(oaklandside.org)
Look, we get it: you’re dying to move on from 2025.
Before we turn the page on this roller coaster of a year, let’s take a moment to remember everything Oakland went through: the FBI dropping indictments on our recalled mayor, a legendary coach gunned down at Laney, peaceful protestors pepper-sprayed on Coast Guard Island, and somehow, improbably, the Oakland Ballers winning a championship in their second season.
It was the kind of year that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time, maybe nursing a pint of Loard’s butter brickle while weeping on Scrappy’s shoulder?
Here’s your complete guide to the biggest Oakland news in 2025, including moments that remind us why we love our embattled, confounding, gorgeous city.
January
The feds finally unseal the Sheng Thao indictment
Remember those FBI raids last June? It was all building to this. Federal prosecutors unsealed corruption charges against former Mayor Sheng Thao, her partner Andre Jones, and David and Andy Duong, the father and son whose family runs California Waste Solutions — Oakland’s recycling contractor.
The alleged scheme reads like a Sopranos plotline. Prosecutors claim Thao and Jones were bribed by the Duongs, who were seeking a multi-million dollar deal with Oakland to build shipping container housing units for the homeless. They also allegedly wanted their lucrative recycling contract extended. In exchange, Jones allegedly landed a cushy “no-show job,” and the Duongs allegedly paid for attack mailers against Thao’s opponents in the 2022 mayor’s race.
All four defendants pleaded not guilty. Trial’s set for October 2026 — yes, over two years after those fateful summer raids. This show is far from over.
April: Samuel Merritt downtown, more Thao intrigue, OUSD superintendent change
Three words upend a political career
A handwritten note from a March 2024 anti-recall strategy meeting came back to haunt Leigh Hanson, Sheng Thao’s chief of staff, who’d somehow survived the recall and stayed on under interim Mayor Kevin Jenkins.
The note, revealed in FBI subpoena documents and published by The Oaklandside, read: “CM Fife can reach out to NAACP. Use BP as tokens.” BP meant Black people. Hanson claimed it was taken out of context, that she was documenting Thao’s observation about what recall opponents were doing, not proposing they do it themselves.
The NAACP Oakland branch wasn’t buying it and demanded she be fired. Jenkins obliged.
The note crystallized Oakland’s messy political moment, where everyone was accusing everyone else of tokenism and corruption, and nobody looked good.
Samuel Merritt’s quarter-billion-dollar bet on downtown
While everyone was doom-scrolling about Oakland’s downtown apocalypse, Samuel Merritt University was quietly planning a $240 million, 10-story campus at Broadway and 11th — the biggest post-pandemic investment in the heart of the city.
The health sciences university broke ground on its 99-year lease in 2025 and will open in January 2026, bringing 2,000 students and hundreds of faculty back to a part of town that desperately needs foot traffic.
It’s a massive boost to Oakland higher education after Holy Names’s shuttering and Mills College’s merger with Northeastern.
OUSD parts ways with its superintendent
The same week Oakland Unified announced it was finally leaving state receivership after 22 years — having just paid off a $100 million loan from 2003 — the school board ended Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell’s employment contract much earlier than expected.
She’d led the district since 2017 through three teacher strikes, a pandemic, school closures, and constant fiscal crises. Under her watch, graduation rates climbed to 80%, enrollment went up for the first time in eight years, and the district finally escaped state oversight.
The board had just extended her contract through 2027 a few months earlier. But some board members apparently became convinced that they needed to change course; the full story still isn’t clear.
Barbara Lee comes home to Oakland
After 27 years representing Oakland in Congress — including that legendary lone vote against the Afghanistan war after 9/11 — Barbara Lee came home to City Hall.
She won the special mayoral election with 53% of the vote, besting Loren Taylor and 8 other candidates. But she inherited a more than $100 million budget deficit, 200 fewer cops than the city arguably needs, federal oversight of OPD, ongoing corruption investigations, and a persistent trash crisis.
Now she actually had to govern through the chaos.
Oakland gets a nostalgic big-screen treatment
“Freaky Tales” hit theaters nationwide, and if you grew up in Oakland or the East Bay in the ’80s, it hit different. In a year when Oakland’s image was getting pummeled, here was a film that celebrated the city’s culture, music, and people — the Oakland we love.
Directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (both Berkeley-raised) created a love letter to 1987 Oakland through four interconnected stories, including punks fighting Nazi skinheads at 924 Gilman and Jay Ellis playing Sleepy Floyd settling scores. Too $hort executive produced, narrated, and made a cameo.
