Oakland's Pay-to-Play Trial Exposes a City Where Accountability Has Never Been the Default

A promising mayor's federal corruption trial is the symptom, not the disease. Oakland's real crisis is a governance structure that has spent decades dodging measurement, oversight, and basic service delivery.

Two years after FBI agents carried boxes from Sheng Thao's hilltop home, the former Oakland mayor and three co-defendants are standing trial on federal bribery, conspiracy, and fraud charges. The alleged scheme is straightforward in its mechanics: the Duong family, operators of California Waste Solutions, allegedly funded attack mailers against Thao's rivals and promised her partner a $300,000 no-show job. In return, prosecutors say Thao committed to extending the Duongs' multi-million-dollar recycling contract, appointing their preferred people to municipal positions, and purchasing converted shipping containers from a Duong-affiliated company. All four defendants have pleaded not guilty.

Thao's rise was a genuine story. The first person of Hmong descent to lead a major US city, she grew up in a refugee family, survived domestic violence and homelessness, and won Oakland's 2022 mayoral race on a wave of post-pandemic interest in equity and representation. In office, she revived the Ceasefire violence-reduction strategy and secured revenue through the sale of the Oakland Coliseum. But the city's mounting public safety and homelessness crises — problems that predated her — fueled a recall campaign that removed her in November 2024. Two months later came the federal indictment. Longtime progressive congresswoman Barbara Lee replaced her via special election. The trial's fifth week has surfaced textbook pay-to-play testimony. Cooperating witness Mario Juarez alleged the Duongs distributed gym bags of cash to city officials as far back as 2014, after securing Oakland's $300 million recycling contract. Text threads entered into evidence show co-defendants celebrating a scheme that would make them "$100 million dollars richer" and declaring that "money buys everything." The defense has attacked Juarez's credibility, alleging he inflated expense reports. Thao has not taken the stand. But the deeper story is not one mayor's alleged corruption — it is the structural vacuum that made it possible. Oakland has faced recurring budget deficits for decades, producing staffing shortages and hundreds of millions in deferred maintenance. Police response to the most urgent calls averaged 23 minutes in 2022 and sometimes exceeded an hour in 2023, yet a city audit found Oakland has no targets for how quickly officers should respond. Illegal dumping now costs the city $10 million more annually than it did a decade ago. The city approves literacy, violence prevention, and housing programs but lacks formal infrastructure for tracking whether any of them work. As Lakisha Young of The Oakland Reach put it: "Every year our kids are behind in the same way they were behind when we had 60% less resources because we are not building an ecosystem that is accountable to measuring its results." On November 3, voters passed Measure EE, a charter reform that converts Oakland to a "strong mayor" system. The mayor now functions as chief executive with hiring, firing, and veto power — a direct response to a governance structure where ownership for key decisions was historically ambiguous between the mayor and city council. Supporters see it as a structural fix for accountability. Critics, including district 4 councilperson Janani Ramachandran, worry about concentrating power in the aftermath of a corruption case that demonstrated what a mayor willing to abuse their position can do. The trial is expected to conclude later this month. Thao faces six federal counts and up to 20 years in prison. But as Chinatown chamber of commerce president Stephanie Tran observed, Oakland's challenges "didn't begin with this trial, and they won't end when it's over." The city's fundamental problem is not one corrupt actor — it is a system that has spent decades spending money without measuring results, approving programs without tracking outcomes, and governing without clear lines of authority. The Thao case is a symptom dressed up as the disease. For Oakland's 430,000 residents, the relevant question is not whether Thao is guilty. It is whether the structural reforms now underway — strong-mayor governance, outcome tracking, budget accountability — can finally break a cycle in which every crisis triggers a new program, every program lacks oversight, and every scandal is treated as an aberration rather than a predictable product of the system that produced it.