We withheld publishing this perspective/opinion piece until Mayor Foster presented a previously unscheduled proposed FY15 budget (reversing his words last year saying his proposed FY14 budget would be his last.) In his final recommendation, he could have proposed ways to begin to restore some of the core police and fire services that Long Beach taxpayers received before he arrived and no longer receive now. He didn't.

By his final budget recommendations, Mayor Foster confirmed our assessment. He showed the entire city that he left Long Beach worse than he found it in key service areas for taxpayers...and despite his best efforts, didn't know how to fix it.

Long Beach taxpayers now have a police level for routine citywide deployments that is roughly equivalent per capita to what Los Angeles would have if its Mayor and Council cut 30% of LAPD's officers. Long Beach taxpayers now have roughly 200 fewer police officers than they had (after Foster sought office in 2006 by promising 100 more officers within four years.) LB taxpayers now have "ghost" LB fire stations (Stn. 18 in ELB, Stn. 17 in Los Altos, Stn. 8 in Belmont Shore) that lack fire engines, leaving them unable to put out fires. They were fully staffed when Foster arrived. (In late January, LBREPORT.com reported the stunning story of a family who live across the street from Los Altos Fire Station 17 watched as their residence burned until an engine arrived from further away.)

The bad economy (that Foster calls "The Great Recession") isn't a valid excuse. Other cities faced the same bad economy and didn't treat their taxpayers as Mayor Foster and his Council majority did.

How are other cities -- from Los Angeles to Signal Hill -- able to provide police levels that Long Beach under Foster called unaffordable? Why should Long Beach be the "can't do" City? We say the current "status quo" ought to be unacceptable to the incoming Council.

While Foster talked frugality, he supported generous raises for city management and other city employee unions. Those taxpayer paid raises effectively covered the employee cost of pension changes, advocated for years by grassroots advocates, that Foster finally labeled reforms. We urge the Council to take a hard look at reducing the city's workforce, starting with management, to make up for those cost increases.

Mayor Foster, enabled by city management and a Council majority with Schipske dissenting, has continued to pursue a Taj Mahal Civic Center rebuild without having first sought bids to find out what it would really cost to simply seismically retrofit City Hall. A new Council should stop that project until it has those real world bids in hand.

Mythology needs to end. Mayor Foster's actions didn't produce the current City Hall budget "surplus." Sacramento's dissolution of Redevelopment Agencies -- which Mayor Foster and the City Council unanimously opposed -- produced the cash windfall that produced the current surplus. City management has acknowledged that without that temporary windfall, Long Beach wouldn't have a surplus; it would have a continued deficit. To us that means there are matters seriously wrong below the surface that haven't been fixed yet and need to be.

The truth is, it's easy to produce a damaging surplus. Try it yourself. Just don't buy food or pay for necessary medicines for your family. We guarantee that you'll have a surplus. In our opinion, what Foster and his Council majority did was find rationales for failing to provide taxpayers with core services.

Long Beach Mayors have no vote. Every action we've cited is ultimately attributable to voting City Councilmembers who either enabled or dissented on these actions. Incoming Mayor Robert Garcia had a vote for the past five years and in our opinion was too often part of the problem and not the solution. For the record, we supported his vote to budget a high tech shotspotter gunfire detection system, and we were stunned when he flip-flopped less than a year later and voted to de-fund it before it was deployed.

Mayor Foster deserves credit for ending an unhealthy co-dependency between the LB Area Chamber of Commerce, a private advocacy group, and the City and Port, which are public entities. We think he did the right thing by recentering the Port as a City operated entity. (We have long believed that the Port should operate in some reasonable harmony with City-set policies, not as some duchy castled south of Ocean Blvd.)

But we say that Bob Foster was too often his own worst enemy. He talked about inclusiveness, but too often tried to rule instead of govern. History showed that Councilwoman Rae Gabelich was right, when she voted against 2008 city employee contracts (IAM and Firefighter) that she said were unaffordable and Foster advocated. (Councilman DeLong joined her in voting against the IAM contract.) As with a police union reopener in 2007 (approved without Council dissent) those contractual deals [for unions that had endorsed Foster in 2006] DIDN'T include pension changes. When the economy soured in late 2008, Foster had to seek "do-overs" that he called "pension reform." Management says those pension changes have produced about $10 million in general fund savings annually, but they were also funded 100% by taxpayers who are paying for the raises that more than cover the city employee costs for their pensions...and those raises will also increase taxpayers' future pension payouts.

Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske infuriated Foster in 2008 when she effectively required 2/3 voter approval to impose Foster's regressive parcel tax, dooming the measure. Had that tax been imposed, working class homeowners in NLB would be paying the same sum as Naples mansion residents. Schipske also pursued the transparency openness that Foster and his majority shrugged. In seeking to make elected officials' emails public records when conducting public business on their "private" domains, no other Councilmember would even second her motion to discuss the matter in a Council committee.

It spoke volumes to us that to our knowledge, no other news outlet in town supported her agendized item. Instead, some berated her and couldn't bring themselves to criticize the Councilmembers who blocked discussion of greater transparency. (In other towns, news outlets normally support greater openness and criticize officials who block it.)

Some were put off by Foster's bluntness. We appreciated his directness. We weren't put off by his personality; we disagreed with his positions on the merits.

In eight years, Mayor Foster never once did what the President of the U.S. regularly does: hold press conferences in which he'd face reporters' questions on multiple issues he couldn't control. We're not surprised that in a 2013 poll that was mainly friendly to Foster, roughly 60% of respondents didn't want him to seek a third term (effectively taking that decision out of his hands.)

We think Mayor Foster tried his best, but at the end of the day, we believe the City needed someone who showed greater respect for taxpayers and put a primacy on providing core services for them, instead of applying medieval medicine in trying to make a patient stronger by bleeding him or her.

It now falls to LB's new incoming Council majority to revisit the actions that Mayor Foster and his former Council majority left...and at minimum begin to restore key public safety services for taxpayers while maintaining the frugality he sensibly preached but too often didn't apply to officialdom.

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