Fifth district Councilwoman Stacy Mungo earned runner-up "Outrage of the Year" status for (a) her ham fisted attempt to fog the $3.1 million total taxpayer cost of the controversial artificial turf soccer field in El Dorado Park and (b) her Council office's stonewalling of Public Records Act requested records, pro and con, received by her office on the project. On the latter item, we include the City Attorney's office failing to hold Mungo's office to the law.

City staff publicly confirmed the project's $3.1 million total cost in the Fiscal Impact statements accompanying the Dec. 8 Council agenda item. (There were two version of city staff's Fiscal Impact text both of which listed the project's total cost as $3.1 million.)

In November 2019, city staff told LB's Parks & Recreation Commission that the project cost was $1.5 million and said city management had the sum in hand. But documents obtained from city staff under the CA Public Records Act show that by early 2020 staff realized that realized the $1.5 million sum wasn't sufficient because two other artificial turf soccer fields at Admiral Kidd and Seaside Park had consumed sums intended to cover the El Dorado Park field. In February 2020, then-acting City Manager Tom Modica approved upping the El Dorado Park field's budgeted amount by $850,000 to $2.35 million using Measure A "blank check" sales tax dollars. A line item in City Hall's FY21 budget reflects this, displaying the $2.35 million item.

After Sept. 8, 2020 Council approval of the FY21 budget, city staff put the project out to bid and received bids lower than expected...but the total project cost also included a 10% cost contingency, plus spending the entire $2.35 million budgeted cost sum plus roughly $760,000 budgeted for other cost items [Fiscal Impact statement text] including planning and design, project and construction management, inspection services, labor compliance, CIP administration, and construction phase engineering/architectural support.

Mungo simply omitted mention of these project cost items. She told her constituents that the project's total "field costs" were $1.85 million, omitting roughly $1,3 million in other LB taxpayer costs (the 10% budgeted contingency, plus the $2.35 FY21 million budgeted cost item, plus the roughly $760,000 added by city staff.)

Counciilwoman Mungo told recipients of her Dec. 6 "Neighborly News" newsletter: "So glad to see this improvement has come in well under the original estimated and inflated cost of $3.1 million," and claimed she had confirmed "with our Public Works team that the initial posted agenda item contained an error in the fiscal impact statement regarding the total cost" and "they have committed to correcting it before consideration Tuesday."

Here's the exact text of a revised Fiscal Impact statement that appeared online on before Dec. 4 at 5 p.m. for the Dec. 8 Council agendized item. :

FISCAL IMPACT

The total budgeted amount for the project is $3,111,644. Total contract amounts to be awarded equals $2,038,814, which includes an award for site construction in the amount of $1,323,115, and an award to install the turf field in the amount of $530,352, and a 10 percent contingency for each of these items in the total amount of $185,347. In addition, the cost for eight years of field maintenance will cost $144,000, plus a 10 percent contingency amount of $14,400, for a total not to exceed amount of $158,400. Additional project costs include planning and design, project and construction management, inspection services, labor compliance, CIP administration, and construction phase engineering/architectural support. Total project costs are supported by $761,644 in FY 14 one-time funds along with $2,350,000 in Measure A funds that are budgeted in the Capital Projects Fund Group in the Public Works Department. Sufficient appropriation is budgeted in the Capital Projects Fund Group in the Public Works Department for the capital costs.

The total maintenance cost for the eight years of field maintenance is $158,400, or $19,800 annually for the contract period, inclusive of a 10 percent contingency. The Parks, Recreation and Marine Department will oversee the annual maintenance.

Here's how Councilwoman Mungo portrayed the taxpayer costs to her constituents (omitting roughly $1.3 million of the project's total costs:)

The El Dorado Park West Artificial Turf Soccer Field Project bidding process has concluded and the contracts for work are before the Council for consideration this Tuesday, December 8th...

Breakdown of the recommended proposed costs/contracts (Agenda Item 54):

$1.32 million for site construction

$530 thousand for purchase and installation of all-weather synthetic turf

Total Field Costs: $1.85 million.

In addition to the above, $144 thousand for 8 years of maintenance services was also included, which is a significant reduction in what it would cost to maintain and water a natural grass field at the same level this all-weather field provides.

