In September, Oaklanders learned the city had blown a deadline to apply for a share of $267 million in state funding from the California Board of State and Community Corrections. The grant supports law enforcement agencies’ efforts to fight retail theft, and OPD could have gotten millions of dollars.
Missing out on easy money at a time when the city was strapped for cash and experiencing an uptick in crime turned this into an embarrassing scandal for Oakland leaders.
Mayor Sheng Thao and City Administrator Jestin Johnson took responsibility for the missed opportunity. But city leaders also blamed the fumble on the Economic and Workforce Development Department, one of about two dozen departments in the city. In September, a city spokesperson said EWD had identified the grant opportunity in early June and collaborated with OPD on the grant application. However, EWD staffers missed the submission deadline and Oakland lost out on crime-fighting funds.
But was the Economic and Workforce Development Department really to blame?
Acting City Auditor Michael Houston announced last month that his team will investigate why the city failed to apply for the grant.
The Oaklandside has also been looking into this issue. So far, our investigation has turned up records that raise questions about who dropped the ball.
We have learned that several city departments were first alerted to the existence of the grant on April 25, not in June as the city previously claimed. That means Oakland officials were aware of the grant opportunity less than two weeks after the state announced it.
Among the people who first learned about the grant were representatives from the Oakland Police Department and the Economic and Workforce Development Department. Public records show that an EWD staffer flagged the grant for OPD and offered to help the department with the application. Police officials replied that they had it covered.
It’s unclear what work OPD did on the grant application between April 26 and June. The department has refused to answer questions or respond to our Public Records Act request by turning over its internal communications about the grant.
We did receive records from the Economic and Workforce Development Department, so we can say with confidence what happened between May 30 and July 7, the day the application was due.
According to those records, a different EWD worker spotted the same grant opportunity around early June. This person, who we’ll talk about later in the story, contacted OPD and offered to help. This time, OPD accepted the offer. By the time this collaboration was cemented, OPD and EWD staff had less than a month to complete the application.
Emails obtained by The Oaklandside show that city staff scrambled until the very last minute to obtain necessary data and materials for the application, which was submitted on the day it was due.
Other records show that, after the city’s failure became known to the public, EWD staff were upset at being made to take the blame.
When the San Francisco Chronicle broke the story about the missed grant deadline on September 14, the head of the Economic and Workforce Development Department, Sofia Navarro, stepped forward to say she was responsible.
“At the end of the day I think that responsibility falls on me as director, making sure that staff is well-resourced, and that I check in… making sure that if we are saying we are going to help support in writing this grant, that we are going to execute and accomplish that,” Navarro said at the time. “I take ownership in making sure that is done appropriately.”
But according to recently obtained city records, Navarro learned the same day the Chronicle story ran that OPD had been aware of the grant since April. She also learned that a member of her own department had been rebuffed in trying to help the police with the application back in April.
Navarro contacted her boss, the city administrator, and the mayor’s office the next day to complain about how her team had been singled out.
“If OPD was already working on this grant and aware since April, I question why this was not mentioned at all during this process to us?” Navarro wrote to City Administrator Johnson and the mayor’s chief of staff Leigh Hanson. “Why did this responsibility, which very clearly was OPD’s from the start, suddenly become EWD’s responsibility to submit? This raises serious concerns and questions for me.”
Navarro wrote in the email that OPD’s actions lacked “transparency and accountability” and asked to have a discussion with city leaders to ensure shared accountability.
City officials did not respond to questions from The Oaklandside about whether that meeting took place.
There’s still a lot that we don’t know about why Oakland missed the deadline. The Oaklandside is still trying to obtain records from OPD to learn more about the work it did to assist in drafting the grant application, and what its responsibilities were in submitting the grant. The department has failed to turn over any records for over two months.
OPD officials also did not respond to questions about what took place between April and June.
While our investigation has yet to conclusively show who dropped the ball, the documents reveal that city staff were internally in disagreement about whose fault it was.
When did OPD first learn about the grant?
