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Ron Dellums Takes the Helm in Oakland

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday January 09, 2007

The City of Oakland put several of its many moods and faces on full display for the inauguration of its 48th mayor on Monday, with a rowdy City Council reorganization meeting that ended in spirited boos and catcalls from the audience, an onstage, interfaith, hand-holding prayer featuring representatives of many of the city’s widely diverse ethnic and religious communities, and ending with the usual and expected rousing and uplifting speech by the new mayor himself, Ron Dellums. 

The three and a half hours of ceremonies, including the swearing in of newly elected City Auditor and members of City Council and Oakland Unified school board, took place before a packed, downstairs-and-balcony audience at the downtown Paramount Theater. 

Dellums actually took office a week ago due to a quirk in Oakland’s City Charter, which allows the new mayor to take office on the first Monday of the new year following the election. Since the first Monday of this year fell on a holiday—Jan. 1—and the city would have been left without a mayor until this week’s scheduled inaugural, the city attorney’s office advised Dellums to take office in a private swearing-in last week. Dellums repeated his swearing-in for the public at Monday’s Paramount Theater event. 

With the soaring rhetoric with which he has become synonymous through four decades of public life, Dellums invoked the grandeur and importance of the moment, both for himself, personally, and for the city as a whole in his inaugural address. 

“When I first decided to run for mayor of Oakland, many people came up to me and asked me why I was doing it,” he said. “Why, at the end of your career, do you want to worry about fixing potholes and putting up street signs? And it made me think that if this is what people believe is the role of the mayor of Oakland, no wonder the city is in trouble.” In contrast, Dellums recalled words given to him recently by a woman in a local supermarket. “She told me that all of your globetrotting, all of your work in D.C., has only prepared you for your work in Oakland. She told me, ‘this is your greatest moment.’” He added that “you have asked me to run this city, and I accept it with great humility.” 

As he did during last year’s election campaign, Dellums said he was declining to set specific policy goals for his new administration. 

“It would be easy to give you one or two targets and then, at the end of four years, all you would have to do to determine my success would be to see if I had met them,” Dellums said. Calling that pathway a “cop out,” the new mayor noted that “we cannot afford the luxury of focusing on only one or two issues. We have to attack all of them, simultaneously.” 

He said that as a first job, he was “reading every word” of the reports of the various task forces he set up over the summer to draw up policy recommendations for all aspects of Oakland life. 

The absence of setting a handful of specific policy goals seemed to be a pointed reference to the policies of Dellums’ immediate predecessor in the office, Jerry Brown, who set four specific goals for his first administration in 1999-bringing 10,000 new residents downtown, reducing crime, improving education, and sponsoring the arts. Brown cut that list down to three when he was re-elected in 2002, dropping arts sponsorship as one of his goals. 

Brown was conspicuously absent from the inaugural ceremonies. A seating plan for the stage handed out to the media listed his name sitting on the dais next to Dellums, but with a question mark behind it. 

Another local politician conspicuously absent was State Senator Don Perata, who represents Oakland in the legislature. Perata once had aspirations for mayor himself, and supported De La Fuente in last summer’s election. Other local politicians were well in attendance, however, including both former 16th Assemblymember Wilma Chan and her successor, Sandré Swanson. Oakland Congressmember Barbara Lee, who succeeded Dellums in Congress, introduced Dellums at Monday’s events. 

Meanwhile, the only specific target Dellums set was a familiar one from his campaign, health care for all Oakland citizens currently uninsured. 

“Everybody in Oakland should have the right to a healthy life,” Dellums said. “We can no longer afford not to have universal health care. We know at the federal level that Congressmembers like Barbara Lee and Sheila Jackson Lee are fighting for that. We also know that the issue has begun to percolate on the state level. But we need it in Oakland, and I am going to fight for it. And if we end up not having enough money to implement that idea, then put me on a plane to Washington, or to see Bill Gates, and I will find the money.” 

Dellums also made one reference to Oakland’s crushing violent crime wave, tying it together with the mounting movement to end the war in Iraq that was escalated by the recent Democratic takeover of Congress. “As we attempt to bring peace abroad,” he said, “let us strive to bring peace to the streets of Oakland.” 

In the place of invoking more specific policy goals, however, Dellums stressed the invocation of a new era in Oakland politics, saying that his overall goal was to set up Oakland as a “model city, anchored in a vibrant economy with healthy, well-educated, well-trained citizens. We want a city that works for everybody. We need to delight in our diversity, not be paralyzed by parochialism.” 

But it was parochialism and partisan, personal politics that were on open display shortly before Dellums’ unity-invoking speech, when members of the City Council held a special meeting on the inaugural stage to re-elect Ignacio De La Fuente to the presidency of the Council. 

The election of De La Fuente to the presidency has added significance this year because De La Fuente, a political foe of Dellums, is in a powerful position to block Dellums’ initiatives going before the Council. 

In recent weeks, there had been rumors throughout Oakland that De La Fuente might receive a stiff challenge for the presidency from Councilmember Jane Brunner, or that one of his Council allies--Larry Reid or Henry Chang--might get his support to take the office. But the possible Brunner challenge never surfaced and though another veteran Councilmember, Nancy Nadel, received a nomination for the presidency from the floor from community activist James Vann, no Councilmember placed her name in nomination. Instead, in a surprise move that seemed to signal a break in the longtime De La Fuente-Larry Reid alliance, Councilmember Desley Brooks--a longtime De La Fuente opponent--nominated Reid for Council president. De La Fuente easily beat Reid for the position, and a defiant-sounding Reid later said that “no one should presume that the Council presidency is a lifetime position. I had earlier wanted to run for mayor of Oakland, but when Mr. De La Fuente stepped forward, I demonstrated my support for him by declining to run, myself. I had hoped that he would reciprocate.” Apparently signalling that he would no longer be a De La Fuente ally on the Council, Reid concluded by pledging his support to Dellums and saying “to my colleagues [on the Council], I think you are going to see a different Larry Reid. Larry Reid’s got a different attitude.” 

Reid’s announcement of independence may signal a shuffling of alliances on Council. While outgoing mayor Jerry Brown never tried to cultivate a reliable block of Council votes of his own, Council is now expected to divide along a rough line between De La Fuente (and his political mentor, Don Perata) and Ron Dellums. 

De La Fuente’s election led to prolonged jeering from the crowd that distrupted the Council meeting and only could be halted when Dellums stood up and admonished people that “even if we disagree, we have to allow others to be able to speak. We have to send a signal to our children, who are settling their arguments through violence in the streets, that we as adults can adopt a more civil way to settle our disputes.” 

Oakland’s inaugural events will continue throughout the week.