On May 10, 2006, LBREPORT.com reported on TV ads in the 2006 Mayoral campaign.

[May 10, 2006 LBREPORT.com coverage]

[Announcer voice over]: Serious crime in Long Beach has been cut in half in the last decade.

[Mr. Foster]: Our police are doing a great job. And it's a tough job. They need our support.

[Mr. Foster]: My top priority will be to add 100 new police officers to help keep our community safe.

[Announcer voice over]: Long Beach police officers support Bob Foster.

[Unidentified officer]: Long Beach police officers support Bob Foster for Mayor. He'll be our partner for a safer community.

[Announcer voice over]: Bob Foster. A better idea for Long Beach.

As of March 2014, the City of Long Beach provides its taxpayers with roughly 200 fewer officers than when he took office.

Other cities faced the same "Great Recession" as Long Beach but they didn't do what the Foster administration and Council majorities did. In 2007, Mayor Foster recommended Council approval to re-open the LBPOA (police ass'n) contract to provide raises. The contract change didn't include pension reforms. The action was portrayed as a way to retain experienced officers who were leaving. The Council approved the re-opener unanimously.

In May 2008, Foster recommended Council approval new contracts for LB's firefighters and non-public safety employees (IAM.) Neither of these two contracts included pension reforms. The Council approved them 8-1 (Gabelich dissenting re LBFFA) and 7-2 (Gabelich and DeLong re IAM.)

In other words, within two years of taking office, Foster had provided City Hall's three major public employee unions that had endorsed him in 2006 with raises without pension reforms.

At the same time, Mayor Foster's administration was proceeding to restore LBPD officers on a schedule that would have reached 100 more officers in four years...but didn't. After getting roughly half way to that goal (reaching LBPD's highest level ever -- 1,020 budget officers, equating to 961 for citywide deployment (included a replenishment police academy class), Mayor Foster and Councils reversed course.

As the economy slowed, the contracts recommended by Foster became even less sustainable. Mayor Foster (1) insisted that the unions re-open their contracts to pay a portion of their raises toward their pensions, a measure that had been advocated for years by taxpayer advocates Kathy Ryan, Tom Stout and Larry Boland for years but mainly ignored by the city's establishment; and (2) recommended Council approval of what Foster called "proportional budget reductions" that had as a practical matter had disproportionate taxpayer impacts on police and fire services.

Regarding police, starting in Sept. 2009 (FY 2010) Foster recommended/Council approved budgets failed to fund replenishment police academy classes, ensuring that retiring/exiting officers wouldn't be replaced. This produced the largest loss of LBPD officers for taxpayers within a four year period in the city's 100+ year history.

Today, virtually all of the officers hired during the O'Neill administration using federal taxpayer funds obtained by telling the U.S. Justice Dept. (after the City said it was committed to increasing its police force) are now gone.

Long Beach residents have a citywide deployable per capita police level roughly equivalent to what Los Angeles would have if L.A.'s Mayor/Council had cut over 25% of LAPD's police officers. Long Beach today has roughly the number of officers available for citywide deployment that it had when Mayor O'Neill took office in 1994.

In August 2012, Mayor Foster recommended a budget that proposed to entirely eliminate LBPD's 22-officer anti-gang field unit. Robert Garcia, whom Foster appointed in mid-2010 to chair the Council's Public Safety Committee, held no hearings of his Public Safety Committee on the public safety implications of Mayor Foster's proposed budget.

In Sept. 2012 a Council majority (motion by O'Donnell) ultimately approved funds giving the Police Chief discretion to restore 11 of the 22 officers (20 officers + 2 sergeants) that LB's anti-gang unit previously had. .

In August 2013, Garcia again failed to hold any hearings of his Public Safety Committee on the public safety implications of Mayor Foster's recommended budget. It took the Council's Budget Oversight Committee (skillful questioning by chair DeLong) to extract the management confession that taxpayers weren't receiving the 11 anti-gang field officers that the Council had expected but as of Aug. 2013 only roughly 7 officers...and management had no plan to restore those vanished anti-gang unit officers in the now-current FY14 budget.

Under the Foster administration with Council majority approval and few dissents, taxpayers also lost significant firefighting resources. Today, three of Long Beach's fire stations don't have fire engines, which are the only units capable of spraying water to put out a fire. In January 2014, residents who lived across the street Fire Station 17 watched their home burn because that station didn't have a staffed fire engine, which had to come from elsewhere in town to put out the fire then consuming their residence.

All the city's public employee unions ultimately agreed to the pension changes on which Mayor Foster insisted. The Council approved those changes nearly without dissent (despite campaign claims by some candidates, no candidate "led" on the issue; Foster basically did and the Council followed and approved. Councilman Gary DeLong objected to one contract on grounds it could have provided taxpayers with additional relief but didn't.)

In Jan. 2014, Mayor Foster said in his "State of the City" message that he had left the city stronger than when he found it. In our view, this is true on paper for bondholders and debt rating agencies (and not a small matter amid some CA cities declaring bankruptcy) but it simply is not true in terms of police and fire resources provided to taxpayers.

There is currently no plan in place to prioritize current City Hall spending to replace police and fire resources that taxpayers previously received.