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Fresno took a day to undo a 30-year fight to place César Chávez’s name on signs across a main boulevard. San Fernando had its public works crews remove a bronze statue 25 minutes after an emergency City Council vote. Los Angeles and San Francisco both straightened their affairs within days.
Long Beach is taking a little bit longer.
Six months after The New York Times reported that Chávez had groomed and sexually abused girls, the city is still deciding what to do with the places that carry his name.
The City Council first took up the matter in March, voting unanimously to begin the process of erasing Chávez’s name. Since then, the state has agreed to rename César Chávez Day, a holiday since 2000, as Farmworkers Day, and other local governments have moved on their own. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed a proclamation renaming the day “Farm Workers Day,” and the Los Angeles school board voted to rename two campuses by the fall.
For decades, Chávez’s name and likeness have been attached to streets, parks, schools and goodwill organizations.
In Long Beach, there’s the 15-acre César E. Chávez Park that opened in 1999, the Drake and Chávez soccer fields, the planned Drake and Chávez Greenbelt and the Drake and Chávez Connection, a project meant to join two parks into 57 continuous acres along the lower Los Angeles River. (César Chávez Elementary, run by the Long Beach Unified School District, is undergoing its own renaming process.) A 2009 mural at Seaside Park that shows Chávez among 10 activists made the city’s list, as did the city’s March 31 observance, which it has held since 2023.
City staff spent the summer studying how Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose handled the question, according to an Oct. 5 city memorandum. San Diego acted fastest, renaming a parkway Chicano Park Boulevard by April and finishing the new signs by late June. San Jose gathered more than 600 name suggestions for its downtown plaza, cut them to five finalists and expects to settle the matter by mid-fall. Los Angeles County is still tallying a resident survey and an inventory of assets. Long Beach is adopting the slower, more deliberative approach.
That starts with a city staff workgroup formed in July that meets weekly and draws on the Office of Equity and the health, library and parks departments. The city will hold five community meetings, four in person and one online, billed as places for “connection, reflection, and healing” as much as for brainstorming names.
A survey in English, Spanish, Khmer and Tagalog launches this month and will run for roughly two months. Staff will then analyze the feedback and bring recommendations to the City Council by the end of January.
Any new name must still pass through the city’s naming rules, revised in 2024. Under them, requests go to the Parks and Recreation Commission or a City Council committee, and the council can revisit a name if a namesake becomes disreputable. Staff suggested the city may want to rethink that policy to avoid a repeat.
For now, the signs stay up, and the questions remain open. Residents who want a say will get their chance in the coming weeks.
Quick sips of the latest news
- A timer to rein in rambling: A week after the City Council approved a plan to consolidate public comment, three council members are asking their colleagues to do some belt-tightening on their own speaking times. Councilmembers Cindy Allen, Kristina Duggan and Daryl Supernaw want to enshrine rules around speaking times for council members, including a five-minute time limit on comments for all agenda items and a one-minute timer on closing remarks. The authors say members should be respectful during those remarks, without side conversations or people walking around the dais. They also want a timer displayed on large screens so the chair, presenters and the public can see it, and they want the mayor or any council member to be able to call for a “point of order” once discussion on an item runs past 30 minutes.
- No laughing matter: Long Beach may ban nitrous oxide sales: City Council members want to advance an ordinance that both meets the state’s new ban on retail nitrous oxide but goes further, with ideas including extending the ban to smoke shops, convenience stores and other outlets without a state tobacco license, requiring sellers to keep transaction records, and creating zones near schools, parks and other youth gathering places where sales would be banned or tightly limited. Citing the gas’ health risks and state data of rising nitrous-related ER visits, they say this is a necessary change to give authorities the power to enforce through citations and permit and business license suspensions.
It comes as Orange County, Garden Grove and several other California cities have adopted local restrictions, and Los Angeles has directed its city attorney to draft one.
- A crackdown on street-parked rigs and trailers? Long Beach Councilmember Tunua Thrash-Ntuk and Megan Kerr are expected to ask the city to report back in 90 days on ways to tighten rules for unhitched trailers, oversized vehicles and mobile billboard trailers on public streets. Changes would update a 2009 ordinance on mobile billboard advertising vehicles, as well as new parking restrictions in problem areas, clearer business licensing and permit requirements for trailer-based commercial activity, progressive fines, nuisance remedies and standardized towing procedures. Staff is also asked to identify a lead department and bring back data on trailer-related complaints, citations and tows.
Council members say trailers become a problem when they sit unhitched on public streets for long periods, turning limited curb space into private storage or stationary advertising. They cite lost parking, blocked sight lines and driveways, interference with street sweeping and emergency access, and accumulated debris, and say enforcement is difficult when owners are hard to identify or move trailers between nearby spaces to avoid time limits.
Helpful/interesting links
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