Release the City's Application for the Bloomberg "Innovation Grant"
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Subsequent development. On December 24 and 29, the City released the materials below to LBREPORT.com and we reported what we found at this link.
(Dec. 19, 2014, 12:30 p.m.) -- LBREPORT.com would like to fully report to you (in ways that other outlets didn't) what the City of Long Beach told Bloomberg Philanthropies in order to get $3 million in "innovation" grant funding.
In our opinion, it's part of the basic "who, what, when, where, why and how" of the story.
When we received City Hall's release (Monday Dec. 15) on receiving the grant, we asked city management's typically prompt public information officer for a copy of the city's application that sought the grant. We waited a day till Tuesday then asked a second time. When Thursday rolled around, we made a request under CA's Public Records Act for the city's grant application which is undeniably a public record. The city management office handling these matters indicated today (Fri Dec. 19) that it's working on the request and will follow-up shortly. [In making our Public Records request, we also requested documents related to the application.]
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At this point, we don't know what's in the grant application.
We do know that in 2012, LBREPORT.com got a story that others didn't by declining to simply regurgitate what we were told in press releases. Officials issued a release stating (accurately) that the city had obtained state funds to create what then-Councilman Garcia called "Armory Park." It's barely a park, a 0.84 acre patch of greenspace that Garcia acknowledged (accurately) would involve blocking off MLK Ave. between 6th and 7th Streets. (Part of the state park grant sum will also be used for a Drake/Chavez park greenbelt, a genuinely ambitious positive project.)
LBREPORT.com used the CA Public Records Act to find out what LB City Hall told the state agencies to get the money for "Armory Park." We saw that the City sought and got nearly $1 million from CalTrans for traffic/roadway reconfiguration by telling that agency that it only planned to block off one lane of northbound MLK, not all lanes. In fact, the City's grant application explicitly represented that blocking off MLK entirely between 6th and 7th Streets wasn't recommended. Meanwhile, the City told CA's Dept. of Parks & Recreation that the "Armory Park" plan would involve blocking off MLK entirely.
Yes, city staff's application for the grant sums used what we consider weasel words to try and avoid a conclusion that the City basically told two state agencies two different versions of what it planned to do to get state taxpayer money to do it. If that's what some Sacramento bureaucrats choose to let Long Beach City Hall do, LBREPORT.com readers know about it.
In a release boasting of receiving the state taxpayer funds for the Armory Park (and Chavez-Drake greenbelt), a City release stated: "Long Beach faced fierce competition in this Statewide grant solicitation, as over 400 applicants submitted proposals that totaled $1.3 billion for a only $150 million of available Statewide Parks Program funding."
Yes, the Bloomberg Philanthropies "innovation" grants were also competitive. Yes, LBREPORT.com wants to see what the City of Long Beach told Bloomberg Philanthropies in seeking their money.
And in our view there's now a threshold matter here: how will the city spend that $3 million over three years? That's not within the authority of any LB Mayor or any city staffer to dictate. No Long Beach Mayor has policy-setting authority or the power to legally bind or commit this City to any policy or spending action. Under LB's City Charter, the Mayor can recommend, but only a City Council majority can enact. LB's Mayor isn't an executive in the way Mayors are in some other cities. Yes, the Bloomberg grant was a competitive process so not everything has to be disclosed in advance but the decision now shouldn't be dictated by a non-voting Mayor or non-elected staff. It's the Council's role, with public input, to approve how that money will be spent presumably within the terms of the grant.
Mayor Garcia may want to spend the grant money for what he calls "economic development" but that's not a blank check for him. For example, he shouldn't be allowed to simply appoint his friends to grant funded positions. The Council has already allocated sizable sums for what the Mayor said he wanted for "economic development." We have real doubts about this. In our opinion, the best way to promote genuine economic development is to make neighborhoods safer and more desirable for residents and businesses. We don't like seeing taxpayer dollars used to legally bribe businesses to locate here. That's corporate welfare that makes taxpayers pay for what well run cities provide. .
LBREPORT.com wants to see at least part of the Bloomberg innovation grant sum used to deliver openness innovations. That doesn't mean links to pay City Hall money for utility bills and parking tickets. We favor innovative ways to do what it refused to do in April 2013, when Council incumbents Lowenthal and Austin (joined by now-non-voting Mayor Garcia with Andrews absent) refused to do: to second a sensible motion by now-exited Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske to discuss in a Council committee making the emails and texts of LB elected officials on public business -- now concealed through the electeds' use of private domains and networks -- releasable public records.
That progressive proposal, backed by (among others) the First Amendment Coalition, deserves to be revisited and implemented by the new Council using a portion of that $3 million innovation grant money. (It's self-embarrassing to other LB media outlets that they didn't support this openness provision in 2013 and they ought to support it now.)
It's not unusual for other levels of government (beyond Long Beach) to delay or obstruct access to information. We don't mean to portray LB City Hall as especially obstructionist. Over time, it's responses to us have been more accommodating than elsewhere.
So when we encounter inexplicable delays on the timely release of a simple application for a grant -- of which the city has boasted in a press release -- it makes us more curious, not less. Further as we learn it...on LBREPORT.com.
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