I don’t envy the mayor this week. For that matter, I don’t envy any elected executive this particular month, the month that “State of the” city, state, and union addresses are traditionally offered to legislatures, citizens, and the media – addresses that are, this year, sure to be something like a pep-talk for the Detroit Lions or a staff meeting in the LA Times newsroom… only grimmer.
Our new president will give the State of The Union address this year, and you can bet Euros to Gyros (dollars and donuts are so 20th century) that George Bush is thanking God he’s off the hook. It won’t surprise anyone if Mr. Obama continues to ring the theme of hope, which has gone from a catch-all campaign slogan to an emotional life-preserver faster than anyone would have liked.
Mayor Foster offered something like hope in his address Tuesday night, although he didn’t actually use the word – a wise choice, because, as Ben Franklin rightly noted, “”He that lives upon hope will die fasting”.
Speaking of fasting… it might be a good idea to start practicing.
Our city, like nearly every city from Portland, Maine to Portland Oregon and Saint Augustine Florida to San Diego, is – how shall I say this? – not exactly swimming in cash.
But you knew that.
Seated in row ‘F’ of the Carpenter Center Tuesday, I was just close enough to see the worry lines on the Mayor’s face. There aren’t as many as one might think; the man is clearly resilient, perseverant, and keeping his nose to the grindstone. But don’t be fooled by the weight-loss jokes (we’re going to be losing some weight this year, whether we like it or not), the man is concerned.
Foster was wise enough not to offer the watery, glib promise of hope; instead, he reminded us of our ‘character’: “We are a tolerant city, we are a generous city, we are a caring city.” He recalled the amazing tenacity of the World War Two generation, and pointed out that, in spite of the tremendous difficulties of the Great Depression and the war against fascism, that generation gave us a country in better shape than they’d found it; they gave us prosperity, freedom, opportunity. Why lean on hope when you have “a great spirit?” Hope is a phantasm; character is something you can count on.
But is it enough?
Having apparently become an official member of the fourth estate, I was granted an “embargoed” press release, and was able to read the Mayor’s speech before he took the stage. I must say, having done that, it was hard to find a reason to stay, but I enjoy Mr. Foster’s style, and, more important, I wanted to see which lines would get the applause.
Even without the speech in hand, it wasn’t hard to predict what the Mayor would say. After all, what could he say? The situation is what it is. You could have summed up his speech thusly: “Friends, Long Beach is a city in America, and there have been no miracles in our treasury. But please, don’t panic; we’ll get through.”
This is what mayors say in tough times; this is what our leaders are paid to do.
He did give a few specifics.
City employee pensions are going to be brought down to Earth (a big applause-getter). The Mayor will ask the enterprise fund businesses (airport, gas, RDA) to cut costs instead of cutting their contributions to the city. (Ask? You mean like we asked the banks to regulate themselves?) And… and… well, there really wasn’t much more than that.
The news is not good.
Not that there wasn’t anything to be proud of. We are now a Tree City USA (too bad about money not growing on them). Crime is way down (a national trend; we’ll see if it lasts as unemployment nears double-digits). The budget remains balanced and will, according to Mr. Foster, remain so forever (I’m no economist, but is that necessarily always a good thing? A little government debt can help sometimes, can’t it?). Four million dollars was set aside for a rainy day by the City Council. Public works fixes potholes at an impressive rate of about one every fifteen minutes, day in and day out. And road construction generally is less annoying; they do it on weekends now, primarily, and they do it faster (although, according to Foster, not fast enough; we need more public works crews and cannot afford them).
But, the bottom line is the bottom line, and we just don’t know where the money is going to come from, money we need to repair a dilapidated infrastructure, to fully fund parks and libraries, to maintain our intensive policing of gang-infested areas, to help the homeless, to expand city services, to continue making Long Beach Greener. (The Mayor told us we are the greenest big city in California, but he did not say how this was measured, and I must admit, examining a Google satellite map of the LBC, I find it hard to believe). Tax revenues must go up; cuts can only go so far, Mr Foster rightly insisted. Attracting businesses sounds to be job one, but a couple of car dealerships and two or three box stores are not going to cut it. Even the world’s biggest indoor soundstage – a most welcome development – falls far short of really shoring up the tax base. The port also faces challenges, as ports in Mexico and the Gulf Coast of the United States compete for business by offering lower overhead thanks to suppressed wages and an utter lack of environmental responsibility.
He didn’t even mention the leaky library roof.
Mayor Foster reminded us that the situation is not as grim as it was 75 years ago. But I’m not so sure it won’t be in the near future. What we’ve got is an almost perfect storm of bad news.
