Oakland’s under-resourced public watchdog group, which has investigated high-profile ethics allegations against the likes of former Mayor Sheng Thao and others, is losing its second top official in less than a year.

Nicolas Heidorn, the executive director of the city’s Public Ethics Commission, announced Thursday that he will resign in July, forcing the commission to launch a search for his replacement.

The agency aided in a campaign finance probe that federal investigators credit with spurring their own probe — and the eventual indictment of Thao and members of the family that runs the city’s recycling contractor — but it has been underfunded for years and faces a growing backlog of uninvestigated complaints.

The PEC has just a two-person enforcement team — one investigator and a chief — to cover over 170 open cases.

Heidorn, who has held the executive director post for two years, said he is leaving the commission to pursue another role outside the city, not specifically because of the commission’s struggles.

Still, he said the problem of limited resources, which has persisted since leading former enforcement chief Simon Russell to resign in September, is significant.

“The commission has consistently shown that it works very hard to promote honest and transparent government in Oakland, and the main challenges that we face right now are resource constraints,” Heidorn told KQED.

According to Heidorn, a fully staffed commission would require two additional investigators plus a staff attorney for the enforcement team.

Before he officially steps down as director, Heidorn said he hopes to increase funding for the commission in the city’s next budget, which will be presented next month.

“One of my main goals in [my] remaining months is to ensure the PEC has the staffing and resources necessary to perform its role as an anti-corruption watchdog agency,” he said.

What that spending plan could look like is unclear — it will have been developed during a chaotic year for Oakland, during which four people will have held the top post in the mayor’s office and as the city entered a fiscal crisis after the current budget went awry.

The two-year budget being developed now will need to balance an even larger $265 million shortfall.

Due to its lack of funds, the city has paused most spending, including on a new public campaign financing program called Democracy Dollars. The program, which was passed by voters in 2022, aimed to give more residents the ability to buy into local politics by awarding them $100 vouchers to contribute to local campaigns.

PEC Chair Francis Upton IV said the delay of that program could have been a factor in Heidorn’s decision to leave.

“One of the things Director Heidorn was very excited about in joining the commission was to work on [Democracy Dollars],” he told KQED. But now, “the earliest that we will implement this is likely in 2028.”

He also pointed to the commission’s financial constraints and chronic understaffing, which have hamstrung its ability to work effectively.

Measure OO, which passed in November, will require the commission to gain another full-time investigator beginning in the 2026–27 fiscal year, but like Heidorn, Upton believes the real requirement should be three.

“We’re still advocating that we get even one more just to allow us to make progress on our backlog,” Upton said. “Some of these cases are very serious and very complicated … and they’ve languished for years.”

One of those cases is the commission’s probe into alleged “straw donations” given to local campaigns, including Sheng Thao’s in 2022, on behalf of other people. That investigation has been ongoing since at least 2019. Any investigation by the ethics commission into Thao has yet to be presented to the commissioners, Upton said.

Simon, the former enforcement chief who stepped down last year, said in his resignation letter that he had worked long, often unpaid hours, trying to uncover corruption and bribery. He decided to resign after the city “continually failed to allocate any meaningful additional resources” to the enforcement division despite his repeated attempts to highlight understaffing, he said.

He suggested in his letter that the failure might even be deliberate, “despite (or perhaps because of) the considerable public interest in our cases that have been brought partially to light.”

Whether or not the underfunding is intentional or a byproduct of the city’s fiscal crisis, Upton said the result is a weakened ability to deter corruption — “people know we don’t have the resources.”

He also expects that it will make finding a replacement to lead the agency much harder.

“We are very, very sad to lose [Heidorn],” Upton said. “His work and the staff’s work during his tenure has been impeccable, and I do think that the fact that we are very underfunded is going to make it hard for us to attract and retain high-quality people.”

The commission is accepting applications in its search for Heidorn’s replacement through June 2, it said.

KQED’s Riley Cooke contributed to this report.