You actually don’t need to vote for Michael Houston
City auditor
Michael Houston, our current Oakland city auditor, occupies an independent, elected position that’s charged with, basically, digging around in city budgets and processes and seeing if everything is on the up and up. The job was established in its current form in 1979, and if that has a whiff of OG tax revolt distrust in how The Government is spending Your Tax Dollars, well, there’s a reason for it. Fewer cities had city auditors before the era of Government is Bad, in the seventies and eighties, and when they did, the job tended to be more of a strict financial accounting sort of thing. Some cities have controllers, who fold oversight into the broader job of managing the city’s money; we, instead, have a city auditor who is supposed to roam the municipal countryside solving crimes on behalf of the citizenry.
Oakland Review of Books
In practice, the job mostly is doing investigations and then issuing reports, like this one on illegal dumping. That report became an Oaklandside article, which is sort of how this process should work: An independent agency investigates city processes and produces a report, then reporters report on the report, and then everybody participates in public discourse en route to swiftly and harmoniously solving the problem forever. Yay! (That’s what happened right?)
Mostly it’s pretty boring, if unquestionably important. After investigating “an anonymous whistleblower complaint alleging that the City paid employees in the Department of Transportation and Public Works Department more in FLSA Overtime Premium Pay than those employees should have been paid,” our man Michael Houston set out and found that “The City of Oakland uses formulas for calculating overtime that differ from FLSA guidelines, resulting in payments that exceed FLSA requirements.” OK! You can read all sorts of reports on the office’s webpage, though you haven’t, because they’re very boring. There’s a whole report in there where his office investigated whether the city was effectively identifying vacant properties, for its vacant property tax, and what he found was: It was. Hell yeah. THE SYSTEM WORKS.
“Independent, elected position” is an interesting phrase, though. This basic function always exists somewhere in city governments, even if it’s nested in a controller’s office or something, as in San Francisco. But who they report to is crucial to what the officeholder can and will do; an appointed auditor is going to produce information for the person who appointed them (which is not necessarily a bad thing, if the person that appointed them—who is, after all, elected—is doing what they should be doing). In Oakland, we vote on what should be a very technocratic job, because our version of this office was formed in a moment when it was felt citizens needed someone on the inside to police the government. This means that while our city auditor is supposed to answer only to voters, they tend, also, to answer to the day’s political narratives.
In an ideal world, this would make the city auditor into a fearless truthteller. In practice, however, that can mean that the office becomes a waystation for the politically ambitious. So it’s usually bad if you remember the name of the Oakland city auditor. We remember Michael C. Houston’s predecessor, Courtney Ruby, for instance. She ran for mayor; she spent a lot of time talking about herself during public meetings; she was accused of conducting politically motivated audits.
And despite the fact that he once went on Seneca Scott’s show—never a good sign—we basically know very little about Michael C. Houston. And wow, do we love that. Were we worried when Ruby left before finishing out her last term and basically bequeathed the position to Houston, who at the time worked in her office? Yes, of course. Have those fears been realized? No! Even Oakland Observer barely has anything to say about him; when we reached out, OO said he seemed “diligent and fair,” and that he’d even been good on OPD, researching its GPS installation and recommending the department actually install it (and that not doing so was slowing down its response times).
Houston is running unopposed, and that’s probably for the best. We want to keep our technocrats focused on the technical rather than the political. May he continue to do things we never bother to actually read up on.
(But seriously, Michael Houston, if you’re reading this, don’t go on Seneca Scott’s show anymore.)