The next big thing
Oakland City Council candidate Warren Logan is brimming with ideas for a city yearning for hope
ELECTION 2024
OAKLAND CITY COUNCIL - DISTRICT 3
—THE NEXT GEN—Seated at a window table, drinking a latte at Kinfolx with Oakland City Council candidate Warren Logan it appeared just about everyone knew him. A number of locals passed by, waving hello to the affable District 3 candidate.
“My job for the last year basically has been to meet as many people as possible, learn about their lives, and their stories, and see how it all connects and ideally try and make our lives a little better everyday,” Logan said. “I go to sleep exhausted, but fulfilled.”
A city planner with an emphasis on transportation, Logan worked in Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s administration as section chief for community resilience, but had no previous desire to run for public office, he said.
“After seeing a number of the very good ideas I had get undone by the council, and people asking me why are they taking away the one thing that is working, it really broke my heart to watch my team’s work get undone for no good reason and without a better plan,” Logan said.
One example is Oakland’s slow streets program, a network of around 40 miles of traffic-calmed roadways. “For $2 million you can make a citywide network of streets that are safe enough for kids to play on, for people to stop doing sideshows and speeding down neighborhoods. You could make a lot of people happy almost overnight,” he said. “That was a moment when we could be more impactful and we chose not to.”
“What a lot of people don’t know is the City of Oakland staff are very good at picking up trash. In fact, we are too good.”
On principle, Logan said many residents in the district agree with incumbent Councilmember Carroll Fife’s goals for affordable housing and homelessness. But Fife has shown herself to be out-of-touch with constituents, and, in some instances, reality itself.
He pointed to a curious Instagram post by Fife that revealed herself clueless about chronic illegal dumping, and an assertion that piles of trash on street corners was placed there by her opponents.
“What I heard from people was anger and they felt insulted because what they were hearing was that she was brand new to this decades-old issue that everyone had been furious about.” Logan said. “It was like, ‘Where have you been?’”
Logan has many ideas when it comes to illegal dumping, one of Oakland’s most vexing quality of life issues. He supervised the illegal dumping program with the public works director.
“What a lot of people don’t know is the City of Oakland staff are very good at picking up trash. In fact, we are too good. We have trained illegal dumpers to dump in our neighborhoods,” Logan said.
“All you have to do is call 3-1-1 and we’ll pick it up in 72 hours and that is the problem with our approach to illegal dumping is that we are downstream. Picking up the trash more efficiently is not a long-term solution.”
A better idea, he said, is rather than allocate a single large pickup annually for every residence, set aside a high number of bulky pickups and allow some the option to use it multiple times.
“I think Oaklanders are looking for hope and direction.”
The seminal moment that lead to Logan taking the plunge to unseat an incumbent councilmember was Fife’s insistence to build a large encampment site at the Oakland Army base, despite city staff repeatedly telling her that it’s a SuperFund site.
“It should seem obvious to everyone why you don’t want to put the most disadvantaged members of our community on a contaminated waste dump and cost us $20 million to remediate the site. Instead, she kept saying the administration is against her.”
Oaklanders just want the basics from their elected official, Logan said: A clean neighborhood and a safe place to park their car, among other desires.
“We need to respect people’s trauma,” he said, referring to perceptions that crime in Oakland remains out of control. “My car only needs to be broken into once for me not to want to park there ever again. That is what I’m hearing from my neighbors that I don’t need to get got twice.”
“I think Oaklanders are looking for hope and direction and vision,” Logan said, “because we don’t have any of that right now from our current leadership, I suppose.”
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