Council Incumbents Suzie Price And Suja Lowenthal Made These Statements Re Certain Taxpayer Criticisms As They Discussed Possible Tax Hike Ballot Measure (Substance And Timing To Be Subsequently Decided By Council Majority); Read Their Words, Take Our Quick Survey

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Council Incumbents Suzie Price And Suja Lowenthal Made These Statements Re Council's Record And Certain Taxpayer Criticisms As They Discussed Possible Tax Hike Ballot Measure (Substance And Timing To Be Subsequently Decided By Council Majority); Read Their Words, Take Our Quick Survey

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(Jan. 27, 2016, 9:45 p.m.) -- At a specially scheduled January 26, 2016 City Council meeting, 3rd dist. Councilwoman Suzie Price (took office mid-July 2014) and Vice Mayor/Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal (took office late June 2006, exiting in mid-July 2016 under term limits) made the statements below. They spoke as nearly all Council incumbents [exception: Supernaw] voiced support for some type of currently unspecified City Hall created tax increase ballot measure whose substance and timing (June or November 2016) a Council majority would ultimately decide.

Mayor Garcia and several Councilmembers indicated they plan to talk with community members/groups and then bring the subject back to the Council where a Council majority would decide what to put on the ballot and when. (LBREPORT.com coverage here.)

LBREPORT.com's transcript below is unofficial, prepared by us from the City Clerk's webcast (which we carried LIVE.) It's followed by a brief survey (five questions) seeking your views on the Councilmembers' statements.

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Councilwoman Suzie Price: "...[F]or anyone who says, you know, there's a lot of fat and we're wasting money, you have no idea what you're talking about; you have no idea what you're talking about. I challenge you to actually look at the books and stop the rhetoric because that's not what we've been focused on for the last two years. We've been living very prudent times here in the City of Long Beach and that's just the truth."

Vice Mayor Suja Lowenthal: "...I'm proud of this Council that had very, very, very fiscally prudent policies and had the ability to cut, to reduce the 700 positions that the Mayor talked about and to save more than $250 million over the last ten years on pension costs, and has leaned this government as he said, but in leaning the government we still kept our eye on maintaining quality of life...[T]his doing more with less is not sustainable going forward. The question now becomes, now that we have stabilized our economy here locally, our city operations and our budgets, what is the city that we want to be today and what is the city that we want to be going forward?...
...[D]oing more with less is not sustainable and I echo Councilwoman Price's statement that anyone who thinks that there is fat really has not done their homework, that hyperbole, and invective and rhetoric and all of that really has to stop because that is just, the purpose of that is just distraction.
Ten years ago, before I ran for Council, when I was working on improving our development projects here in downtown Long Beach, I had coined a phrase about our city and it's not a nice phrase and I wasn't happy to call our city that but I said that we suffer from a "collective municipal inferiority complex." We did not think that we could actually deserve better or do better and so we took what was good enough.
And I think what we have to do is look at ourselves today and exercise some confidence. We have city employees that are talented. We have city employees that we have to compete to have them work with us here as opposed to work elsewhere. I think paying for talent is what we do in every industry and I am not embarrassed or shy about the fact that we will pay for talent because this city deserves it, and so let's crawl out of that collective municipal inferiority complex that this city suffered from for so long and that we have actually come away from and let's not revert to that and let's join with our residents and look at these solutions together and ask them what it is they want this city to be going forward.

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