Okay, K Top, let's start recording.

The time is six thirty-four.

Uh welcome everyone to the regular December meeting of the Oakland Public Ethics Commission.

The commission works to promote fairness, openness, and integrity in city government.

And we will start by taking the role.

Vice Chair Upton.

Here.

Commissioner Baieva.

Commissioner Gage.

Here.

Commissioner Steele.

Commissioner Talak.

Here.

And I am also present.

And we have a quorum and we have all of our current commissioners here, which is great.

And uh that includes our new Commissioner uh Tanya Baeva.

I'd like to welcome her to the panel and uh say that we're very happy to have you here and very excited to have you join us, so welcome.

Thank you so much.

The pleasure is all mine.

Um I'd also like to acknowledge that we have uh some staff present.

We have Executive Director High Dorn, uh we have our program manager uh Suzanne Doran here as well, and I'd also like to acknowledge that we have our legal counsel, uh Christina Cameron here uh on the panel as well.

Um we'll move on to item number two, which is staff and commission announcements.

Um I'd like to make a couple of announcements.

One is just to uh remind commissioners that our next regular meeting will be in January, uh and that meeting will include uh elections for chair and vice chair for the remainder of twenty twenty-five.

Uh so please think about uh if you'd like to uh be a candidate for one of those roles.

Uh and then I'd also like to mention that we're gonna make a slight change to the order of operations for tonight's meeting.

Uh we're gonna move uh the executive director report uh to immediately after open forum.

So that's item number eight.

Uh we'll now be moved uh immediately after item number three.

And the reason why is because we have a guest here from Open Oakland, uh who's going to present to us uh so in uh out of respect for uh uh the time of our guest, we're gonna move that up and allow him to uh present to us uh in our first order of substantive business.

Um with that, is there any additional commissioner announcement?

Uh is there any staff announcement?

All right.

Um we'll now move on to item number three, which is open forum.

Open forum is a time for members of the public to comment on any matter within the jurisdiction of the PEC that is not otherwise included in tonight's agenda.

Under the Sunshine Ordinance, the commission cannot discuss the substance of any public comment that does not pertain to an item listed in the agenda.

Um I'm looking at right now.

I doubt that we have any public uh comment for open forum, uh, but I will call for it.

Uh seeing none, I'll mention that we do have a written comment for open forum.

Uh it's a message from our former enforcement chief Simon Russell.

Um it's uh too lengthy for me to read aloud onto the record, but uh I would encourage everyone to read it.

Uh we of course value um all of the input that we get from Mr.

Russell uh given uh his uh excellent service for us um and so if you haven't had a chance to read that um I encourage you to do so uh at your uh as soon as you're able and uh we'll use those uh comments to guide our uh thinking on enforcement moving forward uh so thank you to uh Mr.

Russell for the comments um we will then move on since there's nothing more for open forum we'll move on as I mentioned to item number eight which is the executive director's report and I will welcome our executive director Nicholas Hydeworn uh to kick things off with that commissioners as mentioned there's a lot of your mic on the button here come down just in case all the other things appreciate it thank you hi again commissioners so as mentioned Nicholas Hydarn executive director of the commission uh there are a number of items in this ED report so I think I'll take them one by one and entertain commissioner questions comments on each one before we move to the next one uh we also have a measure w update we've got program manager Susan Duran who's gonna speak to that as well as our guest um so first I want to begin with the budget situation so currently as commissioners are well aware the city is facing very significant uh fiscal challenges the city is going to do a mid-midcycle adjustment to the budget which will include additional cuts as of right now there are no proposed cuts to the commission in the proposal and final decision final council action is expected on December 17th so things could still change but at least as to cuts uh nothing is currently being proposed for the commission and as I stressed in our memo this is relatively important for the commission at this point we are very thinly staffed we have no staff redundancy and our budget is any very thin so were we to absorb any additional cuts it would likely mean severely reducing or eliminating a a core service of the PEC.

Another item that I want to flag for commissioners uh coming out of this budget process is a potential ballot measure uh which might be considered for the April 2025 special election this ballot measure proposes to fund the city's oversight agencies which is the PEC the city auditor as well as the community policing review commission um the details are unclear at this point of exactly what's included there's no draft language or anything like that and the statement is relatively brief as was included in the full city administrator report that I attached to this memo.

That said from a general staff perspective uh getting stable consistent and permanent funding for the commission would be a very significant uh help to the commission it would enable us to do a lot more planning would enable us to get stability for our programs uh so this is something that could be uh significant interest to commissioners for that reason we are scheduling a potential special meeting on the 16th so that if a proposal does emerge there's hopefully opportunity for commissioners to review it and provide comment before we presumably comes up on the 17th um one thing that staff kind of staffs you my view on this proposal is that in general though we need to see more details the idea of getting stable staffing for the commission would be a good one a stable budget for the commission including for measure w would be a good one to ensure that we can accomplish our mission uh if there is a proposal though to uh fully fund the PC it shouldn't just be for our current staffing plus measure W.

It should also include our enforcement staffing needs as we've been saying for the past several years we are significantly understaffed in the enforcement area we need to get to at least three investigators and ideally also a staff attorney to assist our enforcement program.

So we need to take our enforcement program from about two FTE to about five adding that to a parcel tax would probably only be a few extra dollars would be a relatively small addition to any parcel tax.

So from the staff's perspective, I do plan to share with council members if this uh moves forward that looking at full funding of PC should include also our enforcement needs.

With that, I'll pause, see if there are any questions about the budget situation as well as this ballot measure proposal coming out of the budget process.

Can you hear me?

Um I'm just wondering outside of the uh proposal, do you think there's anything that any of the commissioners can do to assist with the fundraising or uh what can we do with tapping into our own resources or networks or something like that to kind of move this forward.

Do you mean in terms of supporting the proposals or do you mean in terms of the process?

Outside the proposal.

You know, one of the things that we've done successfully, I think for the first time in commission history was getting grant funding from the Haas Junior Foundation.

I think democracy dollars remains something that we potentially get grant funding to support.

But I will say without getting some stability and sense of certainty as to where that program is going, it may be more difficult to get grant funding.

Um if people do know of other funding opportunities, for example, potentially like grants relating to law enforcement, but from an anti-corruption perspective, um, the experience of having successfully applied for grants was a good one for us and could be something that we explore further.

So if you know of those or can connect us to those types of opportunities, that'd be something worth exploring.

I wonder if there's a list of grants that we got in the past that we can take a look at and commissioners can maybe see if they have any um connections or access to that.