First, we have a city official accepting a gift from a lobbyist friend with business before the city. Now we have a city council member accepting a gift from one of the most powerful developers in the city, a situation that involves the same exact lobbyist.
The Press-Telegram‘s City Hall reporter Paul Eakins reported over the weekend that e-mails obtained by the P-T reveal that 2nd District Council member Suja Lowenthal accepted an invitation to attend the Oct. 29, 2009 Los Angeles Kings game, free of charge, from the chairman of one of the most powerful developers in the city. Also at the game, evidently at the developer’s invitation–lobbyist Mike Murchison, whose cozy relationship with and offer of a free gift to now demoted Development Services chief Craig Beck was also first revealed by the P-T.
I am not going to get into all the details of Council member Lowenthal’s story other than to say that you should read Eakins’ Jan. 9 article on the P-T website.
A major difference in the Council member Lowenthal situation is that unlike Mr. Beck, who initially felt compelled to lie about the gift from Mr. Murchison, Council member Lowenthal tried to report the gift from developer Frank T. Suryan Jr.
However, Heather Mahood in the City Attorney’s office determined that because the ticket was a promotional offering to season ticket holders and “had no face value” it did not need to be included in Council member Lowenthal’s required filing of gifts received.
What the puck?
Evidently leaving the price tag off of something now makes it worthless. You would think that the City Attorney’s office could have made a simple call to Staples Center and said “I know this ticket doesn’t have a price on it, but if I wanted to buy something identical, how much would it cost?”
Keep in mind that this was not some nose-bleed seat. According to the e-mails obtained by the P-T, the seats were described by Mr. Murchison as VIP tickets and included a chance to meet famed Kings player Luc Robitaille. I’m guessing that Luc doesn’t normally head up into the rafters of the Staples Center to cavort.
And while Council member Lowenthal did the right thing in trying to report the ticket, does the City Attorney’s office think we are all idiots? Obviously, this ticket had some value. I mean, you or I could not walk in off the street and sit in the seat for free.
Since it was available only to season ticket holders, someone paid for it, whether it was Mr. Murchison or the developer, Mr. Suryan. Even Council member Lowenthal knew it was worth something, that’s why she tried to report it.
In an effort to defuse the situation in a post-Craig Beck environment, Council member Lowenthal told the P-T that the event was purely social.
Okay, here’s where my Logic-o-meter starts going off like a gieger counter at Three Mile Island.
Yup. Just some friends hanging out. In VIP seats. At Staples Center. With a lobbyist now known to offer free gifts to city officials. And at the invitation of Mr. Suryan, chairman and CEO of Lyon Capital Ventures that has least two projects worth more than $130 million under development in Long Beach–both approved unanimously in 2007 by the City Council, including Council member Lowenthal.
Just a typical Thursday night for a council member.
Council member Lowenthal also said the “social” event had nothing to do with work. Just a chance to catch up with acquaintances.
Now the Logic-o-meter has fully pegged its needle in the red.
Put yourself in the same situation: You are invited to an event by people you know through work that you haven’t seen in a while. Are you going to sit for several hours and talk about your new curtains or are you going to talk about work–which is, after all, what you have in common with each other?
I don’t know about you, but I find it insulting when City Hall officials think the citizens are thick enough to buy this type of deflecting drivel.
Call it what you will, but this is pure and simple influence peddling.
And the more I think about, so what if Council member Lownethal tried to report it? The bottom line is she should not have accepted the invitation.
You know I like Frank Sinatra, but the man actually whined that he was being punished for hanging around with mobsters. Well, guess what ‘Ol Blue Eyes, you lie down with mobsters…
The same goes for politicians. You hang around with lobbyists who apparently pick up their ethics at the five-and-dime and business people who are raking in taxpayer contracts you voted on and guess what? You have no right to complain when people look at you askew. It’s called perception. And the public rightly expects its City Hall officials to be 100 percent above board at all times–24 hours a day.
In Council member Lowenthal’s defense, though, it might be hard for any council member to turn down an invitation from the likes of Mr. Suryan and others in what I call the development industry.
After all, people like Mr. Suryan and others in the development industry are among the top donators to the campaigns of all the current council members.
This really shouldn’t surprise anyone, since politicians figured out long ago that to raise the money needed to win and re-win office, you have to kowtow to the people and groups with the money. And guess what, that is not you or me. Oh sure, the vast majority of the City Council campaigns are funded by individuals like you and me, but we are all just single donations with no group power or organized agenda.
