Features

Oakland’s Measure DD Money Difficult to Spend

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday January 12, 2007

More than four years after Oakland voters overwhelmingly passed the $198 million Measure DD water and recreation bond, Oakland city officials are learning a truism: Spending city money can sometimes be far more difficult than obtaining it. 

In the fall of 2002, backed by an impressive coalition of city officials, environmentalists, and public parks advocates, Measure DD was approved by an 80 percent to 20 percent vote of city residents. 

Aside from setting aside more than $88 million for restoration and water quality improvements for Oakland’s “crown jewel,” Lake Merritt, the bond included a grab bag of popular expenditures, including $53 million for ensuring public access to the long closed-off Oakland Estuary waterfront, $10 million for restoration of creeks and waterways throughout the city, and another $20 million for building or upgrading public recreation facilities. 

$70.5 million of the $198 million has already been issued in city bonds. 

Measure DD’s most dramatic and signature projects were penciled in for the bottom of Lake Merritt, where the lake waters look across to the city’s Kaiser Convention Center. The bond language proposed to completely narrow and restructure the freeway-wide 14th Street-12th Street interchange that currently divides Lake Merritt from the Convention Center grounds. 

According to the project description on the city’s Measure DD website, “12th Street will be redesigned into a tree-lined boulevard with signalized intersections and crosswalks and a landscaped median. The redesign would create significant new parkland at the south end of Lake Merritt Park, remove unsafe and unsightly pedestrian tunnels, provide safer and continuous access for pedestrians and bicyclists along the perimeter of Lake Merritt, and improved access between the Kaiser Convention Center and Laney College.” 

In addition, the bond set aside $27 million for opening up the Lake Merritt Channel, which drains the lake waters into the estuary through a hidden culvert running under the interchange. In practical terms, the two projects on the lake’s western edge would extend the Lake Merritt park land all the way into the public lands abutting the Oakland Unified School District administrative properties and the Peralta Community College District and Laney College athletic fields, as well as effectively extend Lake Merritt itself, through the Lake Merritt Channel, all the way out into the estuary. 

Oakland had not seen such a dramatic public works water project since the mid 1800’s when what we know as the present Lake Merritt was created out of its original tidal estuary marshland. 

Even before a single shovel of dirt had been turned, at least one of Measure DD’s proposed projects has already had a profound effect on Oakland’s political landscape. The prospect of opening up the now all-but-hidden Lake Merritt Channel resulted in a sudden and dramatic rise in value for the public property surrounding the waterway, leading to intense pressure to turn the property over to private development. 

In late 2004, members of the Peralta Community College District Board of Trustees authorized negotiations with Oakland developer Alan Dones to come up with a development plan that included channel-abutting lands owned by the district and Laney College. Intense opposition from the Laney College community and unions representing Peralta workers led to a scuttling of the deal, but the controversy contributed to the defeat in last November’s elections of Peralta Trustee Alona Clifton, who was closely associated with Dones. In addition, a federal grand jury looking into corruption in Oakland politics has issued subpoenas to Peralta, seeking details of the Dones deal. 

Meanwhile, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, in his capacity as legal operator of the state-seized Oakland Unified School District, is currently negotiating a contract with an east-coast development team to purchase OUSD administrative and school properties bordering on the Lake Merritt Channel.  

Acknowledging how the Measure DD money had suddenly transformed what once had been an obscure part of Oakland’s landscape, the school district’s 2005 Request For Proposals on its downtown-area property said that the district was “seeking a real estate development team to enhance the value of several parcels in the highly desirable Lake Merritt Channel Area.” 

That proposed deal has resulted in a rare unity of Oakland politicians in opposition, with newly-elected Mayor Ron Dellums and newly-elected Assemblymember Sandré Swanson as well as the Oakland City Council, the OUSD Advisory Board of Trustees, and the Peralta Community College Board of Trustees all coming out in opposition to the proposed sale.  

But while developers wheedle and wrangle with local politicians over how to get some financial benefit from the Measure DD makeovers, many of the Measure DD projects have stalled despite their general popularity, delayed by citizen protest and lawsuits, as well as higher-than-expected costs. 

City officials have issued $9.5 million in bonds to finance the 12th Street renovation portion of the Lake Merritt project, an EIR was completed and bids were put out last November, with construction scheduled to begin this winter or spring. 

But with construction bids coming in some 25 percent higher than expected, Oakland’s Department of Public Works has put the 12th Street renovation project on hold while the city seeks $10 million in federal highway money to meet the project’s higher-projected budget. Instead of a projected construction completion date of the 12th Street renovation by the end of 2008, city officials are now saying that the city will not even be ready to put out bids for the project again until the end of this year. 

In the summer of 2006, landscaping of the Lake Merritt parkland called for in Measure DD was halted when members of the Friends of the Lake organization filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court blocking the removal of more than 200 trees that were part of the renovation. Residents along Grand Avenue have also loudly complained about another facet of the project, the proposed paving over of a meadow near the Lake Merritt Boathouse, turning it into a parking lot to accommodate a new restaurant. 

As a result of the delays and citizen complaints, city officials are working on a second Environmental Impact Report to supplement and expand upon the original EIR issued after the bond measure was initially passed. Officials hope that the new EIR will answer the complaints, help win the lawsuit, and address National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) concerns necessary to obtain federal monies. 

A scoping session for the new EIR was held by the City Planning Commission last week, with the comment period for written statements from the public now extended to the close of the business day on January 22. 

Meanwhile, work on another Measure DD project, construction of the 150,000-square-foot Oakland Family and Aquatics Center in East Oakland, is also stalled. A pet project of District Seven Councilmember Larry Reid, the proposed indoor sports and swimming pool recreation complex proposed for Edes Avenue between 98th and 85th has yet to either get off the ground or spend much of its allotted money.  

$1 million of the $10 million East Oakland center’s allocation was set aside in the city’s initial round of bond issuance and $3 million in state money was granted in 2003, but a plan to enlist the Salvation Army to run the center has fallen through, and the Measure DD official project status summary says only that “other options are now being considered.” 

For his part, Measure DD Project Manager Joel Peter is philosophical about the delays. 

“You win some and you lose some,” Peter says in a telephone interview, adding that “we’re moving ahead on several of the [Measure DD] projects,” including renovation of the Studio One Arts Center (one of the two recreation centers named in the measure), restoration of the municipal boathouse, new construction at Children’s Fairyland, and restoration of creeks outside of the Lake Merritt watershed. 

Meanwhile, Peter says that, perhaps as karmic compensation for the overbid of the 12th Street project, bids for the Measure DD extension of the estuary waterfront trail near the Fruitvale bridge came in lower than expected, and construction on that portion of the project is expected to begin this spring.  

And Measure DD bond money is having a spin-off effect on various other areas of city life seemingly unrelated to the bond’s original goal of water quality restoration and creek daylighting, with the City Administrator’s office, for example, estimating that the bond “will generate approximately $2.8 million for public art projects pertaining to Measure DD.” 

Details of Measure DD, including the bond measure’s original ballot language and a spreadsheet of project status, is available on the City of Oakland’s website at http://www.oaklandpw.com/Page794.aspx.