When Oakland restaurant owners, residents and landlords screamed bloody murder over the tremendous hike in the city’s new garbage contract last month, the members of the Oakland City Council could provide no answers.

Even though they had approved the contract with Waste Management, they couldn’t explain the dramatic rise in costs to customers — leading some people to suspect that council members either weren’t informed or didn’t understand the impact of their actions.

In the midst of an economic boom that will define Oakland’s future, the city cannot afford such dire, costly lapses in judgment and performance. There’s an immediate step Oakland can take to prevent something like last month’s garbage shock from happening again.

Oakland can hire an independent budget analyst. It’s something San Francisco has used for decades.

“We write weekly legislative reports and ... provide analysis for any government action that costs money,” said Severin Campbell, a partner in the firm of Harvey Rose Associates. “It’s one of our main functions.”

For nearly 40 years, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has contracted with Rose’s firm for budget analysis services. It costs the city about $2.1 million a year.

Fred Blackwell, now the executive director of the San Francisco Foundation, wanted to establish an outside budget analyst during his short stint as Oakland’s city administrator.

“It’s something I was interested in but never got the chance to work on,” Blackwell said Monday. “The process in San Francisco is not perfect, but there are elements I appreciated, and one of them was submitting the (annual) budget for analysis and recommendation. I thought it was a good process, and one that Oakland could benefit from.”

It’s crucial.

People who’ve committed their lives and investment in Oakland cannot have their economic futures jeopardized by the whims of elected officials with their own priorities. And the occasions on which the city has miscalculated, or chased an ideological dream on the taxpayer’s dime, are too frequent to be listed, but here are a few of the high points:

•City and county taxpayers are still paying $10 million a year for the deal that brought the Oakland Raiders back to town in 1995.

•In 2004, Oakland voters approved Measure Y, an annual $20 million parcel tax measure to fund a minimum police force of 803 officers, but the city was not able to maintain that number.

•After sparking a garbage war that played out on the streets of the city last year, our council members approved a contract that they didn’t understand and no one could afford.

If you are a close observer of Oakland politics, you know it’s common to see some of the biggest political disputes fought over which bidders will receive a contract. The staff reports that provide recommendations to the council often take a back seat to a council member’s favored bidder.

The addition of an independent budget analyst would not end the favoritism that comes into play in the city’s contract selection process, but it would explain in plain language what the city is signing up for.

It would also establish a baseline — a common-sense, objective, practical approach — that even an elected official cannot dance away from or redefine. And it could serve as a buffer between council members who lack the fortitude to just say no and a constituent-activist council gadfly.

Judging from the collective clueless response from council members around the details of the garbage contract, this is a service the city could really benefit from.

If Oakland hopes to reach its full potential and take its rightful place as one of the Bay Area’s most dynamic, diverse and trend-setting cities, the city’s elected leadership could benefit from the sound financial advice of an objective third party.