LB city officials have invited three developer/operator teams (one has already dropped out) tell us how much we should pay them to tear down our less than 40 year old City Hall so they can build and operate a Civic Center complex for their private profit AND keep the land under the old courthouse at Ocean Blvd./Magnolia Ave. for their permanent development profits to boot.

This contrasts with city officials failing -- since 2005-2007 (Foster took office in mid-2006) -- to invite firms that do seismic retrofits to tell us how it would cost to retrofit LB's less than 40 year old City Hall. Don't you suppose decisionmakers ought to know that? BEFORE running lemming style to putsue a transaction with multi-million dollar commitments spanning nearly 40 years?

What Board of Directors would simply accept a figure concocted by internal staffers and projected on a Power Point slide for such a key cost comparison without seeking marketplace bids? Meet Robert Garcia, Suja Lowenthal, Gary DeLong, Patrick O'Donnell, Dee Andrews, James Johnson, Al Austin and Steven Neal.

They also credulously accepted management's figure for what it currently costs to operate Civic Center, something we believe should have been itemized in detail.

No worries, they say, as they play with millions in public money belonging to the shareholders (taxpayers.) Only Gerrie Schipske had the good sense to dissent on previous votes and we urge her to pull today's "consent calendar" item, point out the irresponsibility of this Mayor and his Council robots and dissent again...and wear that dissent as a badge of honor in this.

The rush now is to leave taxpayers holding a multi-million-dollar bag before Mayor Foster and his Council majority leave in mid-July. Big surprise, city staff has scheduled a decisional vote on or about Julyu 1.

We hope LB's incoming Councilmembers Price, Uranga and Richardson -- and either Kemp or Mungo and Gonzalez or Tagaloa -- to show better judgment and halt this lemming race before it progresses further. In our opinion, this outrage should never have been allowed to proceed in what in our opinion has been a basically unbusinesslike and taxpayer-unfriendly manner.

Still to be seen: whether LB's Board of Harbor Commissioners, purged of dissident Thomas Fields and disgusted Nick Sramek, joins the lemming race to spend CA's Tidelands funds to be included in the new Taj Mahal.

As the final how do you do: the contract for tonight's nearly half million in outside legal services isn't attached to tonight's agenda item. Why not? Because a majority of the current City Council, as with past Councils, doesn't want to see -- and doesn't want taxpayers and the press to see -- proposed contracts before the Council approves them. It settles for a summarized memo of what the contract will say.

Some cities routinely attach proposed conrtacts (especially large ones) to their agendized items, but under a Garcia-advanced policy approved several years ago by the Council, Long Beach City Hall pretends to openness by putting contracts online AFTER they're signed and taxpayers are hooked for the costs. Go Long Beach.

It's another unbusinesslike, non-transparent practice that a new Council can and should change.

As always, LBREPORT.com will carry tonight's Council meeting live on our front page: www.LBREPORT.com.

Opinions expressed by LBREPORT.com, our contributors and/or our readers are not necessary those of our advertisers. We welcome our readers' comments/opinions 24/7 via Disqus, Facebook, plus letters and longer-form opinion pieces (op-eds) submitted to us at mail@LBReport.com.