I know it’s not as exciting and seemingly timely a topic as budget chest thumping by the city council, but the most important article to come out in months is right here.

I assume no one has talked about this article either because they’re not sure what to say or because of political correctness.

For those of you who chose not to read it, the census reported that the population of black youth in Oakland dropped by 42.3 percent from 2000 to 2010. This mirrors the trends we’ve seen in enrollments at Oakland Unified, where something like 25 percent of the black population is gone, replaced largely by hispanics and others.

But it does more than mirror it. 42.3 percent is an enormous number. It’s unprecedented, really. Oakland’s decline mirrors that in New Orleans, according to the article, where Katrina literally forced thousands of people to leave the city.

As always, I’m not a big fan of how our media sorts everything by race, but the data is here. As everyone knows, young blacks commit a hugely disproportionate share of crimes in Oakland, and their scores on standardized tests tend to be substantially lower.

All of this makes me very curious as to what the next 10 years hold for Oakland. We already know that much of the traditional black political base has eroded. But that goes along with the much more moderate decline in overall black population.

This huge drop in the child population could mean much more rapid gentrification for the city. The reason is that the next demographic up in terms of age (early 20s) is really the sweet spot for criminality. Reducing that demographic substantially can’t help but  reduce crime in the coming years.

I don’t know what role this plays in the current battles over police staffing. I do know that no one will discuss it in this context, for obvious reasons. The only feedback you will see in the popular media is people like Jean Quan describing the shift as a “problem.”

For me, it’s kind of hard to see it as a problem. I own property here, and I know that its value will increase if crime decreases. And frankly I suspect a lot of the people of all races still living here feel exactly the same way, even if political correctness prevents them from saying it out loud.

My prediction is a steep drop in crime over then next five to 10 years, followed by pronouncements from the cops about how they became “more efficient and effective.” The truth will be far simpler — demographics is destiny. Don’t believe me? Take a drive through our local segregated enclave, Piedmont.

Let’s hope so.

One thing that more or less guarantees that you’ll wind up with lots of poor people is when you construct programs that pay them to be poor.

Apparently both the Chronicle and Mayor Qunt are worried about these cuts reducing Oakland’s ability to continue all its handouts to the folks who are unwilling or unable to work.

One program that appears to be of particular concern to Qunt is Head Start. I guess she’s never read the research which demonstrates pretty conclusively that Head Start does nothing to improve children’s later prospects. Same goes, by the way, for poor kids bussed to nicer parts of town.

The irony of all of this is that these folks are ignoring the real story this week, which is the census data indicating Oakland continues to gentrify rapidly in spite of the recession and housing crash.

Maybe instead of trying to keep its poor, Oakland should welcome this reduction in funding as an opportunity to try and attract people who actually add something to the local economy.

Take a look at this: http://tinyurl.com/5s9x6me

You can switch it around to see different ethnicities. As you can see, every year whites and latinos tick up, and blacks tick down. OUSD has lost 40% of its black population in the last decade. That’s a huge decline, and sort of oddly worrying.

There must be a story here. Anyone in the mainstream media care to comment?

Apparently Mayor Jean Qunt (pronounced as it’s spelt) disagrees with the actuaries who say that Oakland’s 1976 crop of retirees will live for some time yet.

Now, far be it for me to argue with a Qunt, but I suspect the actuaries are actually fairly good at their task. Yes, it’s amazing that so much money is owed to a set of people who are all in their 70s and above. But, that’s the obligation Oakland undertook.

I noticed none of the local bloggers seemed to care about this story in the Chroncle about Oakland’s legacy pension issue.

To refresh your memory, these pensions apply only to workers hired before 1976, so all but one of thousand or so people are just collecting nowadays. So, as usual, the taxpayers are the bagholders for a former liberal scheme.

This particular pension balloon is notable in that:

1. it is the reason why Oakland homeowners are bilked a 1.4 percent property tax charge instead of the more normal 1.2 percent.
2. It is probably the thing that will make Oakland go bankrupt in the end.

