For public property on which the people of Long Beach had been the landlord for over a century, LB's current Mayor and Council reduced the public to basically a rent-paying tenant for 40+ years, and gave up part of the public's property permanently for a private developer/operator's profit, and now pretend the result is in taxpayers' interests. (For the City's news release on the event, click here.)

We respectfully but firmly disagree.

Mayor Garcia, Vice Mayor Lowenthal, Councilwoman Lena Gonzalez and state Senator Lara are visible in the photo. Present in the audience were Councilmembers Daryl Supernaw, Roberto Uranga and Dee Andrews. Also visible are Supervisor Don Knabe, former Mayor Bob Foster, City Manager Pat West, city management level staffers, LB Port officials and a rep from the Civic Center developer/operator

Before a groundbreaking shovel even touched the ground, the deal had already drained millions from residents citywide for consultants, designers, outside counsel and other mercenary enablers. Now for 40+ years, millions of dollars more will be siphoned away from neighborhoods for annual escalating payments for a private developer/operator's profit. That's money that won't be spent for police, fire, parks and neighborhood infrastructure. Worse still, the Mayor/Council deal tied the City's annual payments to the "consumer price index" (CPI), a figure over which the City has no control that could rise beyond current estimates with damaging future taxpayer consequences.

Those annual escalating payments are scheduled to begin after the 2018 election cycle, a delayed fuse, protecting the incumbents who imposed this transaction from the costly consequences until after they next face voters. To us, this is similar to the cynical and now discredited pension spike that city officials assured the public was prudent before it blew up in taxpayers' faces, imposing costs that LB taxpayers continue to pay now.

In our opinion, what the Mayor/Council did and how they did it are the sorts of things on which the next LB city elections should turn. LB's next scheduled citywide elections will be in Council districts 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9, and citywide for Mayor. We urge our readers to consider what took place here.

In our view, the transaction was both fiscally flawed and fundamentally flawed. We believe Terry Jensen, a Long Beach native with decades of commercial property experience and a former member of LB's Redevelopment Agency Board, amply demonstrated its fiscal flaws. Mr. Jensen didn't oppose putting the Civic Center property to better uses but took the time actually to read the details of the proposed transaction. He came away seriously alarmed at the deal's premises and potential taxpayer cost consequences.

In a series of pieces published on LBREPORT.com, Mr. Jensen challenged management's figures, including its foundational claim that the project wouldn't cost more or "not much more" than the City currently pays to operate and maintain its current Civic Center. Mr. Jensen summed up his salient arguments in a piece at this link. It speaks for itself.

LBREPORT.com believes the transaction was fundamentally flawed. City officials acknowledged City Hall's seismic issues in 2006 but didn't move to fix them. The City didn't make a Request for Proposals for a seismic retrofit. It didn't invite marketplace bids that would have presented options and demonstrated the real-world market costs of a seismic retrofit. Instead, city staff (which has no expertise in seismic retrofits) concocted an in-house estimated retrofit cost, a dubious figure that management then used to claim it made more sense to tear down LB's less than 40 year old City Hall for an "opportunity" to get an entirely new Civic Center.

In "study sessions" hostile to other options, staff portrayed LB's City Hall as "functionally obsolete" and called the current Civic Center a poor use of public space.

This stance harmonized with rhapsodic rhetoric from downtown Council rep Suja Lowenthal who claimed a new Civic Center would "reunite" the city with its downtown (with no evidence that anyone outside downtown wants this.) Downtown Council rep (now Mayor) Robert Garcia argued that a new Civic Center (two government buildings, a smaller main library and a privately developed high rise, the latter consuming what was previously public property) would somehow be "transformational." Following the groundbreaking, Councilwoman Gonzalez wrote on her Facebook page that the project would "transform Downtown Long Beach and cultivate a new era of job creation, public participation and community engagement."

In our view, no serious business would operate in such a juvenile, unbusinesslike manner. LB's Mayor and Council shrugged a Columbia University graduate student's Master of Science Thesis that showed how and why retrofitting City Hall and the Main Library was economically feasible and desirable on the merits. [LBREPORT.com coverage here.] The Council didn't invite any experts in retrofits to present their options, not even an award winning architectural firm based in Lowenthal's own Council district whose principal had indicated that an adaptive reuse retrofit ought to cost significantly less than city management estimated. [LBREPORT.com coverage here.]

After meetings that only generally described the proposed financing, the Council held one so-called "study session" on financial details of the transaction. It scheduled this subject for Veterans Day 2014 at a North Long Beach park's social hall, and city staff provided no written memoranda, only a Power Point slide show. In December 2015, management and the Mayor scheduled the Council's crucial decisional votes for the low-public-attention holiday period ten days before Christmas (motions carried 9-0.)

What LB taxpayers will now receive is a shrunken Main Library with shrunken outdoor public space (since the transaction gave away part of the public's Civic Center property to a private developer/operator.) Meanwhile, the transaction will leave the public and city employees exposed to City Hall's current seismic issues (the original pretext for the project) until at least mid-2019.

To facilitate all this, city officials found willing enablers in state Senator Ricardo Lara (D, LB-Huntington Park) who carried a bill that made it easier for the City to impose the 40+ year transaction, assisted by State Senator Janet Nguyen (R, ELB-west OC) who did nothing to protect LB taxpayers. City Auditor Laura Doud, whose office has devoted endless hours to analyzing unpaid parking tickets, was invisible on one of the biggest taxpayer financial exposures in the city's history.

The Port of Long Beach, a participant in the Civic Center transaction, made a smarter deal than the City. The Port will pay for and get a new Port HQ without gynmastic financing methods (although we regret its participation helped enable the worst parts of the Mayor/Council's Civic Center deal.) [Amnesia File: Mayor Foster vetoed a new Port HQ in the Port area saying it was too costly, an action that effectively ensured that a new Port HQ could be downtown where it could enable a future Civic Center deal.]

After imposing the Civic Center transaction that evaded a vote of the public, the Mayor/Council turned around and sought a vote of the public to raise LB's sales tax to 10% for any general fund purposes they or their successors want. Using a misleading ballot title and text and a $600,000+ special interest funded campaign (whose contributors included some entities involved in the Civic Center actions), the tax increase will let the incumbents and their successors cover, or free-up current city revenue to cover, the Civic Center's annual escalating payments (money that won't be available for neighborhood infrastructure and needed police and fire restorations.)

In our opinion, these actions deserve nomination for LB Outrage of the Decade. In our view what has occurred basically amounts to a wealth transfer from taxpayers citywide mainly to benefit the interests of elite downtown property owners and developers. We acknowledge that those interests can be helpful to helpful incumbents and are mindful that this machinery has worked in the past.

Assuming Council incumbents Gonzalez, Price, Mungo, Uranga and Richardson and Mayor Garcia seek reelection, they will next face voters in April 2018. Again: we believe what LB's current Mayor and Council did and how they did it are the sorts of things that should be the focus of the next LB elections.

Opinions expressed by LBREPORT.com, our contributors and/or our readers are not necessary those of our advertisers. We welcome our readers' comments/opinions 24/7 via Disqus, Facebook and moderate length letters and longer-form op-ed pieces submitted to us at mail@LBReport.com.