LB City Hall's Public Works Infrastructure Scandal: Going Where Facts Lead Without Flinching, Avoiding Damage Control/Cover-Up

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Editorial

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(May 28, 2016, 12:30 p.m.) -- In other cities, it would properly be called a scandal when practices persisted over an extended period that cost taxpayers as much as a seven figure sum and effectively prevented the public from receiving multiple infrastructure projects administered by City Hall's Department of Public Works.

In Long Beach, that scandal is aggravated by the city's Mayor and City Council currently trying to mislead voters into approving a sales tax increase ballot measure, which the electeds wrote in a way that lets themselves spend the tax as they please while marketing the measure to voters in large part as for infrastructure using maps, plans and representations created by -- wait for it -- the city's Department of Public Works.

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Of course the usual civic suspects are now in full damage-control mode, trying to portray the scandal as a pimple within a single Public Works program, to assure the public that whatever the problems were they've all been found and corrected and -- at all costs -- to try to protect the sales tax hike sought by the Mayor and Council.

We don't yet know if the scandal extends further, and if so how much further, whether it was an isolated practice on "small" projects (some of which weren't so small) or indicates a broader City Hall culture that has accepted similar behavior on other projects with bigger taxpayer costs.

History shows that trying to contain a scandal never works. It's eventually uncovered as a cover-up and those who say silly things in trying to cover it up look much worse when the truth eventually comes out.

We believe that what has been uncovered thus far provides another good reason (in addition to those we've previously cited) for LB voters to reject City Hall's Measure A sales tax increase. LB's Mayor and Council fear a threshold question: why can City Councils in other nearby cities -- with sales tax at 8% or 9% -- provide their taxpayers with infrastructure at less cost than LB...while LB's Mayor and Council demand 10%?

In our view, the City Auditor has uncovered reasons that arguably provide part of that answer. The question now is whether this City Auditor will go further, wherever the facts may lead, regardless of whose political toes it steps on. We are very disappointed that, at least in our opinion, City Auditor Doud compromised her pledged independence by feeding her findings to a non-Auditee, Mayor Garcia, before the public could properly learn what was going on.

The answer wasn't to show the public findings prematurely; in our view it was to show independence by not furnishing LB's politically propelled Mayor inside information that he predictably used for political purposes. The Mayor agendized an April 5 item enabling a 45-day delay period (while he and others campaigned for the sales tax hike) which ended with a May 24 Council action (after vote by mail ballots had been flying for two weeks) enabling an ersatz defense -- "we've fixed the problem" -- just in case voters wonder why they should pay more for infrastructure to the same City Hall that shortchanged them on infrastructure. And a day later on May 25, the Audit materializes making no mention of any of this. (City Auditor Doud tells LBREPORT.com: "Any relationship between this audit and ballot measure is coincidental as the report was released when it was completed."

For his part, the Mayor wove the Auditor into the sales tax increase ballot measure at the February 16 Council meeting when he publicly spun her routine audits of city funds as having something to do with the ballot measure; his spin then percolated into ballot label text that the Council approved and the Mayor went on to cite the City Auditor explicitly in his official ballot argument rebuttal to ballot measure opponents. Pretty slick, huh? The lesson here: political credulity isn't a best practice for a City Auditor...and we hope Ms. Doud awakens to this and jetisons it.

Meanwhile, we again urge LB voters to vote No on Measure A...now with the added incentive to avoid making Long Beach a laughingstock as others wonder why we made our city less consumer and business friendly as our City Hall claims it can't provide infrastructure that others can do at less cost...for reasons we believe the City Auditor has begun to uncover. In our view, going where the facts lead -- without flinching -- is the better way to build a better Long Beach.

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