OAKLAND — The special election next week for a key Oakland school board seat features two candidates, but only one will get a flashy mailer delivered to voters’ mailboxes in the coming days — thanks to a hefty dose of labor spending.
It’s a familiar late-game push in the final days before a Nov. 7 election that could shift the balance of power in the cash-strapped Oakland Unified School District to either its administrators or the teachers union.
As is typical in local elections with weighty political consequences, the largest source of spending is not from the candidates or their donors but by independent committees that operate outside the campaigns and often far outspend them.
Only one candidate in this race, Sasha Ritzie-Hernandez, has those committees on her side, and together they have given her nearly a $46,000 advantage over opponent Jorge Lerma, who has no independent backers.
Ritzie-Hernandez’s campaign has also directly outraised Lerma’s election effort, with about $15,000 in donations to his $6,000.
Two-thirds of the outside spending in Ritzie-Hernandez’s favor comes from the political fundraising arm of the teachers union: the Oakland Education Association Political Action Committee. Ritzie-Hernandez and her wife have both worked on the previous campaigns of other union-backed candidates.
The rest comes from the California Workers’ Justice Coalition, which is sponsored by SEIU Local 1021 — a sign of broad labor support for Ritzie-Hernandez, who helped organize rallies during the Oakland teachers strike in the spring.
Despite other strong links to the union in her previous work, the candidate has made clear in interviews that her political judgment on the school board would be her own and not determined by the whims of union leadership.
“I’ve been getting nasty attacks that I don’t have any agency, that I’m being controlled,” she said in an interview. “When really I want to run to help our students thrive, and because I love what educators contribute to the community.”
Meanwhile, the lopsided spending could spell trouble for Lerma, a retired educator and former principal at Oakland schools, whose previous bid for the District 5 seat in 2020 gave him just 11% of the vote in a three-candidate race. Although he has distanced himself from the union, including during this year’s faculty strike, Lerma has avoided commenting on the union directly in interviews.
The teachers union has been a powerful political voice in Oakland, fighting back intensely on planned school closures and declaring a strike earlier this year over progressive policy measures that it wanted embedded in the next labor contract.
More recently, the union has found itself in troubled waters. Records show that it owes the district more than $400,000 to reimburse the salaries of union leaders, including President Ismael Armendariz and second-in-command Kampala Taiz-Ranciferf, among others, as they were released from their teaching duties for union work.
The outstanding debt, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, would appear to represent a sizable chunk of about $870,000 in expenses that the union had budgeted for the 2023-24 school year.
Oakland Education Association representatives did not respond to a request for comment. Armendariz told the Chronicle that the union would work with the district to “rectify all billing errors, including the ongoing, alarming and significant District payroll errors that impact classroom teachers and school staff daily.”
“We’re hopeful that in the next couple weeks, the district can make sure we’ve dotted all our I’s and crossed our T’s in terms of demanding repayment,” school board President Mike Hutchinson said in an interview.
Labor spending has had a strong record of election success recently. In last year’s school board races, union money helped retired educator Jennifer Brouhard defeat a former longtime board member for the District 2 seat, while union organizer Valarie Bachelor toppled an incumbent in District 6.
Hutchinson, the current District 4 representative, received no labor support last November when he won a three-candidate race featuring a union-backed opponent.
In the year since, Hutchinson and two other board directors — Cliff Thompson and Sam Davis — have butted heads with the other three — Brouhard, Bachelor and VanCedric Williams — over labor issues.
The special election next Tuesday would undo that knot by adding a representative to District 5, a largely Latino area south of I-580 that spans parts of East Oakland, including Fremont High School and the Fruitvale neighborhood. The seat has sat vacant for nearly a year.
With mailers going to voters bearing her image and platform, Ritzie-Hernandez is confident about her endorsements and the financial backing of labor groups.
“Just like any candidate, I went and looked for the support of those with whom I align politically,” she said. “All I can say is that (Lerma and I) were both looking for endorsements, and we were given a fair opportunity to speak to endorsers.”