What’s with OPD's new contract?
The Oakland Observer goes to council meetings and writes about it so that we don’t have to. Previously, we chatted about the city’s contract with Flock. This time, we asked him to explain the new contract Oakland cops are set to get, which he’s also covered here.
ORB: A few weeks ago, the city announced a new contract with OPOA (Oakland Police Officers' Association) to raise police salaries. Where are we now, in the process, with respect to that contract? (I’ve learned, after all, that just because an agreement is made, it still has to be executed)?
Oakland Observer: Nice catch, but that would be only true for a proposed commercial contract and the city. The MOU for labor goes into effect on the vote by Council, which was September 15; but the actual legislation that increases the salary schedules for the officers is an ordinance, and that requires two separate readings, and will be coming back at the next Council meeting, October 6. When that happens, there’s not usually discussion or acknowledgement that it’s the final passage, but sometimes there is, and the news cycle picks things up only on the second vote. I think that’s not likely here, to be honest, given how visibly compromised local media is when it comes to OPD. The MOU was negotiated by May and is backdated to July 1. The City began negotiating with OPOA and the city’s civilian unions late last year, because all of their current MOUs came to an end July 1 (of 2026). The first OPD raises won’t actually kick in until January 2027.
So there’s still time for people to oppose the council vote in ways large and small. And it will impact this already budgeted fiscal year, which begins in July 2026 and ends in July 2027. Though it’s been thoroughly ignored by CMs and media, the City’s report notes that about $2 million will be added to city expenditures, as unbudgeted expenditure. The FY 26-27 budget was already so precariously balanced that the council had to take money from remediating lead in schools to staff already slashed senior centers.
I’m not aware of any moves to put aside that $2 million, even though that’s happened in the past. It’s possible, but I haven’t seen anything.
How would you compare this new contract to contracts OPOA has gotten in the past?
It’s a different structure, and what I would call “innovative,” without putting any judgement on the term. For the first time, OPOA is going to be on the hook for some of its own health care and pension costs. That’s a big deal for the city, which has a long-standing issue with staying on top of pensions. Healthcare costs are also increasing wildly; if we give the city the benefit of the doubt, these are meaningful concessions.
The actual raises are also lower than in previous agreements. But I want to be careful about how to frame that. Oakland has given the OPOA huge cost-of-living increases for about ten years straight. Those costs have added up, meaning this is less like a reduction than a slowing-down of runaway pay. They got away with a lot during Covid, ironically, because of the mass flight of OPD cops (many of whom left because they didn’t want to get a Covid vaccination). But that’s a story for another day. I get the impression that OPOA knew there was a limit to how far it could push those raises.
Is that why they had to innovate? What’s the “innovative” part?
Well the new thing, that’s a sort of wildcard, is that they’ve restructured the longevity bonuses for police. It used to be a lump sum paid, once a year, starting at year five. But now they’ve restructured it as a sliding scale percentage of base pay, basically another raise on top of the COLA increases. For the younger police, it won’t be a big difference, but it will be huge for officers who’ve been there for ten to twenty years. I think by year twenty, it’ll mean a 15 percent a year raise, every year, on top of normal cost-of-living raises. Those percentages start to really scale after a few more years.
For a cop, this isn’t a crazy amount of time to stay at OPD. Many officers go through the academy in their early twenties. In another way, though they’ve tread lightly on this, it’s a way of acknowledging that no police department is doing well with replenishing its police force with new cops, so they are going for keeping what they have.
In budget terms, how do the bonuses stack up against the health care and pension stuff?
The City claims that these bonuses are going to be covered by the higher input of health insurance and pension, but then calls into question whether those higher inputs are going to actually save the city money, which was the claim. During deliberations, Finance Director Bradley Johnson said there’d be about a total $2.5 million saved, over the five year life of the contract. It’s not clear if that’s going to be eaten up by the bonuses, but if it is that means it’s not a savings, but a higher set of costs that’s been balanced with higher spending from a new revenue source. The other way that could have gone is saving money by pulling the throttle back on some of these eye-brow raising bonuses. And another unanswered question is how those bonuses will affect pension levels.
OK, I’ll bite: How might the bonuses affect pension levels?
I have some questions into the City about this, but they’ve not come back. The older cops getting the larger bonuses will get higher pensions because of it, most likely. But that number is hard to gauge from here.
How does this play into the ongoing problem of police staffing, or understaffing?
As I was saying, you can see the logic of what the city is doing here; it’s essentially staffing triage after many failed attempts, as young people avoid law enforcement careers. CM Fife recently pointed out something that didn’t make the news, but is pretty important: the 197th academy lost half of its trainees since April. That’s a huge washout rate. It’s usually 30 or 40 percent. And that’s made more meaningful by the fact that OPD sort of boasted about what a big class that was. Forty is a big class, so there was an expectation that OPD had finally broken through its recruiting sorrows with new recruiting practices.
