When it comes to money, the biggest "special interest" contributors in the upcoming Oakland mayoral sweepstakes are the candidates themselves.

Mayor Jean Quan has tossed $30,000 of her own cash into her re-election effort, which had raised $250,000 as of June 30, according to financial statements filed last week.

Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan put in $60,000 of the $101,000 she has raised since getting into the race in early June.

Port Commissioner and health care executive Bryan Parker spent $20,000 grooming his image with a cable TV campaign for Measure AA, the health services tax that Alameda County voters approved in June. Then he lent his mayoral campaign $30,000, accounting for a respectable chunk of the $277,000 he's raised since the start of 2013.

City Auditor Courtney Ruby has lent her campaign $18,578 of the $103,000 she has raised.

But the biggest self-starter is Occupy Oakland attorney Dan Siegel, who dropped $100,000 of his own money into his campaign - more than two-thirds of the $144,000 in funding he reported as of June 30.

"I've been practicing law for 40 years and managed to put a little money away for my retirement - and this is a big chunk of it," Siegel said.

He ascribes the spate of self-funding to a glut of "viable candidates" that has left much of the "smart money sitting on the sidelines" until someone emerges as a front-runner.

At the other end of the spectrum is San Francisco State Professor and TV commentator Joe Tuman, who has pulled in $206,000 but lent himself just $8,000.

And then there's Councilwoman Libby Schaaf, who has emerged as the top fundraiser so far, with $350,000. Records show she lent her campaign a mere $1,050.

Paging Irwin Allen: Producers of a documentary on the new $6.4 billion Bay Bridge eastern span plan to premiere the movie with an Imax screening in Sacramento on Monday - with a "special guest message" from state Transportation Agency Secretary Brian Kelly.

The event is being hosted by Alta Vista Solutions, the Emeryville firm whose inspectors signed off on the welds for the bridge despite earlier complaints from other inspectors that the Shanghai factory making the deck sections was doing a shoddy job.

Makes for a nice sneak preview to a state Senate hearing Tuesday into what went wrong on the bridge.

Infighting: It's hard to tell which is fiercer: the David Campos-versus-David Chiu race for state Assembly, or the behind-the-scenes fight between the candidates' labor supporters.

Supervisor Campos has the backing of the more progressive teachers, nurses and city workers unions.

Board President Chiu has the backing of the more moderate police, fire and construction unions.

Campos took the first round by winning the local labor council's endorsement in the primary - something that threw the mods into a tizzy.

As one moderate trade union leader told us, "It was a question about whether we would be seen as being able to deliver" support, which is what union politics is all about.

But deliver they did, with the cops and others spending heavily to knock back Campos in the top-two primary. The cops, for example, papered the town with mailers highlighting Campos' vote to reinstate Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi after his domestic-violence-related conviction.

The move helped Chiu take first place in the primary.

Last week, the moderates stuck again when they showed up in force at a labor confab in San Diego and, in a series of floor maneuvers including a three-hour roll-call vote, got the state labor council to pull back the Campos endorsement.

So now labor is effectively saying, "May the best man win."

Golf links: Gleneagles Golf Course operator Tom Hsieh certainly is putting his political skills to the test as he fights a 40 percent water hike that he says will put him out of business.

Just when it looked as if the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department was ready to let him walk on his decade-old lease, Hsieh, a onetime consultant to former Supervisor Fiona Ma, pulled a rabbit out of the hat.

He partnered with the laborers union for a neighborhood job training program that, in addition to trimming his maintenance costs, will bring a bit of labor and community pressure on Rec and Park to keep the gates open on the nine-hole course near the Sunnydale housing projects.

And it must be working, because Rec and Park has extended the lease talks for another month.