The film was shot at actual Oakland locations — Grand Lake Theatre, Telegraph Avenue, Loard’s Ice Cream, 1/4 Pound Giant Burgers.
May
Marvin Boomer is killed, an innocent bystander during a police chase
Marvin Boomer, 39, was a beloved Castlemont High School teacher who ran the career program and a community farm where students grew food.
On a May evening, he was taking a walk with his partner when an 18-year-old who was being chased by California Highway Patrol lost control of his car and crashed into a fire hydrant. The hydrant broke off and struck Boomer. In his final act, he pushed his partner aside, saving her life.
Over 100 people showed up to Boomer’s vigil. That same week, Castlemont held its graduation while grieving. Boomer’s death put a face on Oakland’s ongoing debate about police pursuits — and forced people to reckon with the real human cost of high-speed chases.
June: Ice cream victory, coal terminal defeat
Loard’s is back, baby
The Dimond District institution that’s been slinging ice cream since 1950 reopened its original location after a four-year pandemic closure. In a year when Oakland kept losing beloved businesses, here was one that actually came back, reviving 75 years of history with it.
New owners Winnie Tam and Willis Yu completely renovated the building, which had been broken into during the shutdown. They delayed the reopening so the spot could be used as a filming location for “Freaky Tales.”
Now it’s in full swing with 45+ ice cream flavors, including old classics burgundy cherry, butter brickle, and black raspberry marble.
Oakland keeps losing battles in the coal war
California’s First Appellate District Court upheld a 2023 ruling that Oakland breached its contract with developer Phil Tagami’s coal terminal project.
The judge said Tagami could either keep his lease to city-owned waterfront land (and extend it to actually build the thing) or abandon the lease and sue for damages.
Now the city faces the prospect of 12 million tons of coal rumbling through West Oakland on trains each year while also dealing with a separate federal bankruptcy case that could cost even more.
July
Ken Houston tries to make camping illegal for homeless people
District 7’s brash councilmember, Ken Houston, proposes letting the city sweep homeless camps without offering people shelter first, a radical change to Oakland’s current approach.
Critics said his plan would criminalize homelessness and violate federal law. Supporters say it’s time for the city to get tough on camps and remove more of them. After fierce opposition through multiple hearings and even pushback from the state’s homelessness agency, Houston pulled the proposal in December. But Houston says he’ll likely reintroduce the plan early next year.
September
The Ballers win it all
The scrappy independent baseball team that formed after the A’s abandoned Oakland won the Pioneer Baseball League championship in only their second season with a record-breaking 73-23 record — the best in league history.
They beat the Idaho Falls Chukars 4-3 at Raimondi Park, giving Oakland its first baseball championship in 35+ years.
In the same year the A’s officially left for Vegas, Oakland’s upstart community-owned team won a championship. It was peak Oakland — resiliant, community-driven, and improbably successful.
The coal terminal battles ends (for real this time)
The California Supreme Court declined to review the lower court ruling in favor of Phil Tagami, officially ending the decade-long state court fight. Tagami can now extend his lease and build the marine export terminal at the old Army Base. The terminal could be operational by 2028, exporting up to 12 million tons of coal annually to Asian power plants.
In the runup to the spring mayoral election, Barbara Lee signed a pledge to oppose the coal terminal and support “every feasible strategy” to stop it. Now, as mayor, she said the city would follow the court’s ruling.
October: Mitchell resigns, OMCA heist, Coast Guard Island
Oakland loses yet another police chief
Police Chief Floyd Mitchell announced his resignation, making him Oakland’s second chief to leave in less than two years — and the ninth chief or interim chief in the past decade.
During his 18 months, crime fell 25% (though it was following a national trend). But OPD kept struggling with federal oversight compliance, and Mitchell made it clear he wasn’t pleased with the Police Commission and what he called the “weaponization of the disciplinary process.”
His decision is further evidence that being Oakland’s police chief might be the most impossible job in law enforcement.
Oakland Museum’s artifacts stolen
Just before 3:30 a.m. on October 15, thieves broke into the Oakland Museum of California’s off-site storage facility and stole 1,000+ artifacts, including Native American baskets, 19th-century decorated walrus tusks, and much more.
The FBI’s Art Crime Team joined the investigation, but as of year’s end, no arrests, no recovered items.
It happened just four days before the Louvre got hit for $100 million in jewels. But this wasn’t Ocean’s Eleven — investigators think it was a crime of opportunity where the thieves didn’t even realize it was museum storage.
