Oakland's Capital Improvement Program

CIP timeline showing the extensive process required to collect, assess, and implement capital projects.

About

May 7, 2021 Update:
- Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and City Administrator Ed Reiskin today released a two-year Proposed Policy Budget for fiscal years 2021-2023. Information about that release is available here.
- The complete proposed FY 2021-23 Proposed Capital Improvement Program documents are available here.
- A PDF copy of staff's CIP presentation to the May 10 City Council meeting on the budget is available here.

Every two years, the City of Oakland seeks community input to identify and select priority capital projects for funding. Capital projects improve and maintain Oakland’s public facilities and infrastructure. They can range from restoring aging public buildings, to improving streets and sidewalks, to creating or improving our parks.

In fall 2020 the City opened a public portal for project request submissions to be identified and prioritized for the two-year budget that will begin on July 1, 2021, and those requests are being considered as a part of the current budget process. The next CIP cycle will commence in 2022. The public portal for project request submissions is expected to reopen in late summer/early fall of 2022 to accept project requests for the two-year budget that will begin on July 1, 2023.

When the portal is once again active, you will be able to access it on this page.

CIP in the News

May 23, 2019

Capital Improvement and Pavement Plans

Oakland tries a new way to prioritize city improvement projects: by considering equity

The FROG Committee cuts the ribbon on the new Hardy Park / FROG Park playground

Feb 09, 2020

FROG / Hardy Park Renovation Grand Opening

Oakland Public Works has recently completed the renovation of Hardy Park, also known in the community as FROG Park after the community group Friends of the Greenbelt. OPW and FROG celebrated Sunday with a ribbon cutting and grand opening.

The CIP Process in Motion

Every two years in the summer and fall, the City of Oakland conducts engagement efforts to gather community input to inform the next round’s selection of CIP projects. Because the City has more demand for capital projects than it has money to pay for them, the CIP must make choices about how to score and prioritize potential projects. Once that information is collected, the project scores are calculated, and projects receive an overall score using the City's Prioritization Factors that can be found in the How a Capital Project is Formed section below.

City staff present the scores and recommendations to the City Council as part of the Budget Development process. The Budget Development process includes a series of public meetings and hearings where the Mayor and/or Council Offices discuss the City's Budget and CIP and will ask for the public to provide comments. The City Council will review the CIP proposal, and may make changes to it based upon the feedback received at these meetings. The dates and times for those meetings are variable each cycle; however, the City Council must adopt its Budget and CIP by June 30, 2021.

Since 2015 the CIP budget has grown by nearly 500% giving it an important role in building new city infrastructure.

The CIP Budget represents a major investment in our community. It reflects the overall priorities of the City and has an enormous impact on its health and vibrancy. CIP dollars can bring about entirely new community-envisioned changes and speed up the completion of existing projects that may be stalled because of funding shortages.

What is a Capital Project?

Chart highlighting the key differences between capital and maintenance projects

When the biennial budget is adopted, the CIP for those two years is also adopted. The assets identified for repair, replacement or purchase in a budget cycle become “CIP projects."

Projects included in a CIP are defined as any long-term investment that build, replace, or improve an asset (e.g. buildings, roads, parks, sewer, and drainage lines, etc.), have a useful design life of at least ten years and a minimum cost of approximately $100,000. In this way, they differ from maintenance projects which are typically smaller in scale/cost and refer to more urgent short-term repairs to ensure vital city assets remain operational.

If you have an urgent maintenance request (e.g. potholes, graffiti removal, etc.), you can navigate to the City's Oak 311 service which handles these more routine fixes. Please be advised that Oak 311 receives hundreds of requests and may not be able to respond to your concern immediately.

Click Here for Oak 311 Maintenance Service

How a Capital Project is Formed

Chart showing the priority factors Oakland relies on to comprehensively evaluate capital projects.

In 2018, the Oakland City Council adopted a major update to the City’s program for funding infrastructure projects, by developing a new, inclusive forum for Oakland residents to incorporate their feedback and introduce project ideas to be considered for the CIP selection process.

Along with it also came a new "CIP Prioritization Model," or the system used to weigh the urgency and projected impact of applicant projects to ensure City dollars are allocated effectively. The CIP Prioritization Model approved by the Oakland City Council scores projects on the factors listed above in the figure.