoned vehicle enforcement to the Oakland Police Department. That move has now been canceled.

The proposed changes, according to the city staffers, have led to a “mixed” morale inside the transportation department. Those who are not moving to finance are pleased, while many of the 13 who will move over to finance are still “very upset.” One source told us that people on the collections team fear that simple tasks such as reporting an inoperable parking meter to get it fixed might take longer because it would now involve coordinating with, three separate departments: finance, transportation, and public works. The same source told us that ever since collections moved to OakDOT in 2021, employees have felt more productive.

Savlan Hauser, the executive director of the Jack London Improvement District and a signatory of the Oakland BID Alliance letter opposing the finance takeover of parking, told The Oaklandside today that she was “very glad” that the move was not as “extreme” as first proposed.

But she said she remained frustrated that city officials kept businesses and the transportation department staff out of the loop on the proposal until it was made public last October, since businesses see parking operations as integral to a healthy revenue ecosystem.

“We work closely with the transportation department because it goes hand in hand with economic development and our private right of ways and is critical to our public safety and safe and welcoming neighborhoods,” she said. “City staff, including collections, feel it makes sense to be part of a transportation system because otherwise it feels like a money grab as opposed to it being in service of a functioning department.”

Hauser said OakDOT staff have been especially responsive to changing circumstances and road conditions, such as during COVID, when Ford and his team were able to quickly determine how businesses could use their curb space. She said she worries that placing parking staff in finance might slow some of these processes down.

One city staffer told us that one possible benefit of the move is that the finance department might now have an incentive to grow the collections staff now that they are responsible for it, claiming they had pushed back on similar requests from OakDOT in the past after the team had shrunk in recent years.

As part of the mayor’s budget, OakDOT will receive $1.25 million to pay contractors for parking meter mobile payment application services, $1.6 million for street sweeping, and $100,000 in budgeted overtime pay to handle parking enforcement on weekends and evenings.