Then-Vice Mayor Garcia (whom Foster named to chair the Council's Public Safety Committee) held no meetings of his committee on the FY 13 (or FY14) budget, but the proposal drew grassroots neighborhood opposition at Council district budget meetings.

The Council responded to Foster's budget proposal in Sept. 2012. Councilman Patrick O'Donnell made a floor motion to use what Foster called "one time funds" to give LBPD management discretion to fund up to one of the two field anti-gang units [10 officers + 1 sgt] for one year and effectively ended funding for the other field anti-gang unit.

A year later in September 2013 (entering the city's 2014 election cycle) the Council was disinclined to publicly revisit the issue, which effectively left LBPD management to rely on a gymnastic combination of overtime and other sources to fund a skeleton portion of the sole remaining field anti-gang unit.

LBREPORT.com recently learned that the remaining field anti-gang unit's level has now fallen to roughly four officers plus one sergeant. It's not formally budgeted but uses overtime to backfill officers drawn from other units, a far cry from the 20 officers and two sergeants that taxpayers were receiving as a fully budgeted item as recently as two years ago.

A City Council majority has the final word on budgeted spending and, if it so chooses, can by voted action change the management/Mayor recommended budget on or before September 15. The Mayor has a line-item veto which six of nine Councilmembers can vote to override.

The proposed FY15 budget continues to fund other LBPD gang-tasked officers, nearly twenty, assigned to handle gang related matters; their funding hasn't been touched. However, if the City Council were to adopt the management/Mayor recommended FY15 budget without changes on this issue, LBPD's field anti-gang units could effectively disappear entirely (as Mayor Foster proposed in August 2012.)

Long Beach budget documents indicate that in rough [very rough] numbers, funding half of LBPD's former field anti-gang unit (10 officers + 1 sergeant) would cost a little over $1.5 million. By way of context, that's roughly [very roughly] half the cost of unbudgeted management raises approved by the now-former City Council in November 2013.

In 2006, Mayoral candidate Foster told voters he'd put 100 more police on the street in his first four years in office, but following the 2008 economic downturn (that he called "The Great Recession"), Foster recommended the largest cuts to police officers in the 100+ year history of Long Beach. Those actions came after Foster recommended, and Council majorities approved, contractual raises without pension reforms for City Hall's three major public employee unions that had endorsed Foster. Foster and the Council then insisted, and the unions agreed, to pay part of the taxpayer paid raises to cover the full employee portion of their pensions (which Foster calls pension reform.)

The cities of Los Angeles (the County's largest city) and Signal Hill (one of the County's smallest cities) provide significantly higher police levels than Long Beach (L.A. County's second largest city.) Under Long Beach Council budget votes in September 2009, 2010, 2011 (Schipske, Gabelich Neal dissenting), 2012 and 2013, Long Beach how provides its taxpayers with a budgeted sworn citywide deployable police level roughly equivalent per capita to cutting roughly 30% of LAPD's officers.

Developing with further to follow on LBREPORT.com.