OAKLAND — City Councilmember Ken Houston says he doesn’t “give a rip” if people are upset he made an obscene hand gesture during a meeting this week involving a controversial $2 million city contract.
The viral moment — in which Houston appeared to raise a middle finger toward the public — came as the council took heat from hundreds of attendees at the Dec. 16 meeting who unsuccessfully urged the council to reject the deal, given to a software company with previous links to federal immigration authorities.
Houston and his colleagues did not fold to public pressure they faced in the City Hall chamber. It was the latest of several recent policy decisions by a mostly new council — just two of the eight members have served beyond a first term — that seems to reflect a sea change in Oakland’s politics.
In that moment recorded on video, Houston said, he thought he heard someone whispering a racial slur against Mexican people. The council member was born to a Mexican father and raised by a Black single mother in East Oakland, near the city’s borders with San Leandro and Alameda.
The latest incident reflects Houston’s general mantra: don’t back down. In his first year on the council, he has exhibited little patience for what he describes as elitist behavior by those without lived experience in his community.
“I’m born and raised in District 7,” Houston said, referring to the East Oakland community where he grew up and which he now represents. “They voted me in — a guy from the neighborhood who’s not a politician, who’s going to be who he is.”
City officials had already taken heat for bypassing ordinary procedure with the contract, including reversing course from a vote last month in which the council had rejected the deal.
But the council pressed forward at its Dec. 16 meeting, voting 7-1 on the new contract with some financial penalties built in if the company broke its promise to respect Oakland’s sanctuary policies.
This council appears to be setting a new agenda for Oakland. In addition to the new surveillance contract, the council is also entertaining an upheaval of city policies that require homeless residents to be offered shelter before encampments are cleared.
Multiple council members enthusiastically supported an Oakland police watchdog body’s reversal of a policy that restricted high-speed police chases.
And earlier this year, the council rejected its professional staff’s backing of a new security company to staff city facilities, a rare denial of a formal recommendation that will keep incumbent firm ABC Security in place through next September.
The days when public pressure from activists swayed the council to formally back a Gaza ceasefire resolution or reconsider the size of police budgets now seems like a quaint relic of the city’s COVID-19 era.
Fading too, perhaps, are voting blocs that frequently divided past iterations of the elected body on “progressive” and “moderate” voting lines.
Zac Unger, the council member who boasts the most union support, backed the surveillance vote. In interviews, he downplayed the role of national politics in city policy decisions around public safety, facility maintenance and a balanced budget.
“We had some previous councils that were deadlocked on 4-4 votes,” Unger said. “When we disagree, we do so in different ways and different patterns. And if I disagree with someone on one thing, I can’t just say, ‘We’re never talking again.’”
Labor-backed Councilmember Rowena Brown, who flipped her vote in favor of the surveillance contract, indicated Friday she was satisfied with amendments that protected the city’s sanctuary policies.
Councilmember Janani Ramachandran, who once ran as a further-left alternative to Assemblymember Mia Bonta, also backed the deal while insisting on her “skepticism” toward tech companies.
The council’s president, Kevin Jenkins, stays mostly silent during key city decisions. On Tuesday, he ceded the bulk of his allotted speaking time to the colleagues who voted with him, but also to Councilmember Carroll Fife, who is often the lone dissenter in votes that strengthen law enforcement.
Jenkins and Houston, however, are the ones driving a change in the city’s direction, according to multiple City Hall sources with direct knowledge of the council members’ thinking.
“That boy is brilliant,” Houston said of Jenkins, who served as the interim mayor before Lee took office, and who declined to speak on the record for this story. “We actually don’t agree on everything, but I respect him.”
On Thursday, Houston was scrambling to wrap up errands before his flight just hours later. He was in high spirits as he took credit for steering the city’s recent policy changes, pausing only to instruct a coughing council aide to take a COVID-19 test.
“I’ll show you how to put the thing in your nostrils, man,” he told the aide, lifelong East Oakland resident Lonnie McClindon.
Chipper, a pet rooster Houston owns, crowed persistently during the interview Thursday as the council member also attended to a chicken named Chip, who once famously got lost and wandered onto the Bay Bridge — one of Houston’s first forays into the public eye.
McClindon and fellow council aide Nelly Rocha were both homeless for years before Houston hired them at his previous job with the Oakland Beautification Council, which abates graffiti from public properties.
They spoke highly of Houston, who is determined to pass a new encampment policy that would soften the city’s requirements to provide displaced tenants with shelter.
These are examples, Houston insists, of both his own unorthodox spirit and of the city’s recent political shift, which he said is more complex than it appears.
“I’m in the Oakland streets,” he said. “You can come to me with a needle in your arm — my brother was an addict, man — and I’ll take you on. I meet you where you are.”
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at shomik@bayareanewsgroup.com.
