Lower-than-expected attendance, declining enrollment and protracted labor negotiations may lead to budgetary challenges in the future for the Long Beach Unified school district, officials said this week.
Long Beach Unified expects to rely heavily on its reserves in the next few years as declining enrollment and lower attendance hurt its bottom line.
The citywide pavement condition score is 58 with just 13% of streets being considered “excellent” and 53% of the city’s streets being rated “fair to marginal” or worse.
The largest reductions came from funding set aside to help businesses, with those funds being reduced by nearly $4.5 million.
As the end of a strenuous fiscal year nears, city leaders are proposing a new budget with upward of $30 million in cutbacks to multiple departments and funds, including the Tidelands Fund. City staff utilized creative solutions to minimize the impacts on the Tidelands but the future of coastal-area funding and its revenue streams is in question.
The union representing local police officers says it conducted a survey that shows Long Beach voters broadly approve of the Black Lives Matter movement but don’t support for the group’s core goal of shrinking the police department.
“We actually have about $3.3 million going to the arts in FY21, as compared to $1.2 million last year.”
Long Beach is in for much more economic pain than originally anticipated as the city’s projected economic shortfalls were adjusted Tuesday night to reveal a hole in the annual budget that could be as much as $41 million.
A staff report given to the council Tuesday night revealed that “general economic growth,” departmental savings, a rise in the price of oil and sales tax largely contributed to the roughly $8 million in surplus that the council distributed Tuesday night.
When the Long Beach City Council wound down its budget cycle in September it projected shortfalls in 2019 and 2020 amounting to about $19 million. However, in light of recent litigation, city staff disclosed yesterday that those projections have grown which could leave the city poised for more cuts in services in the coming years as the budget is balanced.
