Public transparency is in decline across Alameda County
From poor-quality livestreams to PowerPoint-driven policymaking, Alameda County cities risk eroding public trust and civic participation
☕️MORNING BUZZ
—In the past year, a troubling trend has emerged in local government across Alameda County: a steady erosion of public transparency.
Faced with rising budget demands tied to infrastructure, employee wages, and pension costs, nearly every city in the county has allowed the quality of its public meeting broadcasts to deteriorate.
Alameda County itself relies on a peculiar setup that displays the same video feed in two small boxes on screen—confusing and inefficient.
Several cities are faring even worse.
In Alameda, video and audio quality during meetings are often poor. Union City’s livestream regularly fails to work on many devices, and the camera work resembles a football coach’s defensive tape. On the edge of Silicon Valley, Fremont’s video interface appears hopelessly outdated, like something built with GeoCities.
Last week in Berkeley, a council meeting video feed turned into a psychedelic mess, featuring a warped fish-eye view of the chambers and what looked like footage from a spy camera hidden in Berkeley Councilmember Igor Tregub’s lapel pin. The previous week, there was no public livestream at all—the meeting was held on Zoom without any public notice.
—By contrast, Oakland remains a bright spot. Its video quality is strong, and meeting recordings—sometimes five committee meetings in a single day—are often posted online within hours.
Honorable mentions go to Hayward, Livermore, and Pleasanton, which provide accessible livestreams via YouTube.
Meanwhile, the quality of information available to the public is also declining. The Alameda County Board of Supervisors increasingly substitutes detailed staff reports with generic PowerPoint presentations. These presentations often consist of vague bullet points that offer little depth or context.
The county has fallen into a bad habit of avoiding any explanation of an agenda by merely posting a PDF that says only “Oral Presentation.”
San Leandro stands out for all the wrong reasons. The city now relies almost entirely on PowerPoint slides during its committee meetings, many of which contain minimal useful information.
Worse, the city provides no livestream—neither video nor audio—for these committee meetings and does not offer Zoom access for public participation, potentially putting it in violation of state transparency laws.
These issues came to a head on June 30, when a San Leandro committee meeting featured a PowerPoint presentation that failed to mention the actual changes being proposed to the city council handbook.
When audio of the meeting was finally released ten days later—another blow to transparency—it was difficult to follow the discussion or discern the intended policy changes.
As cities across Alameda County face financial pressure, it’s becoming clear that transparency and public access are among the first things being sacrificed.
But with very-low attendance plaguing almost every city council in the county, more people are watching from home and the experience needs to improve. If not, there’s a risk even more people with withdraw from participating in the local governmental process.
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