Lawyers in the 'Hood: Neighborhood Law Corps Hits Oakland Streets

by Ellen Griffin

Editor's Note: John Russo, Oakland's first elected city attorney, campaigned on a platform of "community lawyering." Now he's created a privately funded corps of attorneys who agree to two-year stints as blight fighters, working in neighborhoods instead of City Hall. Before you get your hopes up, there are only five of these do-good lawyers for five neighborhoods: Eastmont, West Oakland, Brookfield, Lower San Antonio/Eastlake, and Fruitvale. The task of the lawyers is to work with residents, schools, community- and faith-based organizations, and merchants to work on blight and code enforcement issues (drug houses, illegal dumping, building-code enforcement, abandoned vehicles, toxic pollution, as well as problem motels and liquor outlets). In the following edited interview, Metro reporter Ellen Griffin questions Russo on his vision for the program, possibilities for expanding it, and the role the community will be expected to play in ensuring its success.

Q: What has been the most challenging aspect of launching this new program?

A: The difficulty we are having funding it. This is a program that we wanted to establish at least at first with private money, not city money. I didn't realize the fundraising world is as bureaucratic as anything else.

Q: Why do you need to fund this program with private contributions?

A: The city is $30 million in the hole. I came to this office from being the [Oakland City Council's] Finance Chair. I could see that follow-up was not being completed on certain problematic expenditures in the city. This was an office that needed more of everything just to handle the caseload. I couldn't see how I could go to the City Council and ask for more money for the core existing services while simultaneously looking to expand. So that's why I turned to fundraising for this new program, and we've had some success. But we still lack the kind of money that will be necessary to build the kind of program I want to build.

Q: You have five attorneys participating in the Neighborhood Law Corps, each making $35,000. Was it hard to find recruits?

A: I've been amazed at the interest. It's the Law Corps, like the Peace Corps. It's a two-year commitment. I was told my first day here that you'll never get someone to work here for $35,000. Well, I beg to differ. There are people who want to do public service. They want to do what is right, and they want to give a couple of years to the community. Not all new lawyers are prepared to do that. We went to [UC Berkeley's] Boalt Hall, and we had to conduct a lottery for the interview slots, and that is not a sign of the times. That is a sign that idealism lives on.

Q: Where did you get the idea for the Neighborhood Law Corps from your contact with people during your campaign?

A: This idea came before the campaign. I started my career as a legal-aid lawyer in St. Louis, Missouri, working in the community. I did this because I didn't go into the military. I was a pacifist, but I felt that I owed the country two years of service. This was my service. I always felt bad as a legal-aid lawyer that I could remedy a problem for an individual, I could stop bad things from happening to an individual, but I couldn't represent the entire community. That was against the rules, and I couldn't change the law.

Q: How is this program different from legal aid?

A: These lawyers don't represent an individual. They represent the city. They have all the health, safety, and welfare powers of the city to be able to board up blighted buildings, shutthem down. The law corps has all that power. We can actually stop bad things from continuing because we have municipal authority. The flip side is that unlike regular city attorneys, who are career attorneys and work here in this nice City Hall plaza, these lawyers don't take their job direction from the bureaucracy, they take their orders from the community, as expressed through the town hall meetings that we've been holding regularly.

Q: What do you expect from the community?

A: If the community says they want us to go after this business and then this one, when it comes time to go to court, when we need affidavits and witnesses, we're going to say, "You made the decision that we go after these people and get these properties, and now we need you to step up, even if this is something you don't like to do."

My feeling about the relationship between government and the people is we've gotten much too much of the mind that the government is like "the government company," where "I pay my taxes and I expect these services. There is me, and there is them." And folks in government have completely pandered to that and played into that sensibility: "I'll give you a bigger tax cut. I'll give you a prescription drug benefit. I'll give you ... I'll give you." And it's all pandering. The reality is that in this city the number of people participating in community affairs is going down. Not just participating in elections, but in Rotaries, service clubs, PTAs in every type of organization, membership across all age groups, across all races, everything is going down. I think that government ought to challenge people. We really need to reestablish concepts of community service. Politicians need to be less frightened of getting people ticked off by saying the wrong thing. To use a cliché, politicians should be thermostats, not thermometers. We're supposed to be leaders, not just calibrate the current mood of the public today.

Q: There is so much need in Oakland for programs like the Neighborhood Law Corps, how did you decide which five neighborhoods would get represented?

A: We looked, historically, where the most blighted neighborhoods are. Almost all the neighborhoods of the city with the possible exception of on the hillside of Highway 13 could point to at least one or even a half-dozen problem properties we could be working on. But we need to address the worst problems and situations first. Now if we can continue to fundraise and get some foundation money, we will hire another five, and we would probably put those lawyers in what I call "middling" neighborhoods, like Grand Lake, Dimond, Temescal, the more middle-class, or upper-middle-class neighborhoods. But right now with only five, there is no question that we need to put the lawyers where the need is greatest, and where, I might add, the votes are fewest, unfortunately. There's no political benefit to going into neighborhoods where people are traditionally disenfranchised or aren't even citizens. But if you are going to do an idealistic program, you ought to just do an idealistic program, so we went where the need is greatest. There was no political calculation.

Q: So what does someone in the Laurel District do, for example, with a persistent blight problem?

A: You call us, call our office. These aren't the only lawyers who work on these problems. We have the Public Safety Unit, where we have five lawyers working. The law corps allowed us to double the number of attorneys working on these problems. So they should call this office and ask for the Public Safety Unit.

Q: How will you measure the success of this program?

A: To be fair, this is a new program, and a lot of it is evolving. I don't want to measure the process, but what is the end result: How many buildings do we get turned around?

Q: If the program proves successful, will you expand it?

A: Yes, because I assume that if it is a success, more money will come in, and we will be able to expand it. It's not beyond the pale that four or five years from now, this becomes such a desired program that the City Council might decide they want this program as their own and they decide to fund it. They won't be able to live without it, is my hope.