OAKLAND — Efforts to remove Mayor Sheng Thao from office are likely headed to the November election after city officials confirmed Tuesday that a recall campaign against the mayor gathered enough valid petition signatures.
A progressive mayor who took office as the city struggled to recover from the pandemic, Thao may now be forced back into campaign mode. The City Council is expected to discuss placing the recall on the November ballot during a July 2 meeting.
Earlier this month, recall organizers submitted around 40,000 petitions to the city — far more than 24,644 valid signatures needed to compel a new election.
After randomly sampling a portion of the petitions, Alameda County’s elections office estimated last week that the whole batch would exceed 110% of the necessary threshold. That’s enough to trigger an election outright without a full manual count of signatures.
Organizers of the recall campaign, led by retired county judge Brenda Grisham and former mayoral candidate Seneca Scott, celebrated news of the validated signatures on social media.
“Thao’s actions have pushed Oakland to the brink, but the community is saying, ‘NO MORE. We want Thao gone,’” Grisham said in a written statement.
Thao’s opponents have pilloried her and other local progressives for the perception that she is soft on crime and bad at managing public money.
Oakland saw a devastating spike in crime during the pandemic that has slowly begun to recede: total citywide crime was down 33% as of Sunday from year-to-date statistics in 2023.
The city, entrenched in a staggering budget crisis, is planning to direct revenue from a private sale of its share of the Oakland Coliseum property toward its budget shortfall over the next two years — a move criticized by financial experts as a shortsighted use of long-term funds.
Thao has pointed to her revival of the Ceasefire strategy, an anti-violence program in Oakland that slowed during the pandemic, as the cause behind the recent decline in crime.
She has also cited as success her support of outside investments in Oakland, including by the Ballers, a minor-league baseball team that formed this year ahead of the A’s departure to Las Vegas via the Sacramento region.
A once-rare political maneuver, recalls have gained prominence in California. Voters in Alameda County are pursuing a recall against District Attorney Pamela Price in November.
Perhaps the largest source of criticism against Thao has come from supporters of the city’s ex-police chief, LeRonne Armstrong, who sued the mayor after she fired him last January for his response to an internal cover-up scandal involving a city cop’s hit-and-run.
Armstrong, who is now running for City Council, will be another player in the upcoming November election.