The reality fro Long Beach is that since the 1950s, the people and groups with the majority of the political juice have been the development (and property) industry. This umbrella group consists of people like realtors, robber-baron landlords, property investors, building trades, commercial banks, property management firms, and more, who all became rich in the unrelenting residential, commercial and industrial development and redevelopment of Long Beach.
And with so much money being made, the development industry in Long Beach has never been at a loss to throw campaign contributions at politicians to make sure that the wheels of development and redevelopment never stop turning and regulations favor their interests, not that of the citizenry.
Take a look at the willy-nilly zoning laws that allowed entire streets of Craftsman houses to be decimated to make way for Stalinesque apartment buildings. Or the lack of oversight which has allowed some of the richest landlords in town to become absentee slumlords, doing what they want and charging what they want because they know no one at City Hall is looking over their shoulder. Or the insane commercial real estate overbuilding in downtown during the late 1980s. Or the complete and utter destruction of downtown’s once-scenic Ocean Boulevard into a chasm of mocking and soulless apartment high-rises. Need I even mention the Nu-Pike, the old mall, or the new old mall called the City Place?
That these things can go on year after year tells you where the power in this city lies, because it surely isn’t being wielded by the citizens that have to live in the bric-a-brac shoulder-to-shoulder reality that has been created. Evidently, when you have the cash, you can peddle any crap you want in this city and get it approved.
But, let’s be realistic.
A free Kings ticket, even a full price, is not really going to get you much in the buy-and-trade world of politics. No, the life blood of any elected official’s future is campaign money.
For this reason, your intrepid writer spent a couple days looking through every single campaign contribution ever made to each sitting city council member since they first ran for office. Due to a filing and posting lag, these only included those made through the end of June 2009. For example, if a council person is in their second term and thinking about running a write-in campaign this year, I looked at every contribution they received in the first and second campaigns as well as anything raised through June 30, 2009 for the upcoming race. And so on for each sitting council member.
I tagged each contribution by a company or organization as one of several interest groups that were clearly the most numerous. These included the development industry, unions, attorneys, and lobbyist/public relations firms. Executives of firms or groups that fell into these categories also were tagged. I should point out that each of those special interest groups listed on the following chart represent the largest such contributing groups for each council member.
Now, this little project encompassed just shy of 3,500 contributions, totaling close to $1 million in donations over roughly four years, and I fully concede that in the course of my efforts I most certainly misidentified a few. But not many.
The whole idea of this was to gather some sense of who the vested interests are that support those sitting behind the council dais.
The results were interesting, both dispelling several common myths and quite clearly showing who is holding the strings at City Hall.
In the case of five council members (Lowenthal, DeLong, Andrews, Gabelich and Lerch), the development industry was by far the largest special interest contributor. In the case of three of the remaining council members (Garcia, O’Donnell, and Reyes-Uranga), the development industry was number two, and for Council member Schipske it fell to number three.
All told, the development industry has over the years donated a total of just under $190,000 to the nine sitting council members.
This is just over 19 cents of every dollar collected by the current council. This is also just over 2.5 times more than the next nearest interest group, the unions, which spent just over $70,000 on all the current council members’ races.
Click here to download a PDF version of the chart.
Now, while I hope you will peruse this chart at length, and come to your own conclusions, I would be remiss in not pointing out at least one item of note.
Five of the six council members whose districts are mostly contained within the city’s redevelopment zones all saw their greatest special interest donations from the development industry.
Remember that nearly 40-percent of the city falls into one of the RDA’s seven zones, with the majority falling within just five council districts: the 1st, 2nd, 6th, 8th and 9th. In fact, Robert Garcia’s 1st, Dee Andrew’s 6th and Val Lerch’s 9th District are virtually 100 percent RDA zones, while roughly 60 to 70 percent of Suja Lowenthal’s 2nd district and Rae Gabelich’s 8th district fall within RDA zone boundaries. The remaining four districts have some RDA zone areas, but these are very small pockets in comparison to the first five districts mentioned.
Also keep in mind that in the 2010 budget, the city expects to spend upwards of $140 million on redevelopment in these RDA zones. Can you imagine a more tempting piggy bank for the development industry? Especially one like the RDA that is mandated to spend a majority of its funds each year. And considering that Long Beach is not exactly overflowing with conventional development opportunities given the feckless fiscal leadership that City Hall seems to attract, these RDA dollars are no doubt highly sought after.
Just ask Mr. Suryan. His firm’s more than $130 million in developments are all being handled under the auspices of the city redevelopment office.
So, there you have it. I am not going to rant too much this week or really even offer any solutions.
I just thought that everyone out there might like to know who is holding the purse strings and which puppets those purse strings might be tethered to.
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