Stay tuned. This pension is just part of the overall shell game. The bigger part is the 3-and-50 game that our current employees and their union squeezed out of the system.

If only there were some people in California willing to move in the direction Wisconsin and Indiana are headed.

By now it is pretty clear that Measure L has fallen around 3,500 “yes” votes short of passage.

The measure would have taxed each property in Oakland $195 to pay for schools. The teachers’ union took no position on its passage, because it would have allowed some of the money to go to charter schools.

The simple answer for why the measure failed is that Oakland’s public schools are terrible. But this explanation is not quite as true as it once was. In fact, Oakland’s API scores have improved pretty dramatically over the last decade.

Most of this improvement is a consequence of gentrification. Nowadays, we see groups of parents all enrolling their kids at a public school, which pushes out the lower-income kids bussed from the ghetto, improving the school dramatically.

Still, running a school district does cost money, and successful school district in the region typically require some type of parcel tax assistance to be successful.

To increase the odds of passage, I would suggest that the school district make the following changes the next time they place a parcel tax on the ballot:

1. Make the tax charge residents on a per-house and per-unit basis, not per-parcel. This better matches the revenue to the number of residents, and it doesn’t punish people and entities that own vacant land. One of the reasons there was opposition to Measure L is that some folks would pay far more than $195/year because they own additional lots. Asking for money from these additional lots risks strong opposition for relatively little increase in revenue.
2. The union needs to accept that the measure will fund both regular schools and charters. Most likely, the future of educating inner-city kids lies in charter schools. Certain charter methodologies appear to significantly improve urban kids’ performance. And, as these are adopted nationwide, unions will have to accept a smaller role.
3. Focus on the schools’ improved performance. Don’t just complain about being underfunded.

That third point is extremely important. Oakland’s school district should actively publicize the fact that the schools are improving.

And, the district should encourage parents to give public schools another shot. The simplest way to increase funding in the school district is to attract additional pupils.

Several local elementary schools have already experienced significantly higher parent adoption because of efforts by parents’ groups to increase enrollment. The district should actively encourage neighborhood enrollment at such schools as Montera and Skyline, both of which would improve dramatically if more local kids attended them.

The bottom line is that Oakland residents will reward success, so long as the payment bears some relationship to the services offered.

By Mark Ross, Contributing Writer

[Disclaimer: the objects of the verb “kill” in the above title are corporate entities and not living organisms.]

Meg Whitman has been buying copious amounts of media time extolling her agenda for a revitalized California. She wants to make the schools good, the government frugal and the future bright. Some of us are getting just a little too adapted to living with elephants in the living room.

Meanwhile, the mysterious villain who paved the way for many of the public sector pathologies that plague our state today is a likely nominee for the other side in the upcoming gubernatorial contest. Jerry the Moonbeam Brown, in his previous tenure as governor, oversaw the unionization of teachers and most other state and local government workers.

And herein lies the rub. Government worker unions, such as the CTA and SEIU, run the state, the counties and the cities. Any attempt by the Legislature, or a city council to adopt a policy contrary to the interests of government employee unions has been thus far slapped down like a drunken bug.

Vallejo is the test case for a new reality that may bring some sense to this mess. The town council had the outrageous temerity to identify union contracts as the agents of their impending bankruptcy. Sorting out and negotiation continues. At a recent town council meeting, city retirees were pitted against local taxpayers. This conflict will likely continue well into the future… taxes will go up (despite a shrinking economy) and benefits will decline.

The “B” word was used earlier this year concerning Oakland’s financial crisis. Here, in Liberalism’s favorite city, bankruptcy is considered a last resort. First, the thugs who run this town want to bankrupt the tax payers… then they’ll look at tinkering with the union contracts.

