Past Precedent, Present Excuses And Public Safety

At minimum, we believe Councilwoman Price is failing to do what she is legally entitled to do, failing to lead on the issue she told voters would be her first priority.

Since she didn't deny our report (which stands unrebutted), she's trying to invent a "defense" that's bogus and without merit. We take it apart below sentence by sentence.

Public Safety Committee chair Price	LBREPORT.com
...In terms of the public safety committee, however, there will be no budget hearing, but there will be a meeting where items impacting the budget will be discussed.	Backwards. The issue isn't how public safety impacts the budget. The issue is how the proposed budget will continue to impact public safety. That means starting to restore previously budgeted police and fire levels for taxpayers. Councilwoman Price is refusing even to let her Public Safety Committee discuss this, ducking the issue herself and blocking Committee members Austin and Mungo from potentially making motions that could begin restoring police and fire levels LB taxpayers had and other cities (including Los Angeles and Signal Hill) manage to provide.
Based on my research it does not appear that City Council committees have ever held separate budget hearings to address the specific focus areas of that committee beyond the budget hearings that are scheduled with the full City Council and the Council's Budget Oversight Committee. There is no precedent for such a thing.	Bogus issue. Councilwoman Price doesn't need a "precedent" to call a meeting of her Public Safety committee to discuss the most important annual Council action impacting her committee's subject matter. She has the law on her side; we even cited it for her: LB Municipal Code section 2.03.06. Subsection (b) provides: "Each such committee established by resolution of the City Council shall hold a meeting upon the call of the Chairman thereof..." It's servile to pretend she needs a "precedent" or anyone's permission to do what she's legally entitled to do. Councilwoman Price's action is muting her Committee's voice and the voices of the public who would tell her how public money should be spent on public safety, which is the subject matter of her Committee. As a candidate she told voters what she wanted to do. Now after voters gave her that power, she pretends she can't use it.
I have, however, always intended to have several agenda items for the September Public Safety committee meeting, which directly address programs and public safety funding issues for the FY15 budget.	Fog. The Council has only two regularly scheduled meeting dates -- Sept. 2 and 9 -- before the Council's budget passage deadline. Wedging in a Committee meeting at the last minute leaves no time for serious work on a serious subject. And what exactly are the secret agenda items Councilwoman Price says she's always intended? Why doesn't she tell us what they are and agendize them in August when they might produce budget results, if they have any budget substance?

At her first neighborhood group meeting at the LB Yacht Club, Councilwoman Price said she's read and "tabbed" (legal style) the FY15 proposed budget. What she didn't say then, and still hasn't said now, is that she will move to begin restoring decimated police, fire and paramedic levels for taxpayers. What she won't find in her nicely tabbed document are the costly consequences -- in family, neighborhood, new business competitiveness and residential property value terms -- of previous budget actions by some of her colleagues.

Long Beach currently has roughly 200 fewer budgeted sworn citywide-deployable police officers than in 2009, no structural funding for now-former 22-sworn officer field anti-gang units (proposed for complete elimination in FY15), three fire stations (8, 17 and 18) without fire engines to extinguish fires and a management-favored less costly paramedic deployment system (similar to one used in most of CA but not in LA or OC) now being tested on LB residents. (LBFD Chief DuRee says it's working seamlessly; the LB Firefighters Ass'n says it's bringing unintended worsened results.)

It's not about frugality. Some of the same Council incumbents who voted for those budget actions also voted to hand unbudgeted raises to city management and pursued a lavish Civic Center rebuild without first seeking businesslike bids for an economical City Hall seismic retrofit.

Vice Mayor Suja Lowenthal, who voted for these actions, was predictably named by Mayor Garcia (whose Council voting record was no better than hers on these items) to chair the Council's Budget Oversight Committee. The Council hadn't even voted on her appointment when Vice Mayor Lowenthal issued a press release announcing that as incoming Committee chair, "I want to strongly endorse Mayor Garcia's budget recommendations."

When Congress and state legislatures receive proposed budgets, their respective committees go to work (education on school spending; transportation on highway, port, rail projects. etc.) Thoughtful lawmakers don't simply do what budget proposers tell them to do. In our view, Councilwoman Price is charting a trajectory inimical to this check and balance principle.

It's dysfunctionl to pretend the Councilwoman/Committee chair can't do what she's legally entitled to do. To claim it's unprecedented to do her job is to be part of the problem when she could be part of the solution.

We urge Councilwoman Price to reconsider her decision and to schedule meetings of her Public Safety Committee in August to address and propose remedial Council actions in view of the proposed FY15 budget's continuing detrimental impacts on police, fire, paramedic and park ranger services for taxpayers.

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