NBC Bay Area just ran a 36-second explainer on Oakland’s Measure EE. Here is what they did not have time to say. On November 3 a simple majority can lock a new system into the city charter. The mayor becomes CEO, gets a veto over laws, and gets a line-item veto over the budget. One person can zero out a park, a street, or a neighborhood project. It takes six of eight council votes to undo it. The City Auditor’s impartial analysis says the package costs $2 million to $2.6 million a year, mostly because the Public Ethics Commission would reset elected pay, with council raises estimated at $36,000 to $108,000 each. Barbara Lee is the one selling this. She convened the working group, she and Council President Kevin Jenkins wrote the plan, and she broke a 4-4 council tie to put it on the ballot for the office she holds and is running to keep. Councilmembers Zac Unger, Janani Ramachandran, Noel Gallo, and Ken Houston voted no. The official argument against it, signed by Loren Taylor, Budget Advisory Commission member Ben Gould, Pam Drake, and Naomi Schiff, calls it a power grab. Their words: it makes government less transparent, increases the risk of corruption, and drives gridlock. A future mayor could appoint unqualified friends to department jobs. And it hands councilmembers massive pay raises while asking them to do less. Nate Miley, Nancy Nadel, and former Ethics Commission chair Ralph Kanz are on the no side too. – at Oakland, CA

Oakland Measure EE is Barbara Lee’s power grab. Measure EE rewrites the City Charter so one mayor can veto Council legislation, line-item veto the budget, and take control of city departments. Your district representative can fight for a street, a park, or a neighborhood project. Under EE, the mayor can zero it out. Stopping her takes six of eight votes. Three allies and the rest of the Council becomes what Zac Unger already called it: a punching bag. The same measure writes politicians a raise. Council pay is $114,678. Measure EE forces them full-time, then lets the Public Ethics Commission benchmark salaries against cities like Los Angeles at about $245,000. That is a path to a 125% pay hike. The City Auditor put the first-year cost at $2.0 to $2.6 million. Oakland is already staring at a $115 to $135 million annual shortfall through 2030. Lee’s working group designed the version that gives the mayor the most power. The Council tied 4-4. She broke the tie herself and put her own expansion of power on the same ballot where she is running to keep the job. She does not deserve more of it. Under this mayor, Oakland lost the last of its major sports teams and now gets Instagram posts about an ultimate frisbee squad. The airport keeps losing real airlines while City Hall celebrates Frontier. Institutions like Home of Chicken and Waffles close and she shows up for the photo. Crime hits parks and homes while proclamations go out for National Mai Tai Day. That is the record. Measure EE would lock more power into that office for every mayor after her. This is not reform. It is veto power plus a pay raise, sold as accountability. Vote NO on Measure EE.

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee’s Strong Mayor Charter Amendment ballot measure is a pure power grab. Plain and simple. It gives the mayor line-item veto power over the entire budget and the ability to hire and fire department heads. With just three allies on the council, she can override the will of the other five. Neighborhood representatives lose real power. Your district councilmember becomes a bystander. At the same time, the measure creates a legal pathway for council salaries to jump from $114,000 toward the $245,000 Los Angeles level. That’s a potential 125% pay raise while the city is in fiscal crisis. Oakland has tried versions of this before and rejected them multiple times. Voters have already said no to concentrating this much power in one office. The process was stacked. Lee’s hand-picked working group wrote the final version that gives her the most power. When the council deadlocked 4-4, she broke the tie herself to put it on the ballot when she should have recused. The cleaner alternative used by most California cities never got a fair shot. This doesn’t fix potholes, staffing shortages, or the budget. It just concentrates power and raises politician pay. Vote NO on Oakland Strong Mayor Charter Amendment by November 3. – at Oakland, CA

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee is trying to BRIBE her way to more power. The November Charter SCAM measure includes massive pay raises for City Councilmembers in exchange for handing her VETO power over the budget and legislation. While your neighborhoods lose the ability to fight back against cuts to parks, streets, and local services, the people who are supposed to represent you get financially rewarded for going along with it. Oakland just rejected a tax increase for the first time in 15 YEARS because voters have had enough of Barbara Lee’s failed leadership. Now she is asking you to give her even more control, and quietly paying off the council to accept the deal. This is the Oakland Charter Scam. – at Oakland, CA

The full breakdown — the exact provisions, the vote breakdown, the suppressed alternative, the pay math, and the corruption risks — is at OaklandPowerGrab.com Read it. Share it. This is the clearest self-dealing ballot measure Oakland has seen in decades. They’re not even hiding it anymore. If you’re tired of being governed by people who treat your neighborhoods as afterthoughts and your tax dollars as their personal compensation fund, this is the line. The measure goes down in November or Oakland loses what little local representation it still has. – at Oakland, CA

On June 16, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee used her tie-breaking vote to force a ballot measure onto November’s ballot that does two things at once: It gives her unilateral veto power over the budget and legislation. And it quietly bribes City Councilmembers with massive pay raises in exchange for their support. This wasn’t reform. It was a transaction. The measure requires councilmembers to work full-time and bans outside employment. Then it hands the Public Ethics Commission the power to benchmark their salaries against “comparable” full-time cities like Los Angeles — where council pay already exceeds $245,000. That’s a potential 125% raise from the current ~$114k. Total compensation with benefits could push past $300k. They wrote the rules so the only way councilmembers get the big paycheck is if they vote to hand the Mayor line-item veto power and turn themselves into a reactive oversight body with no real budget authority. If she keeps just three loyal votes on the council, she becomes a functional dictator over spending in every neighborhood. This is the deal. Her hand-picked Charter Reform Working Group — the same one that suppressed the cleaner, less corrupt Council-Manager alternative — delivered exactly what she wanted. Four councilmembers had the courage to vote against putting it on the ballot. She overrode them with her tie-breaker to ram through her own power expansion. While Oakland voters were rejecting her $192 parcel tax Measure E in June because they no longer trust City Hall with money, she was engineering a permanent pay hike for politicians and a structural power grab that lets one person defund district projects at will. This isn’t about fixing government. It’s about consolidating it. Barbara Lee has spent months talking about “accountability.” What she actually delivered is a system where the Mayor writes the budget, vetoes legislation, and controls the administrative apparatus — while the people who are supposed to check her power get financially incentivized to look the other way. The same Mayor whose private fundraising from contractors and interests doing business with the city already raises conflict questions now wants even more unchecked authority over those same contracts and budgets. Oakland doesn’t have a structure problem. It has a leadership and trust problem. Voters just proved they won’t keep writing blank checks for failing services. So instead of fixing the services, City Hall rewrote the rules to give itself more power and more money. – at Oakland, CA