Five shadowy Independent Expenditure Committees have raised and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting Loren Taylor for Oakland Mayor and District 2-linked candidates ahead of the April 15 Special Election, public records show. Empower Oakland; Revitalize the East Bay; Better Bay Area; Responsible Leadership for Oakland; and Oakland Neighbors, Businesses & Public Safety Advocates have raised and spent over $400,000 on internet and digital advertising, mailers, canvassing companies and other strategies. 

Four of the IE’s are linked to the recall and the center-right wing campaigns for Oakland elected offices in November through their principals and professional relationships. Two of the committees are run by the same person, Isaac Abid, duplicating a similar pattern from the investor, landlord and developer money that we saw in the 2024 election. Several IE’s are yet again creating circular financing that by nature is not transparent.

Revitalize the East Bay/Empower Oakland Run by Isaac Abid

Isaac Abid is the founder of Revitalize East Bay and assumed the role of principal officer at Empower Oakland's campaign finance committee on March 20, 2025. Abid took over the principal role from Trishala Vinnakotta, Loren Taylor's mayoral campaign director.

REB was functionally the sole contributor to the Black Action Alliance, a committee roundly criticized by standing Oakland Black advocacy organizations for misrepresenting itself and serving as a manufactured community organization to partner with Empower Oakland and KTVU. The criticisms are echoed in current reporting from the committee that shows it has done little more than provide the "sponsorship" and pay its own accounting bills since founding. 

To add to the confusion, Abid, who often ran Revitalize as a pass-through for the money of Philip Dreyfuss in the recalls of Sheng Thao and Pamela Price, appears to have created a new city–registered committee days after the last finance reports before the election were due on April 1. The new committee is called Revitalize the East Bay Independent Expenditure Committee, and has a distinct ID number from Revitalize East Bay. On that same day, Abid changed the designation of the county committee to a city committee. Now two committees with almost the same name appear on the city's database, despite being two separate committees, with the same designation and same stated purpose. Functionally one IE run by the same person, the records are divided as two entities under two separate jurisdictions.

The old IE continued contributing to Responsible Leadership for Oakland this month, now with a city designation, representing a current total of $267,000 of Responsible's total $367,000.* 

Abid's original Revitalize was a successor to another similar sounding committee, Reviving the Bay Area, run by Abid and recalls-funder Philip Dreyfuss. That committee became supporters of Pamela Price when the state's Fair Political Practices Commission forced the org to acknowledge its main focus was the Price recall and it was not a general purpose committee. 

The rationale behind Abid's decisions aren't clear, but one actual outcome is that Revitalize isn’t required to list its contributions before the election on April 15. As it has in the past, a committee created by Abid will avoid reporting its donor[s] during a critical time for transparency.

Empower Oakland hasn't been as active in this cycle as last, outside of its outsized role in the KTVU forum, and more of its efforts seem to be in getting Charlene Wang elected. Chris Larsen, a billionaire tech mogul who's also contributed directly in San Francisco police spending, gave Empower $100,000 — the Revitalize contribution and the Larsen contribution are the two largest and make up 90% of Empower Oakland's current bank. Empower Oakland is also drawing from nearly $100,000 it raised last year as well. 

Better Bay Area 

Better Bay Area registered at the state level, and is an arm of a much larger state-wide IE run and funded by restaurant, fast food and real estate interests California Alliance of Family Owned Businesses [CAFOB] PAC. In the November election cycle, the statewide committee raised over $10 million and spent around $7 million, with a tiny wedge of that going to BBA. 99% of Better Bay Area’s $949,000 came from CAFOB last year. $125,000 of the $135,000 in the April cycle came from CAFOB — around $10,000 came from California Real Estate Political Action Committee. 

Better Bay Area is run by Cosmo Fagundo, who owns dozens of McDonald’s franchises in the South Bay. Last year, Fagundo’s IE also gave $20,000 to Citizens for a Brighter Future [supporting Leronne Armstrong] and $15,000 to Oaklanders Together for a Safer Oakland and Charlene Wang in Oakland’s November Election. BBA's contribution of $50,000 to Empower Oakland is still being credited in Empower’s mailers for Wang's current campaign, now being run by Abid. 

BBA also spent funds in a San Jose race against a labor-backed candidate in 2024—at the time, city unions and labor advocates opined that BBA’s goal was to weaken union solidarity and undermine nascent fast food unionizing. 

So far BBA's expenditures have been direct and in support of candidates, with mailers, materials and other support, not to IEs. 

Oakland Neighbors, Businesses & Public Safety Advocates for Loren Taylor for Mayor

The principal officer for the recall-associated committee is Brenda Grisham, who was also a principal officer in SAFE, the Price recall finance committee. Like Grisham's former venture, the IE is also fronted mostly by the money of an absentee landlord and developer — about $50,000, more than half the funds reported to date, come from Ronald Nahas, a developer whose address is in Idaho.

The IE also maintains an odd link to the original recall core: a library worker in Tennessee, Andrew Hock. This time an LLC created and run by Hock, Laschian Consulting Group, received $22,000 from the committee for consultant and graphics work. The committee was made infamous last week when Oakland residents noticed a fake Oaklandside article featured in one of the online video ads. Oaklandside later reported on the clearly faked headline and article. At that time, Grisham, who as the principal officer is the ostensible generator of the political content of the committee, seemed to be unaware of where the ad came from. Hock's firm is one of two listed as being paid for video content for the committee.

Responsible Leadership for Oakland: Elect Loren Taylor for Mayor

There are also links to the recall and to Taylor in Responsible. Responsible's principal officer Ji Winkler works for Genentech, where Taylor’s spouse Erica Taylor is also employed in a senior position — although the two appear to share no overlapping roles there. Erica Taylor has had official roles in her husband’s campaigns in the past — she served as Loren Taylor’s treasurer in his candidate-controlled officer holder committee and in his 2022 mayoral campaign candidate account.

Winkler also has significant links to Chris Moore, an organizer and major funder behind the Pamela Price recall. Winkler’s spouse is a real estate investor with properties in Oakland, Richmond and Albany, who has written for East Bay Rental Housing Association’s newsletter and given seminars for the org — Moore is the treasurer of the association, one of four principals who run the organization. Ji Winkler and Moore are friends on Facebook.

Daniel Winkler gave $1100 to Oakland United to Recall Sheng Thao last year; Winkler gave at the $600 limit for individual contributions to Loren Taylor’s 2025 mayoral candidate account in March.

Responsible received the bulk of its contributions from Abid's Reviving the East Bay, but other contributors worth noting also gave significant amounts: 

Max Hodak: $70,000. Hodak co-founded Neuralink with Elon Musk, and has also been linked to animal experimentation. Hodak's new company, Science Corp., headquartered in Alameda, is competing in the same field and does research experiments on live primates. In 2024, Alameda’s City Council voted against Hodak’s proposal to move into an Alameda City-owned building to expand the company. A significant community opposition on the grounds of a history of animal abuse at the corporation and at Neuralink were credited for the failure of the proposal—Physicians for Responsible Medicine also opposed the sale in a letter with graphic details about Neuralink's animal abuse.

Garry Tan: $10,000. Tan is strongly linked to the Astroturf Network in San Francisco and has now shifted to focus to include working with the Trump-Musk regime in Washington. 

JDW/Justin Douglas Wallway: $9,900. JDW is a rental property company owned by Justin Douglas Wallway. The company achieved some level of notoriety several years ago when it was featured in the anti-eviction map of mass evictors and in an East Bay Express article for using substantial rehabilitation loopholes to evict tenants in rent-controlled apartments. Wallway may own dozens of properties and hundreds of units under various LLCs.