Politics Blog
Oakland's Rebecca Kaplan gets an education in lawn mowing
By Will Kane on July 2, 2014 at 5:19 PM
Oakland Council member Rebecca Kaplan listens to a speaker advocating for more funding for libraries during the City Council meeting in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, July 1, 2014. The Oakland City Council decided how to use a windfall of $29 million from real estate taxes during their meeting on Tuesday.
It costs more than $50,000 to mow the lawns at Oakland's city parks, Councilwoman and Mayoral Candidate Rebecca Kaplan learned at Tuesday night's City Council meeting.
Kaplan, responding to complaints that the city was failing to keep its Little League ballfields mowed, proposed that the City Council give $50,000 to the Parks and Recreation Department to buy a park-size lawnmower.
The only problem? The Parks Department doesn't maintain any of the parks — the Public Works Agency does — so they wouldn't have much use for the lawnmower and they don't have someone certified to drive it.
"I appreciate it but I cannot do a whole lot with it as it relates to the mowing the ballfields," said Audree Jones-Taylor, the director of the city's Parks and Recreation Department said after Kaplan gave a passionate speech supporting her lawnmower plan.
Getting the Parks Department to shift gears and start mowing their own lawns would cost somewhere closer to $250,000 for a lawnmower, a certified gardener, a trailer and repair shop for the lawnmower, Jones-Taylor said.
So what if the $50,000 went to the Public Works Agency — the department that already has the gardeners and equipment to mow the ball fields? Could they use the $50,000 to keep the fields in better shape?
Well, that wouldn't work either, said Henry Gardner, the interim City Administrator.
"The cost of Parks and Recreation to do it would be a lot more than $50,000 and $50,000 is not enough for Public Works to go around and mow every ball field," Gardner said.
So what should Kaplan do with her lawnmover money? Spend the $50,000 on overtime for Public Works gardeners, with the promise that they would focus on mowing ballfields, city bureaucrats said.
The lawnmower saga raises a question about Kaplan's campaign platform to fix Oakland's broken bureaucracy: Is she a go-getter trying to shake up a calcified bureaucracy or naive in the ways the city's bureaucracy actually works?
A spokesman for Kaplan said it was the first option.
"Properly maintaining our parks isn't something that should require legislation," said Jason Overman, a spokesman for Kaplan. "Why doesn't Parks & Rec already have a lawnmower? It's the kind of bureaucracy and dysfunction that gives TV shows like Parks & Rec something to make fun of."
"When we say that Oakland isn't ungovernable, it's just ungoverned — this is an example," Overman said.
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