That large an attrition suggests, to me, that they got that big initial number by recruiting a lot of people they knew weren’t going to cut it. The OPD confirmed to me that they’ve recycled about 8 of those trainees into the 198th academy, which has a larger than normal class, 47. There’s a high chance for a similar high washout rate, where that additional 8 won’t mask what’s coming on graduation day. This is after years, now, of annual graduating classes of 15 new officers, while something like 30 officers leave the department each year. Graduating 20 officers isn’t a real improvement on that, it’s far below expectations and need still, though slightly less catastrophic
So since they can’t find more new cops, this is an effort to keep more of the old ones from leaving?
Yeah. It’s been well known, though it’s never “news,” that a lot of officers leave OPD before even year six. They can get gigantic recruiting bonuses at other departments; some of them offer as much as $75k on signing. Of course Oakland has a requirement that if officers leave before five years, they have to pay back some proportion of their $20K worth of training. But if you look at the math, there, it’s not really a disincentive. (I also have some serious questions about whether most of them are even paying it, to begin with. OPD isn’t a collection service.)
Anyway, this is where the City may have wanted to get creative with its retention strategy, focusing on keeping veterans by giving them outrageous “extra” raises based on seniority. It gets pretty ridiculous by the time you get to year twenty; 15 percent a year, starting in 2027/28, on top of the COLA raises to the base pay. I think the calculation I saw was that 20-year officers would get a nearly 50 percent raise in a couple of years. But there’s obvious flaws in this thinking, given age, mortality, and the fact that some of these pensions and pay are going to get so big starting just a decade in that the lure of retiring early and doing something else after earning a few years of them is going to loom pretty large on the horizon. The City may actually be creating an incentive for older cops to leave sooner than they would have.
So for someone whose base pay is $150k, that’s another $75k?
Yes, I keep rechecking this calculation thinking it can’t be right, and the City obviously doesn’t want to get into these specific largesse. But that’s what it looks like. And when you think about what this means…during the presentation, the city’s HR director thanked OPOA’s negotiating team by name, and it was mostly 20 year vets, including Hyu Ngyuen, who is famous for already being one of the highest, if not the highest paid, City employee, elected or appointed.
This is wild to me. The team that negotiated these outrageous bonuses for a select few are that select few who will get those bonuses. That’d be news with any other city union.
How does it compare with the city’s so-called “civilian” employees?
Well, another novelty is the “Me Too” clause. The city has never done this, at least not with the police union. The way “Me Too” works for OPOA, is if any of the civilian unions manage to get higher raises, as a function of COLA minus any increased worker payments on pension and healthcare, OPOA would also get that dividend.
During the Council deliberation on the OPOA contract, some folks from the IFPTE 10 negotiation team called that a “ratchet” against the civilian unions. You can see the impact of racing to settle a very lucrative contract with OPOA. which is going to cost tens of millions by its third year. The City will likely argue it has no money for cost of living increases for civilian staff now. And civilian unions, unlike OPOA, often go years with no COLA. Then they will use the only leverage they have, a strike, or a threat of strike, and the City might do a partial catch up with COLAs, which means any single year or two could look like a high raise for the civilian unions, when it’s really just some of the last few years they’ve missed.
The civilian unions were hoping for a raise in 2025, for example, but it didn’t happen, because it was only keyed to clearing a certain amount of revenue by the end of the fiscal year. That’s the kind of hurdles the city unions are jumping to get in a single COLA, compared to the City basically going into express mode to give a contract to OPOA that will make some senior officers literally rich. So the City will say whoops, we’re broke now guys, sorry. And the civilian unions are already talking about striking, because they’ve gotten nowhere on negotiations. But the threat of strike or an actual strike might lead to the kinds of concessions I’m talking about, with what appear to be high raises, such that, then, that additional wedge goes into the already high-level OPOA spending. The civilian unions will shoulder the blame for the strikes, and the blame for higher labor costs, and OPOA will get an even higher backdoor raise than they already have. It’s win-lose for OPOA and the losers are everybody else, including residents who have to deal with the impact of a strike, as well as the visible and not as visible costs.
There’s downstream costs, of course, and we’ve been feeling them for years. As the city consistently treats civilian workers like beggars at the table, it loses its deep knowledge base. The people who really know how to do a job, they just go work for another city, and cities are always looking for Oakland workers, because it’s considered a crucible for municipal training.
And then the City can’t attract new workers, because people with a good skillset will want to work elsewhere. It’s the exact same conundrum that the City identified and wants to spend millions fixing at OPOA. But I don’t think they could be showing they don’t care if that happens at the civilian level more if they were actually trying. And I am not sure that they aren’t trying, to be honest.
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