Lynndee Kemmet of the American Institute for Economic Research, writing in the Chronicle mentioned that the public employee unions have gotten their toadies in the legislature to ram AB155 through the Assembly. Should this pass the Senate, then California cities will be constrained from altering union contracts as a result of bankruptcy. Again, let’s bankrupt the tax payers instead.

This writer is old enough to have lived through several serious recessions. Never before has the public sector (a.k.a. the government) been in such vicious competition with the citizens over money. Why? It is perhaps because of the cumulative effects of union dominance over public policy — especially fiscal policy.

Some examples of how the public employee unions have a strangle hold on most, if not all, aspects of public policy in California, and many other states, are:

1) Restrictions on hiring police (and other emergency personnel) in order to pump up overtime.

2) Dispatch of both ambulance and fire engine to medical emergencies… in the olden days this would be called “featherbedding”… forcing the “employer” to commit excessive manpower to a task in order to increase the labor cost… and, thus, union member benefit.

3) Reduced classroom size as a benefit to K-12 education. This is my favorite… because Scientific American ran an article declaring that no educational benefit of reduced class size has been demonstrated. This from a graduate student at the right wing, knuckle-dragging bastion of Oakland’s very own Mills College. The proffered explanation is that teachers working in classrooms that have had the number of students reduced, have changed nothing about the way they do their job. There’s just a lot more of them doing things the same way they were done before the latest union thug edict was implemented.

4) In the Los Angeles Unified School District they’ve had to adopt a policy of refusing to accept donated books. It seems that mandated union rules cost the district hundreds of dollars for each “free” book, for cataloging. This in the age of the computer. Readers are most welcome to add to this list.

All along my theory and opinion has been that public employee unions are, ahem, illogical. No competitive pressures exist to moderate excesses of demand. Government is a monopoly. No stockholders or discretionary consumers are available to influence otherwise suicidal financial decisions. In practice, struggling private sector unions have striven to make their industries de facto monopolies as well. The American automobile industry is a prime example of that. Union actions have simultaneously targeted all three corporate entities in order to side step market realities. Too bad Americans are allowed to import automobiles from “unstrangled” foreign economies.

Ms Whitman and any other wannabe candidate for governor of the doomed state of California would be well advised to acknowledge the elephant in the living room. “Let’s make California a right-to-work state” should be the battle cry. We are victims of cowardice as well as union thuggery.

Joe Tuman is the only candidate for mayor of Oakland who seems to actually understand or care about the city’s problem with public-employee pay and pensions.

For this reason, combined with the enormous sums of money you can expect the corrupt unions to pour into the election, he has little chance of winning the election. Still, if voters want to see any sort of improvement in Oakland’s governance, they should vote for him.

I strongly urge my readers to take a look at Tuman’s blog, where he answers a host of questions about the future of the city. You’ll notice that he appears to have a grip on our problems, and he’s offering to do a set of things that seem like those a reasonable person would undertake.

Voters should immediately reject Jean Quan and Rebecca Kaplan as candidates. Both candidates are part of the existing liberal power structure within the city. Quan, in particular, has presided over the city’s fiscal destruction.

While Kaplan is a relative newcomer, she has failed to take on the public-employee unions to any significant degree. The one positive about Kaplan appears to be that she is favored by the city’s lesbian community. I am all for Oakland becoming a gay-friendly city, as the average per-capita income of gays significantly exceeds that of Oakland’s current average resident. So, to the extent gays and lesbians displace our existing poor residents, this is a good thing.

Some conservatives might consider voting for Don Perata because of his pro-development stances. The key thing to understand with Perata is that he received the endorsement of the police officers’ union.

This union is pure evil, as should be obvious to anyone familiar with Oakland’s ongoing flirtation with bankruptcy. So, anyone they endorse should immediately be eliminated as a viable candidate.

This year, Oakland is using ranked-choice voting. I recommend the following choices. I suggest not ranking any more than two candidates, because all other candidates would be a disaster, so it is best not even to offer them the illusion of a mandate:

1. Joe Tuman

2. Rebecca Kaplan

Just a quick post to point visitors to the site created by Marleen Sacks against Measure BB.

