(June 19, 2009, updated below) -- Would you pay someone over half a million dollars a year and let them manage property you own, while they leave you holding the bag for $3 million they said they'd pay and haven't?
What kind of chumps would do this? The City of LB's nine-member City Council is doing this right now.
As you read this, LB's Councilmembers are continuing to pay LB's Museum of Art Foundation roughly $569,000 budgeted taxpayer dollars a year -- roughly $47,000 taxpayer dollars each and every month (paid quarterly, we're told) -- while the privately-run Foundation (the Council's unwise choice to manage/operate the publicly-owned museum) fails to pay LB taxpayers $3 million on a debt bond that City Hall floated in 1999 with the Foundation's representation that it would raise money to pay the sum years ago so LB taxpayers wouldn't have to pay it on Sept. 1, 2009.
Photo source: City of LB website.
[Note: The LB Museum of Art at 2300 E. Ocean Blvd. is unrelated to the Museum of Latin American Art on Alamitos Ave.]
The deadbeat Foundation is now trying to move the goal post to the five yard line by offering a taxpayer-unfriendly, bookkeeping device: giving City Hall title to part of what the Foundation says it owns while leaving taxpayers to do what taxpayers weren't supposed to do.
Our response: the City of LB deserves a remedy that protects taxpayers, not bookkeepers. The goal post should remain exactly where it is...where the Council effectively put it when it voted in Sept. 2008 to include $3 million in City Hall's current budget based on city management's representation that it was working to ensure taxpayers didn't pay that sum.
$3 million could pay for nearly five skateparks. Or it could add cops in Belmont Shore, Central LB, or elsewhere.
As of today (June 19), City Hall has no plan in place to ensure LB taxpayers don't pay that sum.
We propose our remedy below. We urge Councilmembers and the Mayor to publicly reject the politely disrespectful letter that the Foundation sent the Mayor which doesn't even bother to publicly :cc LB's decisionmaking Councilmembers (letter linked below).
The Foundation offers what amounts to a line-item on the City's books that the Foundation claims is worth $8 million and will likely never be transformed into real world cash...while LB taxpayers eat the real-world $3 million that the Foundation didn't pay. To view the Foundation's letter in full, click here.
We are uneasy with the fact that LB's plain-speaking Mayor hasn't plainly called the Museum's offer what it plainly should be called: a non-starter.
The time is overdue for the Council to do its job on this, which legally trumps the Mayor where taxpayer dollars are at stake. In our opinion, Councilmembers should take the following actions immediately:
(1) Convene a closed session with the City Attorney to determine if the following are legally justified, and if the City Attorney says they are legally justified to agendize a public Council session to approve the following:
(2) Cease payment of the roughly $47,000+ now being paid monthly to the Foundation and end the City's operating agreement with the Foundation;
(3) Take possession of the facility and all art works therein to which the City has clear title;
(4) Make arrangements promptly to lease, loan or sell as appropriate those pieces to raise the money with which to pay the $3 million so LB taxpayers won't do so.
If the City Attorney says these actions aren't legally justified, the Council should agendize a public item to explain why they're not legally available and publicly take-up other remedies that will protect LB taxpayers from paying the $3 million sum taxpayers are obligated to pay but weren't supposed to pay.
This could be agendized for action on June 23 if three Councilmembers agree to do so by end of business today (June 19). LBReport.com has put the countdown clock below on our front page (www.lbreport.com), indicating the hours and minutes remaining to do this. [graphic removed now that period has ended]
If LB taxpayers don't currently have three Councilmembers willing to do this, LBReport.com will continue reminding taxpayers, via countdown clocks and other means, of the thousands of dollars that their City Councilmembers are costing taxpayers each month by failing to act, with the prospect of $3 million coming due in just months that taxpayers weren't supposed to pay.
[update] As reported by us earlier today (June 19), a closed-session agenda item has now appeared regarding the LB Museum of Art Foundation.