Federal Agents gather at Coast Guard Island. All hell breaks loose — and then doesn’t
The Trump administration said it was dispatching 100+ federal agents (Customs and Border Protection and ICE) to Coast Guard Island in the Oakland Estuary as a staging area for a “surge” in immigration enforcement operations.
Hundreds of protesters showed up at dawn to block the single road onto the island. Oakland Unified sent alerts to families, clergy held vigils, and protesters, including a few in Wonder Woman and Batman costumes, made shows of defiance.
Things got ugly fast: federal agents deployed chemical spray at a clergy member at point-blank range and used flash-bang grenades and pepper spray on demonstrators.
Mayor Barbara Lee, Rep. Lateefah Simon, and local officials publicly reaffirmed Oakland’s sanctuary city status. Then, suddenly, Trump called off the whole operation, citing conversations with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and several tech industry titans.
This was Oakland’s resistance moment in the first year of Trump 2.0 — proof that our city will still show up to protect vulnerable communities even if it meant getting pepper-sprayed.
Oakland fears owing nearly $700 million for saying no to coal
A Kentucky bankruptcy judge ruled that Oakland “tortiously interfered” with an insolvent company’s plans for the coal export terminal, preventing the company from getting financing.
Potential damages ranged from $230 million (Oakland’s expert’s estimate) to $674 million (what the company was claiming).
This was separate from the Phil Tagami case Oakland already lost. The city was now facing massive financial exposure in federal court while already drowning in a budget crisis.
In November, though, a federal district judge vacated the ruling, saying the bankruptcy court didn’t have authority to make a final judgment. But the case continues, and Oakland’s still facing potential hundreds of millions in liability.
November: FBI case drama, Coach Beam is gone
The FBI’s star witness is revealed to be…problematic
Lawyers for David Duong filed a motion to suppress evidence from the June 2024 FBI raids of his house and office, arguing that the feds had relied on a deeply unreliable informant with a “decades-long history of fraud” — Mario Juarez, aka “Co-Conspirator 1” — and withheld that information from the judge who issued the search warrant.
Then, in December, Sheng Thao, Andre Jones, and David’s son Andy joined the motion with further accusations against the informant: the FBI had also omitted Juarez’s racist text messages about Jones, including messages citing “stupid black shit.” The defense argued that a relatively inexperienced FBI agent took the word of an unreliable source.
If the evidence gets suppressed, the entire corruption case could collapse.
Oakland loses Coach John Beam
On a Thursday morning, John Beam was shot and killed in the field house at Laney College.
Beam was a legend. He’d been coaching Oakland kids since 1982, starting at Skyline High School before moving to Laney in 2004. Over 100 of his players went on to Division I college football; more than a dozen made it to the NFL. He led Laney to the 2018 State Championship and maintained a 90% graduation and transfer rate.
Netflix featured him in Season 5 of “Last Chance U” in 2019. People who knew him described his “tough love” approach, saying he didn’t just coach football; he helped young men navigate life.
The shooting happened the day after a shooting at Skyline (his old school), and Skyline students were on Laney’s campus when it happened.
December: Flock fight, OUSD cuts
The Flock camera fight gets weird
Privacy advocate Brian Hofer sued OPD (again) for allegedly sharing license plate reader data with ICE, the FBI, and agencies in “deep red states” — despite Oakland being a sanctuary city.
He filed the lawsuit the same day the City Council’s Public Safety Committee was considering a $2.25 million contract with Flock Safety, a company that operates police surveillance cameras, including license plate readers. Over 100 people spoke against the contract, and the committee deadlocked 2-2, seemingly killing the proposal.
But then the Rules Committee fast-tracked it directly to the full council, bypassing the usual process. On December 17, the full council approved the surveillance camera contract; Carroll Fife was the lone “no” vote.
The contract includes new safeguards, but critics remain skeptical, especially as new and worrying information about Flock’s data sharing keeps popping up around the country.
OUSD greenlights $100 million in devastating cuts
The Oakland school board approved a plan to slash $102 million — roughly 20% of the district’s unrestricted general fund — from next year’s budget.
And this time, school sites aren’t safe; they could lose up to 10%. That could mean fewer teachers, fewer counselors, fewer after-school programs, dirtier classrooms, and fewer Chromebooks.
How did we get here? The district spent years running deficits and relying on one-time COVID money that’s now gone. Enrollment has dropped by 3,000 students over the past decade. And the district’s cash reserves collapsed from a projected $27 million in June to just $1.3 million by the end of October.
Interim Superintendent Denise Saddler is pushing for “full restructuring”—including school closures and mergers—but past closures haven’t proven they actually save money.