Oakland has a contract with a company, Townsend Public Affairs, that lobbies for it in Sacramento. One of this lobbying firm’s responsibilities is to look out for potential sources of funding for the city. On April 25, Niccolo De Luca of Townsend, emailed OPD Interim Police Chief Darren Allison, OPD Deputy Director Kiona Suttle, the Mayor’s chief of policy and legislative affairs, Zach Goldman, an employee in the Finance Department, and Deputy Director of the Economic and Workforce Development Greg Minor, about the state’s organized retail theft grant.
In a separate email to Allison, Minor told the chief that he had forwarded the grant opportunity to several OPD officers.
“Do you think OPD will take it from here or would it be helpful if I organized a teams meeting to discuss this grant (and if so, who should I include)?” Minor asked in his email to Alison.
Allison responded that OPD’s team “should be able to handle” the application pending an assessment of the grant. Amber Fuller, OPD’s acting grants coordinator, emailed Minor that she would follow up on the grant opportunity.
About two months later, on June 28, Minor followed up to ask Fuller if OPD was indeed applying. Fuller assured him the department was. “We should have everything written up by the end of this week,” she wrote.
On September 14—months after Oakland had missed the deadline—Minor emailed Navarro saying he was surprised OPD hadn’t applied for the grant, “as they indicated to me for months that they were handling it.”
How did Economic and Workforce Development get involved?
Even though Minor worked for the Economic and Workforce Development Department and was aware of the grant in April, it appears that his colleagues in EWD mostly weren’t aware of the grant until they learned about it months later.
On May 30, Savlan Hauser, executive director of the Jack London Improvement District, emailed city councilmembers and the mayor urging them to prioritize public safety in the 2023-2025 budget. On June 6, Shawnee Keck, an urban economic analyst for EWD, contacted Hauser with information about the retail theft grant, which she said she found in a memo from the city’s lobbyist.
“This grant is available for OPD, how can we partner with them to apply on behalf of everyone!?” I’ll help them write it!” Keck volunteered. Keck didn’t appear to know that OPD was already aware of the grant and had told other city staff, including a member of her own department, they would handle it.
Keck and Hauser looped in Barbara Leslie, head of the Oakland Chamber of Commerce. Keck’s boss, Navarro, was also included on this thread. Leslie said she had previously heard about the grant from Home Depot during a policy meeting, and Oakland appeared to be “a bit late” to the application process. Leslie advised that she could reach out to the “Chief or Barry” (referring to OPD Interim Chief Darren Alison and Barry Donelan, the head of the police officers union) to find the best contact at OPD. Keck, who included her boss Navarro on some of these emails, volunteered to coordinate with OPD and the City Council about the grant.
On June 13, Keck emailed Navarro about the application. In that exchange, Keck noted that her role “is to advocate for our businesses and associations.” Keck also noted that OPD would probably need to file the application proposal because “the money goes to them.”
Two days later, Keck updated Navarro, Leslie, and Hauser that she spoke with Deputy City Administrator Joe Devries, who told her that OPD did not have a full-time grant writer, and that “service teams” had been leading grant proposals with various city partners, which meant EWD could help OPD with the grant. Keck’s tone was optimistic, but she added, “Just in case we can’t do this one, I’m happy to understand the process so we can be ready for the next one!”
The very next day, on June 16, Keck reached out to staff with the city administrator and Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas to figure out a path forward for the grant. She noted some potential procedural hurdles that could make it challenging to submit the grant by the July 7 deadline. That same day, Keck also contacted Tracey Jones, a police services manager with OPD.
“Our first question was whether your team was aware and interested in this opportunity?” Keck asked, adding a link to the grant packet. “Can you advise us on the protocol for the application from your team’s perspective?”
Jones replied three days later by thanking Keck for bringing the grant to her attention. Jones looped in several OPD officials, including the acting grants coordinator Amber Fuller.
When did EWD and the police start working together?
