Oakland will be choosing a new mayor this election year.  The field has slowly become crowded with three contenders vying for the city’s top position at City Hall.  Don Perata, former State Senate President, has his eyes on the big chair.  Jean Quan will be leaving her District 4 City Council seat to run for mayor.  Both are political heavyweights in their own right and have worked the East Bay political scene for well over a decade.  But the surprise entry into the arena is Rebecca Kaplan, a former AC Transit Director and a relative newbie in politics compared to her counterparts.

Only in 2008 did Kaplan ride a wave of enthusiasm to win her current seat as Oaklands only At-Large (city-wide) Council-member.  Last month, Kaplan announced the creation of her exploratory committee, a must first step to run for any politcal office.  Though her run is not official just yet, it is all but certain to most observers that shes in the game.

Our friends at Oakland North were able to have a one-on-one chat with Rebecca Kaplan on her vision of the future for Oakland.  Here is a brief excerpt but be sure to read the full interview here.

Q: You talk about making changes at City Hall.  What is working and what is not working to attract businesses to Oakland?

In Oakland right now, you cannot apply for a business permit online. So the businesspeople come down to downtown and stand in the lines and lose time. We are wasting money, and we are paying people to sit entering the data, when instead, the businessperson could go onto the Internet and put in information to pay their fees and do their business licenses.  Meanwhile, we get complaints all the time when people try to call — they have questions about parking tickets and business licenses, and they say nobody is answering phones.  We are wasting all these staff [hours] typing data from a piece of paper that a businessperson can put in themselves online.

So when we look at how we are structuring the jobs inside City Hall, there are a lot of things where we are still not fully entered into the modern era in terms of technology and our systems. And if we change some of those, we could free up some staff time to do the things that people do need.

Read the full interview here.