1:45pm | Just over four years ago, the Salvation Army selected Long Beach as one of the sites of a future Kroc Community Center.
The deal was pretty simple and by all accounts, pretty amazing for Long Beach: The Salvation Army would provide the construction costs and a portion of an endowment to keep the center open in perpetuity. All the city had to do was come up with a percentage of the endowment as a gesture of community buy-in.
The original plan would have seen the Salvation Army contribute $140 million to the project—$80 million for construction and $60 million for the endowment. The city had to come up with $20 million, or just over 14 percent of the whole project.
Between 2006, when the City Council was first briefed on the Salvation Army terms, and 2010, the project was downscaled slightly to about $60 million in construction costs and $40 million for the endowment, with the city’s contribution as of this year reduced to about $15 million.
Unfortunately, while spending a tremendous amount of time and effort working out how to utilize the Hamilton Bowl site for the project, City Hall never officially pushed the launch button on a fund raising campaign.
So, on May 4, almost exactly four years to the day after selecting Long Beach as a Kroc Center site, the Salvation Army canceled the project, citing an inability to raise money in Long Beach for the community buy-in.
Last week, City Hall released a statement saying that the Salvation Army, after meeting with city officials in late May, refused to reverse their cancellation of the project.
However, in the City Hall statement, Mayor Foster states that the city remains committed to building a “world-class community center” at the Hamilton Bowl site—now on its own dime.
It should be pointed out here: a) the city is more than broke; b) the city could not raise 14 percent of the cost of the center; and, c) short of state or federal funds, the city has no revenue sources to pay for such a community center on its own in the foreseeable future.
But the Mayor did not let those facts get in the way of making a silk park from a dirt field.
In what may be the boldest attempt lately to spin bad to good, the Mayor thanks the Salvation Army for turning over the proposed Kroc Center project and design plans to the city at no cost.
This “generous donation” the Mayor states, “will save Long Beach a lot of money” when the city gets around to building the center on its own.
But this is not a time for celebrating or even counting what small blessing come out of this situation.
This, above all of the recent City Hall snafus, is a time to point fingers.
This is not just the typical City Hall case of making the wrong decision.
No, the main problem here was just plain hubris.
Those in City Hall with the ability to act on the fund raising, or the ones that should have acted on the fund raising, did nothing to take it as a serious requirement for the project. And this inaction was committed with the assumptive arrogance and overconfidence that someone like the Salvation Army would never even consider canceling the project on a city as deserving as Long Beach.
Even after the Salvation Army first told City Hall the project was canceled, the official city line, repeated by numerous city official in one form or another was, “we can work through this.”
Imagine—the Salvation Army states unequivocally they are done and the official reaction from City Hall is, “No, it’s not done.”
Well, again, City Hall was wrong.
As citizens of Long Beach, there seems to be a certain amount of resignation as we see this city’s leadership stumbling from bad decision to bad decision like a junkie staggering from fix to fix. And for the most part, these decisions are simply groused about in the media, and then fade away until the next precious example of feckless leadership rears its head.
Yet, if ever the citizens of this city needed an investigation into how one of these bad City Hall decisions was formulated and by whom—the case of the failed Kroc Center is it.
If ever the responsible city official or officials needed to be hauled into the spotlight of public humiliation due to their poor judgment and inactivity, this is the case.
If ever City Hall needed the brilliant light of openness shined under every rock and into every nook and cranny of 333 Ocean Blvd., this is the case.
Because if no one is held accountable when our elected and appointed officials squander what amounted to a nearly $100 million gift designed solely to help one of the most in-need areas of the city—then what real confidence can we have in any of their fiscal actions of smaller scale?
Please, take a few minutes, call or email the office of City Auditor Laura Doud or City Attorney Bob Shannon and demand someone look into how the Kroc Center went from dream to debacle and who caused it.
Demand that the public be allowed to know the entire story, not just the happy spin and que cera version the Mayor wants us to believe.