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Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums made a rare visit to the Oakland City Council tonight, Tuesday, and for the purpose of breaking a tie vote on an alternative created by Councilmember Jean Quan to a resolution that if passed would have taken money from the Oakland public campaign financing program and put it into a plan for educating voters on the new Instant Run-Off Voting system. Quan's alternative split money $100,000 for campaigns, and $100,000 for IRV education. The current City of Oakland program provides just over $200,000 for public campaign financing. In other words, the city helps you by providing matching funds. The Mayor stepped forward after a lively but brutally nasty two-minute statement by Oakland's number one gadfly Sanjiv Handa. Sanjiv accused the City of Oakland and its City Council of being "greedy" because incumbent councilmembers running for reelection didn't want to have competition. While this space agrees with Sanjiv in principle, Handa...

The terrible death of 59-year-old Tiansheng Yu one again sheds light on a problem that has plagued Oakland for some time, yet many don't want to talk openly about it. This space has, and will continue to do so. The City of Oakland has a problem with young black men who just walk around picking people who they think are welcome targets for violence. I blogged about this problem many times. In the case of the " mugging over at Wayne Avenue in 2007 ,"a man who lived on the 300 block of Wayne Avenue in Adams Point was mugged at gunpoint. Someone in the area two black men do the crime in what was described as an "underlit driveway." In 2006, a young woman walked around China Hill, Haddon Hill, and Grand Lake posting a letter called Muggings on Athol . The letter, as I wrote then in Oakland Focus , stated a painful fact: that whites are the targets of assault and theft crimes committed by African Americans in the area. She wrote: We are faced with two d...

Susan Mernit, Oakland Local Founder and Executive Editor, was kind enough to post her interview with Oakland's At-Large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan at Zennie62.com and at SFGate.com, and here at Oakland Focus. The Rebecca Kaplan interview's a to-the-point discussion of her reasons behind her decision to run. (A bit of disclosure: Rebecca Kaplan's communications director is a blogger and editor at Oakland Local.) Before the text is presented, this blogger has to make one observation: Councilmember Kaplan said she's thought "for months" about running for Mayor. Given that she's barely two years into her time as Councilmember, it seems safe to say Kaplan was not happy being Oakland's At Large elected official and wanted to be Mayor of Oakland as far back as after the first year of her term. But that's this blogger's observation: I yield the floor to Susan Mernit: When Rebecca Kaplan announced last week she had formed a committee to ex...

See: city of oakland, mayor of oakland, ron dellums, jean quan, don macLeay, jean quan, greg harland, maya dillard smith, terrance candell The City of Oakland, California Mayor's race is more crowded than you think. It's not just Don Perata, Don MacLeay, Oakland District 4 Councilmember Jean Quan, and Rebecca Kaplan. The Oakland Mayor's Race has ten candidates, nine of them fully known and the last one still largely "under the radar." The full list of Oakland Mayor's Race candidates consists of incumbent Ron Dellums, Don Perata, Don MacLeay, Jean Quan, Greg Harland, Maya Dillard Smith, Terrance Candell, and an tenth person who's still not ready for prime time, but will be. Ten choices for Mayor of Oakland, California. This blogger just got off the phone with Greg Hatland, who's an Oaklander who graduated from Oakland High School in 1964 and lives close to California Attorney General Jerry Brown in the Oakland Hills. Hartland, who's we...

The City of Oakland, California Mayor's race is more crowded than you think. It's not just Don Perata, Don MacLeay, Oakland District 4 Councilmember Jean Quan, and Rebecca Kaplan. The Oakland Mayor's Race has ten candidates, nine of them fully known and the last one still largely "under the radar." The full list of Oakland Mayor's Race candidates consists of incumbent Ron Dellums, Don Perata, Don MacLeay, Jean Quan, Greg Harland, Maya Dillard Smith, Terrance Candell, and an tenth person who's still not ready for prime time, but will be. Ten choices for Mayor of Oakland, California. This blogger just got off the phone with Greg Hatland, who's an Oaklander who graduated from Oakland High School in 1964 and lives close to California Attorney General Jerry Brown in the Oakland Hills. Hartland, who's website is at Harland4Mayor.com , decided to run for Mayor because Oakland has been a focus of crime for as long as he could remember and wante...

The Oakland Salon Beatdown Video is back in the news as the trail starts in April. According to ABC News Channel 7 in the Bay Area, the pretrial hearing was held in Alameda County Superior Court, Department 104. Melissa Seals is the owner of the Oakland hair salon where she was the focus of a brutal beatdown by not one, but six women in the spring of 2009. The women entered the salon and two started the attack while one made a video of it. They then stole her merchandise and raised the blinds so people walking by could see what they were doing, according to The Huffington Post . Here's the ABC News video (Warning: it's graphic): The ABC video reports that in 2010, 36-year-old Melissa Seals is suffering from Post-Tramatic Stress Disorder. One of the attackers is named Kavina Bryant, who attended the hearing. Bryant is the woman in the green sweat pants and blue halter top who does much of the beating of Seals. Another woman, who Melissa Seals identifies as "...