Back in March of 2019, when we were still a year away from when things would begin to crumble in Long Beach and the rest of the country, and Pat West was still the city manager, the city council asked him and his staff to work with Urban Commons and a consortium of aerial tram builders and developers called \u201cThe Wave Team,\u201d along with key waterfront business people (OK, I\u2019ll say it: \u201cstakeholders\u201d) to explore the idea of building an aerial tram connecting Downtown with the Queen Mary Island.<\/p>\n
Now, the city is seriously considering the feasibility of a feasibility study<\/a>, which would cost about $500,000 to determine whether to build the aerial gondola system. The city hopes to spend little if any money on the study and the project and is merely facilitating hooking up investors with the developers. Still, there’s no such thing as a free gondola\u2014or even a free feasibility study\u2014and it’s not difficult to imagine the city ending up with a stack of bills from all of this.<\/p>\n Teams that peddle aerial gondola systems tend to be good at pointing out the benefits of them and The Wave Team almost has me on board. It\u2019s fast, it\u2019s fun, it\u2019s clean, it\u2019s efficient, it eases traffic and parking and best of all, at the end of your ride, you\u2019re at Queen Mary Island.<\/a><\/p>\n Queen Mary Island, in case you\u2019ve forgotten and there\u2019s very good reasons for forgetting, is little more than a sheaf of fantasy illustrations from the ship\u2019s former operator, Urban Commons, that depicts a ship and its adjacent property as being a wonderland of fine dining, dancing, game-playing, world-class musical performers, rock-climbing and other activities.<\/p>\n It was estimated to cost about $250 million to build it, plus, a like amount of money would be necessary to make the Queen itself ship-shape and, of course, those numbers have likely changed by now, and they haven\u2019t gone down.<\/p>\n And the ship\u2019s operator is now Eagle Hospitality Trust, which was created by Urban Commons last year so it could sell stock on the Singapore Stock Exchange with the goal of raising millions for Queen Mary Island.<\/p>\n In September, Eagle Hospitality committed financial patricide and kicked Urban Commons off the ship and took over as the new operators.<\/p>\n The following month, authorities in Singapore arrested<\/a> six current and former directors of Eagle Hospitality Trust on suspicion of failing to make required disclosures to investors.<\/p>\n If you had a bottomless pit full of money you wouldn\u2019t give a buck and a quarter to these people, never mind a half-billion. We\u2019re closer to Okinawa now than we are to a Queen Mary Island.<\/p>\n