Steve Falk has been talking to people all over Oakland about his plan to make the city’s government work better. Perhaps no one crystallized Oakland’s problems to him better than the unidentified City Council member who said: “In Oakland, the buck stops nowhere.”
Falk has lived that dynamic. The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Public Policy lecturer has worked for 39 years as a city manager in six California cities, including two stints each in Richmond and Oakland.
“This city is more dysfunctional than any other city I worked for,” Falk said earlier this year. “It’s because of the charter.”…