Residents say they want homeless, safety and health services prioritized in 2025 budget

Last week, residents told city officials that they’d like to see investments in homeless services, public safety and health and wellness prioritized in next year’s budget.

Over the course of one virtual and four in-person meetings at Recreation Park’s community center, residents voted on various issues in an interactive survey. Homelessness — both preventing it and responding to encampments — were popular topics that residents placed colored stickers next to.

Fixing city streets, improving access to libraries, affordable high-speed internet, affordable recreation and fitness programs and improving public transit options were also popular issues.

The meetings are part of a new approach the city says it’s taking to incorporate the community’s voice into the actual proposed budget that will be released this summer.

Manuel Valenzuela, the executive director of Long Beach Heritage, a group that advocates for the preservation of the city’s historic buildings and businesses, said preserving old buildings and having them be adaptively reused instead of torn down to make way for new ones could help the city’s climate goals. The greenest building is “the one that’s already built,” he said.

Valenzuela also said that investing in park space, like Willow Springs Park in Central Long Beach, is something that he wanted to see funded in the upcoming budget.

“They’ve had plans in place for about eleven years now, it would be nice to see the investment and some of that stuff actually being built,” Valenzuela said.

The park has been the source of some community concern ever since it was left out of a round of city designations that could have solidified its status as a park permanently. Some activists have alleged that the city had plans to convert it to commercial use.

However, during the city’s virtual community meeting Wednesday night, Christopher Koontz, the city’s director of Community Development said the issue would be heading back to the council in the coming months.

“We’ll have some good news for you around then about Willow Springs Park,” Koontz told attendees about a potential vote that could come as soon as March.

Public safety was also a popular issue, but how the city should invest in it depended on who you asked. Some attendees said that the city needed to push harder to hire hundreds more officers to help speed up response times and improve neighborhood safety.

Long Beach Police Department Chief Wally Hebeish noted that the department has implemented a number of hiring incentives to help try and draw officers to the city but noted that it’s an industry-wide challenge to attract and retain officers.

But Joanna Diaz, a civic engagement program manager with the nonprofit Long Beach Forward, said that more cops will not provide better public safety. Diaz said the city’s money could be better spent by protecting renters from evictions, building affordable housing and investing in language access programs to allow non-English speakers to participate in city processes.

Diaz disagreed with one of the more popular categories voted on by attendees: Rapid Response and homeless encampment clean-ups.

“We don’t need our encampments to be “cleaned up,” Diaz said. “We need to prevent people from becoming unhoused.”

Community comments from the five meetings held last month are expected to be combined with results from an online survey that ended earlier this month. The community’s feedback will be given to the City Council ahead of its approval of the annual budget, something that typically happens in September.

Long Beach officials said last month that the city could be facing a $28 million deficit in the next fiscal year that starts in October, something that it hopes will shrink if forecasted revenue goes up. However, a large deficit could limit investments in non-essential projects as the city could be facing staff and service reductions to balance the budget.

The proposed city budget has historically been released in late July or early August.