OPD’s Fuller and EWD’s Keck appear to have been working together on the grant by June 20, according to emails we obtained. Fuller said she was working on the grant application with Lieutenant Omar Daza-Quiroz.
None of Keck’s correspondence with Fuller that we have been able to review reference the fact that OPD had been aware of the grant since April, or that the department had previously turned down assistance from a different EWD official.
Between June 20 and the grant deadline on July 7, Keck exchanged emails with OPD officials about the application. Keck also scheduled meetings with OPD, and communicated with officials from the city administration, and members of City Council President Bas’ staff. On June 29, Keck asked Hauser and other business leaders for letters of support.
Three days before the deadline, Keck sent a deputy director for the city administrator with a detailed “storyline” for the grant application she had worked on with several people, including Daza-Quiroz of OPD. In a different email, Keck asked Daza-Quiroz questions about OPD’s budget and asked him for log-in information so she could access the grant application. It appears that OPD had the log-in info to access the state website where the application had to be submitted, which other staff used throughout this process. On July 5, Daza-Quiroz emailed a list of documents that needed to be attached to the application.
On July 6 and 7, OPD staff were still adding information and collecting data for the application, according to emails, including the cost of “upfitting” a patrol car and the salary and benefits for a crime analyst.
On July 7, the submission deadline, Keck emailed her boss and business leaders that OPD wanted one letter signed by multiple business associations. Barbara Leslie said normally for grant submissions it’s helpful to have multiple letters from different stakeholders, but Keck reiterated that OPD wanted one letter.
That same day at 5:07pm, minutes after the deadline, Keck contacted the BSCC for help.
“We have just discovered at the time of application that our attachments have not been saved? We have tried to submit this application several times before the 5pm deadline; however, the attachments that we previously uploaded have not been saved in our application?” Keck said. She added that the team had not submitted a couple documents that didn’t seem to apply to Oakland, but the application couldn’t be submitted without them. Fuller and Daza-Quiroz are copied on the email.
Keck’s request was forwarded to BSCC’s legal counsel. On July 21, the agency informed Keck that Oakland “did not meet the necessary requirements for a successful application submission.” Oakland had failed to apply.
The Oaklandside also obtained public records from the BSCC that show city staff also tried to glean more information from BSCC about Oakland’s application, and whether the application platform experienced any technical issues.
So whose fault was it? And how are they fixing it?
City emails obtained and reviewed so far by The Oaklandside show that officials from OPD and EWD knew of the grant application shortly after the state announced the opportunity and that police leaders said early on they would handle the application. Later on, different staff in the city’s Economic and Workforce Development Department became aware of the grant and tried to get involved.
When they did jump in again to help, and after they took the blame for missing the deadline, EWD staff complained to city leaders. In her September 15 email to City Administrator Johnson, Navarro said Keck was trying to be helpful and over-committed herself “to something that never should have been her responsibility” as an urban economic analyst.
Because OPD has yet to respond with records sought in our Public Records Act request submitted on September 25, we still don’t know how much work the police department was able to accomplish on the application, and other important details.
When we asked the city recently about OPD’s role in the missed grant deadline, city spokesperson Sean Maher told us that it was the result of systemic city issues.
“Several of your questions below seem to be zeroing in on individual steps taken or not taken by individual staff. We want to be clear that this is an issue of leadership accountability – and both Mayor Thao and City Administrator Johnson have taken that accountability to acknowledge and address the need for systemic improvements,” Maher said.
He noted that the city updated its framing of what happened in the days and weeks after the news broke, culminating in the mayor taking ownership of the mishap during her state of the city address.
“Mayor Thao and City Administrator Johnson take accountability for that outcome and have been hard at work implementing swiftly-identified improvements,” Maher said.
In her October state of the city address, Thao said the city was fast-tracking the hiring of a grants coordinator, upgrading the city’s grant management software tools, and seeking the support of professional consultants to help with grants.
The city auditor’s investigation is ongoing. And we’ll provide an update to this story once we learn more from the records we expect to obtain from OPD.