The unfortunate – even tragic – reality is that Long Beach did not create this mess, and that makes it hard for us to fix it. While our city expenditures were far from visionary during the economic boom of the last 6 years (and it’s a real shame we didn’t do more to create long-term sustainability while we had the capital on hand), they were also far from irresponsible. We didn’t act foolishly; we didn’t spend more than we had. The fools and robber-barons who inflated and then popped the speculation bubble have taken their chips and gone home, and no one in Washington appears able or willing to make them give the booty back.
So what to do (besides fast and pray)?
I have a few suggestions.
First of all, let’s go solar – and I mean, really go solar. I can see no reason this city – or anyone in this city or any city in Southern California – should ever use nuclear or coal generated electricity again, or pay for electrical power at all. We have 300 days of sunshine and it’s time we put it to good use. The Mayor talked about efficiency; what’s more inefficient than millions of kilowatt hours being wasted every day? I know the city has put a few panels in at the airport (the self-congratulations have been impossible to miss) but that’s more symbolic than impactful. How much money would be freed up for other uses if all our electricity were free? Add to this the use of electric automobiles, charged off of free power, and you have a significant new revenue stream without a single budget cut or tax increase.
This means some upfront investment, but a creative, long-term project like this would certainly win over my vote for a bond issue, and I think many Long Beach residents who said nay to Foster’s Measure I would be moved to support such a measure if it could promise free power in perpetuity. Granted, there may be some obstacles of which I’m not aware – that is, besides the howls from Mr. Foster’s old employers at SoCal Edison, and from anyone who thinks the working class should, on principle, be screwed at every turn (this is apparently known as “capitalism”). I hope someone will call any such obstacles to my attention; meanwhile, I’m hopeful.
Second, raise property taxes. (Insert wild booing here) Ours are among the lowest in the state, but a slight (I said slight) tick upwards might offset declining property values at least a little bit. And third, consider rewriting the city charter to mandate (I said mandate) more revenue from enterprise funds.
Fourth, no more watering on city property, including schools and parks. All landscaping should be native, drought resistant plants. It’s simply insane and inane to use one more ounce of our scarce water supply for plants that don’t belong in California in the first place. Let’s set an example for all property owners to follow.
Fifth, and this is a big one, the city must advocate at the federal level for more help, both direct and indirect. California gets about 89 cents from Uncle Sam for every dollar we give, and that ratio ought to change. Our state has changed over the past decade; we were bamboozled by Dick Cheney’s friends at Enron to the tune of sixteen gazillion dollars (a rough estimate); we’ve absorbed most of the country’s immigrants; our high school graduation rates stink; real wages are down; by almost any measure, we have become more deserving of assistance and less able to provide it. Maybe 93 or 94 cents on the dollar would be fairer, and it would make a real difference to this city.
We also have to advocate in DC for better trade agreements with Mexico and Asian nations, as well as tighter federal guidelines for the 50 states – a real possibility now that Washington is solid blue. Our high standards for labor rights and environmental protection are noble and right, but they can make us less competitive when other nations and states race to the bottom, attracting the corporate behemoths whose only goal is profit. We shouldn’t change those standards, but we should use our still considerable economic clout to coax other regions into the 21st (or in some cases, 20th) century. I feel confident Mayor Foster has the ear of Laura Richardson and Dana Rohrabacher any time he wants it (especially if he’s buying lunch), and I hope he’s making it clear that this is no time to be renaming freeways or handing out awards to dead people. Evening the playing field by bringing the rest of the planet up to or near California’s standards is probably the best economic medicine available.
Finally, I recommend a few lawsuits, or at least one. The electricity scandal of the early Bush years has never been rectified; there might be a case there. Financial speculators ripped off hundreds of cities, school districts, and bond investors over the last five years; let’s make sure that if Long Beach got bitten, we bite back.
These ideas are unorthodox. But let’s be sober: This is no ordinary economic crisis. This is a tectonic shift in the global economic structure; it’s the end of an era, and it could be the end of America’s dominance. Long Beach cannot count on another bubble to come along and rescue us. We’ve got think way outside the box. We’ve got to create an urban landscape that will make sense for the rest of this century and into the next. While we don’t have the resources we had a few years ago, resources that would have made this transition to a 21st century economy much easier, we do have another kind of capital; in a crisis, people step up, especially in a city characterized by, in the Mayor’s words, kindness, generosity, and caring. We can turn Long Beach into a model for sustainability – or we can rely on the same old short-term solutions (box stores, bonds) and work on our fasting skills.