I’m somewhat conflicted about this measure. While I appreciate the notion of “starving the beast” by preventing the city from collecting property taxes, I do generally like the idea of parcel taxes because they are regressive.

Of course, there’s always the question of whether a parcel tax can be passed along to renters (most of Oakland’s undesirable inhabitants are renters). I’m not sure about Measures Y and BB.

And, parcel taxes do lower property values for homeowners, since they raise the total cost of ownership. So, that’s a definite negative.

Still, I generally like them, because their impact on a million dollar house is more or less negligible, but it is significant to those on a limited income — those we’d like to see leave Oakland for good.

The story of Measures Y and BB is so sordid that it does seem like people should vote against it. I would probably vote no if I hadn’t moved my legal residence to Nevada several years ago because of my hatred of liberals.

So, take a look at that site and make up your mind. Remember that it needs a 2/3 vote to pass. So, if you vote no, it’s like getting two votes for the price of one.

As for me, I’ll be in Nevada this weekend early voting against Harry Reid.

The property tax bills for Oakland homeowners are in, and as usual the situation is pretty ugly.

But, looking at my bill for the year, I was shocked to see that the county appears not to be collecting funds for Measure Y. I’m not sure if this is a consequence of Marleen Sacks’ brave efforts (please click that link to see her excellent blog on the matter).

Or, perhaps it’s that the city has finally admitted on its own that collections of the tax are illegal when we have such a reduced police force. Whatever the reason, I’m grateful for the change.

And I’m also happy that I no longer have to send a petition to the city every year for a refund of the tax for the vacant lot I own. Long-time readers will know that the city has refused to record in their records that the lot is vacant. They have opted instead to force me to petition them every year to get my money back.

Without further ado, here are the details of my property tax bill. This should be interesting to those vast numbers of you who don’t own property but merely freeload on the exorbitant property taxes paid by your landlords.

First, the ad valorem rate is set at 1.4086% for this year. That’s, as usual, the highest rate in the Bay Area and probably the highest in the state. That means, if you buy a house for $500,000, you will pay around $7,000 a year for this tax. In contrast, in places like Contra Costa, you’d pay more like $5,500 or $6,000.

Here are the parcel taxes, rounded to the nearest dollar to further ensure my anonymity:

Mosquito Abatement: $2
CSA Paramedic: $26
CSA Vector Control: $7
City Emerg Medical: $12
City Paramedic Srv: $10
School Measure G: $195
Oak Fire Prev Dist: $65
Flood Benefit 12: $16
CSA Vector Cntrl B: $4
Mosquito Assess 2: $3
AC Transit Meas VV: $96
City Library Serv: $86
EBMUD WetWeather: $67
East Bay Trail LLD: $5
EBRP Park Safety/M: $12
City Landscp/Light: $112

The total fee is about $720. What a rogue’s gallery of junk. Included is the fee that hills residents get to pay because the city decided we weren’t worthy of fire protection ($65). And, we get to pay $112 into the “LLAD” which is a notorious slush fund.

I’m not sure why I have to pay $16 for floods. I live on a hill. I pay $96 for bus service, even though the nearest bus route to my house is a mile away and is more or less useless to me.

City library services are obviously a waste. Do people even use books anymore in an era of Kindles, Nooks and the ever-present Internet?

And, don’t even get me started on School Measure G. True, schools are improving in Oakland. But it has nothing to do with funding. It is a product of gentrification, pure and simple.

By the way, the schools get 0.1267% of the ad valorem tax, with community colleges getting another 0.0430%. That’s just more money transferred from my checking account to someone’s ridiculous pension. Glad to hear of it.

Regardless, I don’t see the “Violence Prevention Tax” that I’ve seen in previous years. I’d be curious if anyone knows the reason.