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Oakland’s fiscal crisis appears to be reaching a tipping point after its contingency budget was triggered this month, and the city is on track to continue overspending, according to a City Council committee meeting on Tuesday.
The city’s precarious position is partly due to a revised agreement on selling its share of the Oakland Coliseum, which delayed payments it relied on to patch over $60 million of a massive budget shortfall.
When the council passed that budget in July, it included a contingency plan with cuts to public safety and a hiring freeze should the sale funds not begin to come through by September. During a finance and management committee meeting on Tuesday, the city attorney’s office said that since those parameters have been met, the contingency budget is going into effect, but it’s still uncertain when those cuts would go into place or whether some could be avoided…