If Tuesday’s City Council meeting proved nothing else, it is that the Council dais needs a permanent spot reserved for a Rod Serling-esque narrator. Just before the start of each meeting, the classic “Twilight Zone” theme will start up and the narrator will intone the following:
“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vapid as paste and as feckless as infirmity. It is the middle ground between wrong and wrongest, between demagogy and condescension, and it lies between the pit of voter apathy and the summit of bureaucratic inaction. This is the dimension of un-imagination. It is an area which we call, ‘The Council Zone.’”
Just as the last crescendo notes of the theme fade out, Mayor Foster will begin the meeting and perform the perfunctory business at hand such as the roll call, moment of silence, and pledge of allegiance.
Then the lights would dim, the chambers would grow quiet and the narrator would step forward again:
“Submitted for your approval –the quaint town of Long Beach. Lost somewhere in the shadowed crevices of a sprawling metropolis, it has become a prison of both its halcyon past and the unfulfilled promises of its future. A financial cage with half-a-million prisoners and nine warders. But as these warders are soon to find out, the trappings of authority are sometimes the bars to the cruelest dungeon of all. It is a dungeon located in the deepest corners of ‘The Council Zone.’”
Hyperbole? Perhaps. But what else can explain the Bizzaro World scenes from Tuesday’s meeting where the Council voted 7-0 (Delong and Reyes-Uranga were absent) to officially declare that Long Beach is in a “fiscal emergency.”
This is governance? It’s like we are all William Shatner strapped to our airplane seat looking out the window at nine gremlins slowly destroying the engines on the wing. It kind of makes you understand the Shatner character’s ultimate frustration of no one listening.
This may sound a bit brutish, but where the hell have the Council been? Long Beach has been in a fiscal emergency for a long, long time.
And yet this Council, like previous Councils, can do little more than be reactive to the terror around them. There is no proactive leadership.
The irony is that of the 20 minutes or so of discussion Tuesday before voting on the resolution to declare a “fiscal emergency,” the majority was spent blame-storming—harping on the state for all the money it plans to not give the city to balance its own books (because Sacramento faces the same dire crisis of leadership).
At the request of the Council, Tom Modica, the city’s manager of government affairs, reported that the tentative state budget that is currently being finalized (and may go before the state assembly for a vote by the end of the week) is likely to add another $16.3 million to the city’s deficit.
“Specifically the funds that we are looking at are about an $8 million raid in gas tax,” Modica informed the Council. “This is a funding source that $6.3 million of which funds critical transportation operation services in the General Fund, so if that funding source goes away there is a hole in the General Fund of $6.3 million. Examples of services are street light power, street tree maintenance, pot hole crews, traffic signal operations, and the like.
“We are also looking at about a $10 million in Prop. 1A (2004) borrowing, which is our property tax that comes out of the General Fund. That would have to be repaid after three years [by the state] but would create a shortfall of $10 million in the General Fund next year.”
In addition to this $16.3 million being “raided” by Sacramento, the final state budget may also cut redevelopment funds to the city by another $23.5 million.
“To put that in perspective,” said Modica, “the state’s take would be about roughly 60 percent of the available tax increment given to [the Redevelopment Agency]–that they would have available to them next year. That is an enormous reduction.”
And Modica is right. It is enormous. But this practice of Long beach and other city’s relying on the state and the feds to provide funds for everyday services is absurd. Certainly Long Beach should get money it is owed (like the 35 percent of the $0.18 per gallon gas tax on gas sold in the city). The problem is that this money should be icing on the cake. Why on Earth is the city relying on state funds to fix potholes? Or traffic signals? Isn’t this what the General Fund is supposed to pay for?
Tuesday’s discussion would almost make you believe that Sacramento was at fault for the city’s projected $43 million deficit next year.
However, what was not discussed Tuesday was how the city got where it is now, budget-wise, in the first place. Not a word about how a city that had a General Fund surplus only two years ago is now so far in the hole that it is having to shut down city services once a month and contemplating furloughs for public safety workers.
“It might seem ‘what is the point to declare a fiscal emergency,’” said Councilmember Lowenthal on Tuesday, “but I as a policy maker here do see quite a significant point in that. While it might be something that all cities are going through, it is very important to articulate to all of our residents that we have reached a point in our budget deliberations—not just locally, but throughout the state—that there is very little in the way of good news coming out of Sacramento these days.”
Again with Sacramento?
Sure, the state legislators may be tightening their own belt to an extreme degree, much to the chagrin of Long Beach, but the current city budget deficit lays squarely on the shoulders of the current City Council and City Hall administration. Does anyone remember that the city faced a $100 million deficit in 2002? A deficit so huge that it took the skilled handling of numerous people in city government and some painful decisions to eliminate it by the 2007 budget.
In the space of three annual budgets this has vaporized to where we find ourselves today.
Perhaps it is time for the Council to own up to the fact that this happened on their watch and it is their duty to solve it, not just pass the blame-buck northward. This is their mission and their responsibility–To Serve The Citizens.
Let us not find out, after all is said an done, that the City Council mistakenly thought that “To Serve The Citizens,” was really just a cookbook.
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