Keyboard warriors and mountains of mayoral minutiae

Things are getting chippy on the campaign trail, ALCO Dems admonish Loren Taylor; Oakland council candidate wants to house the homeless in Alameda; EPA to loan Hayward $244m for wastewater facility

MORNING BUZZ

—Things got chippy on the campaign trail as the penultimate weekend before the April 15 Election Day came and went.

The Alameda County Democratic Central Committee called for Loren Taylor’s campaign to cease and desist from using the party’s logo on his campaign literature.

The local party admonished Taylor in a statement on Sunday, reiterating that Barbara Lee is the endorsed candidate of the Alameda County Democratic Party.

Taylor used the logo on a recent campaign mailer to highlight his membership on the elected Alameda County Democratic Central Committee.

Oakland’s special election is a chance for the local party to regain some face after opposing the recall of Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price on two separate occasions, in addition to opposing the recall of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao.

—On various social media platforms, all-around keyboard-to-keyboard combat appeared heightened over the weekend.

The level of online acrimony was able to pull in Sam Singer, the typically easygoing Bay Area public relations legend into the fray, opposite Trash Night Heron, the herald of Oakland’s far-left.

—On Friday, a painfully complicated chart attempted to illustrate how wealthy interests are aiming to take over Oakland politics was brutally panned, while Lee supporters found truth

(On the next edition of the East Bay Insiders Podcast, we skewered the chart. Co-host Shawn Wilson thought it was better utilized as a New York City Subway map).

—On the campaign side, Taylor’s campaign took the hammer from independent expenditure committees and used for themselves in a hard-hitting billboard.

The ad, paid for by Taylor’s campaign, attempts to link Lee to Thao, the extremely unpopular recalled mayor. “Wrong then. Wrong now,” the billboard says, in reference to Lee’s opposition last October to the recall of Thao.

—A hit piece sent out by an IE backed by SEIU Local 1021 and IPFTE Local 21, and recently bolstered with cash from the California Nurses Association, suggested Taylor was a supporter of the city’s defund the police movement.

He was not, but supporters and opponents of the original proposal in 2021 to cut the Oakland Police Department’s budget by 50 percent have often blurred the lines on the subject.

With 15 days left until Election Day, a large bulk of the electorate—however small it may turn out to be—will begin marking their ranked choice ballots and sending them in.

On Wednesday, we’ll get a snapshot of each campaign’s fundraising and spending over the past month.

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—More inside:

• Oakland council candidate has a plan for the city’s homelessness problem, and the solution resides outside its city limits.

• A little R&R for Oakland’s most vexing problems.

• Trump is trying to gut the EPA, but not before Hayward gets a massive loan to upgrade its wastewater facility.

• Fremont’s got its goats

• Campaign finance data for the weekend: Money is coming in and going out in Oakland’s special election.