In our view, four major pieces of unfinished business remain for a new incoming Council majority:

• Restoring (or at least beginning to restore) police levels for taxpayers. Over a recent weekend, Long Beach ran out of cops to respond in a timely fashion to calls for service. Armed robberies to businesses aren't business friendly and residential burglaries don't improve property values.

• Restoring firefighter services that have left Long Beach with "ghost" fire stations without fire engines to put out fires. Earlier this year, an ELB residence burned across the street from an ELB fire station until an engine arrived from elsewhere as the fire doubled in size each minute.

• Preventing LB families from becoming experimental subjects for a paramedic response system untested anywhere in urbanized L.A. or OC. What LB taxpayers are facing is the result of demonstrated inability of LB's outgoing Mayor and Council majority to provide LB taxpayers with paramedic levels that every other L.A. and OC community provides. The guinea pig paramedic system is poised for implementation in just weeks unless stopped by the current or incoming Council. (As LBREPORT.com reports at this link, three Councilmembers have agendized a June 10 Council item proposing a pause until FY15 budget deliberations; two of them will be off the Council by the time that happens.) Fire Chief DuRee, who bravely devised the paramedic system test after the Mayor and Council failed to budget sufficient sums for LB fire services, says the new system will be better on the merits. Firefighters and paramedics say it'll mean worsened patient care. Do you want your family to become a statistic in this?

• Slowing the Foster-fueled rush into a costly new privatized Civic Center. For fully eight years, the Foster administration has failed to seek marketplace bids on what it would actually cost to seismically retrofit LB's current City Hall. From that unbusinesslike foundation, other taxpayer scornful actions followed: the Council accepted what amounts to an internally concocted management estimate of retrofit costs; it swallowed numbers displayed on a Power Point slide that management claims as current City Hall costs without requesting a factual foundation, itemized details or cited sources; it shrugged public testimony overwhelmingly opposed. An economical City Hall retrofit might have been done by now, instead of leaving workers and visitors for several years more in a building with seismic issues while inviting a private developer operator profit from a vainglorious project the City doesn't need, can't afford and in our opinion taxpayers shouldn't accept.

Mayor Garcia won't be of any help to taxpayers on these items. On police and fire services for the public, Garcia was among those who voted to decimate police and fire services. (Foster named Garcia to chair the Council's "Public Safety Committee" where Garcia conveniently failed each year to hold hearings in Aug-Sept. on the public safety impacts of Foster's proposed budgets.) During his Mayoral campaign, Garcia didn't shrink from his record. He made clear in campaign appearances -- and we believe him -- that he doesn't support doing more than maintain decimated police levels with perhaps small additions. Garcia, like Foster, has attempted to portray this as "fiscal discipline," but that's disproven by his votes for unbudgeted management raises and to advance the Taj Mahal Civic Center project.

The only hope taxpayers have on these items of unfinished business rests with a new Council majority (Gonzalez, Price, Mungo, Uranga and Richardson) plus four current incumbents (Lowenthal, O'Donnell, Andrews, Austin.)

Of course some will say it's time to unify to "move forward," but it won't move Long Beach forward if the roughly 48% of LB voters who didn't vote for Garcia become civic zombies who quietly accept policies that have moved the city backward. Taxpayers need to defy a current civic taboo and speak honestly about this. In terms of core police and fire service levels provided to taxpayers, Long Beach is undeniably worse off than it was eight years ago.

LBREPORT.com urges a serious start at restoring public safety services to levels LB taxpayers previously had and still deserve (that LB's soon-to-be-former Mayor and his Council majority showed themselves unable to deliver.) If LB Councilmembers can't tell you why other cities manage to provide their taxpayers with police, fire, streets, sidewalks, gutters, parks and libraries at levels LB can't, they're not doing their jobs. Some suggestions from us:

• We have long favored a zero based budget requiring city management to justify every dollar of spending it proposes. That may not be possible in its entirety, but Councilmembers can and should cross-examine management department heads on why they're spending what they're spending now and exactly what they're producing for taxpayers.

• We favor closing City Hall one day a week if that will save money.

• We favor cutting back management staff to reduce the taxpayer impacts of the unbudgeted raises that the exiting Council awarded last year.

• We favor halting the current Civic Center rebuild process until a competitive retrofit bidding process is undertaken, completed and seriously discussed publicly by the City Council.

Under the City Charter, a Council majority has policy-setting powers that LB's Mayor doesn't have (and six members can override any Mayoral veto.) It's overdue for the Council to revive and exercise its check and balance function that the Council has always had...and Mayor Foster sought to bully down.

The next few weeks will show what this incoming Council majority is made of. Taking care of LB's unfinished business is the prerequisite to moving Long Beach forward...before it falls further behind.

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