So glad to see this improvement has come in well under the original estimated and inflated cost of $3.1 million. This project is a job generator at a time when people need work. If approved this would be the final of the three turf field projects originally approved in 2014. Like the other two extremely popular fields, El Dorado West’s field would serve tens of thousands of kids and their families for 15+ years of year-round healthy, active play.

Please note that we did confirm with our Public Works team that the initial posted agenda item contained an error in the fiscal impact statement regarding the total cost. They have committed to correcting it before consideration Tuesday.

If approved by Council, the construction would be completed just in time for the Summer 2021 season - we hope even before the restrictions will be lifted. So many families will be looking for safe outdoor activities for kids to interact with their peers once our current COVID-19 infection rates have lowered.

The bottom line: On December 8, 2020, Councilwoman Mungo made the Council motion, seconded by Councilman Austin, to approve the artificial turf field project despite its Fiscal Impact total project cost of $3.1 million. The Council vote was 7-1. Voting "yes" were Zendejas, Pearce, Price, Mungo, Uranga, Austin and Richardson. Supernaw voted "no." Andrews was absent on the vote (present earlier.)

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If someone is shot/wounded/or killed by a police officer (or even just stopped and questioned), the City has to collect information on the person shot or stopped and the circumstances. It's CA law.

But if someone is shot/wounded/killed in a Long Beach neighborhood shooting, the kind disproportionately impacting working class neighborhoods and frequently committed by gang members, LB doesn't collect or provide any publicly releasable information about the victim. To be blunt, their lives don't matter.

LB's equity and race focused Councilmembers and School Board members are mum on that inequity, the "tale of two cities" that LBREPORT.com considers a chronic injustice and has editorially decried. They only seem to care when a police officer does the shooting, not gangs or other neighborhood criminals who prevent children from safely enjoying neighborhood parks, who make streets unsafe for students walking to libraries to access computers and span the digital divide. These students find it a lot harder to concentrate when they live in a shooting-plagued gang infested neighborhood that students in more affluent areas don't experience,

If you can't measure it, you can't correct it, and LB has created the perfect conditions for NOT correcting it. It doesn't make shootings visible in its crime statistics (see item above) AND it doesn't track the race, ethnicity, gender and age of non-police involved neighborhood shootings,.

LB's police defunders seem quite comfortable with treating working class neighborhoods as guinea pigs for social experiments that treat gangs as victims instead of perpetrators. To view how widely accepted this perverse viewpoint has become in Long Beach, can you name a single LB elected who has publicly called for ridding LB neighborhoods of gangs? On the contrary, when a 14 year old Cambodian child was found shot to death in the 1400 block of St. Louis Ave., newly elected CD 6 representative Suely Saro posted a social network message stating: "Please Don’t be so quick to judge when 'gang-related' is mentioned." Egad.

Councilmembers who are genuinely data driven should direct LBPD to begin publicly reporting the race, ethnicity, gender and age of neighborhood victims of non-police shootings. Their lives should matter too.

The Council approved the quarter million dollar advance offered by Councilman Daryl Supernaw from his budgeted district discretionary funds (effectively citywide taxpayer dollars) with no guarantee of reimbursement to LB taxpayers by the LLC/operator. Pacific6 spokesman Brandon Dowling has told LBREPORT.com that "The $250,000 in elevator repairs were paid by the City of Long Beach and invoiced to the City of Long Beach. No money was ever 'given’ to MWN and we were never invoiced for the services.") The extent and types of repairs performed and their costs haven't been independently confirmed at this point by LBREPORT.com.

In our opinion, the $250,000 sum amounted to a gift of public money. Gifts of public money are generally prohibited under CA's Constitution and Government Code unless in some cases used for a "public purpose." We're not expressing a view here on whether the transaction was or wasn't for a "public purpose." Our outrage stems from the fact that the Council didn't include any requirement for MWN to repay LB taxpayers for the quarter million dollar sum.

In our opinion, it will remain a continuing outrage facing LB's incumbents and any candidate(s) seeking to replace them fail to publicly call on MWN to reimburse LB taxpayers for the $250,000 sum within a legally binding reasonable time frame.

LBREPORT.com includes the following for context. The hospital's lessee is "MWN Community Hospital LLC" one of whose participants is Pacific,6 partnership co-founded by John Molina.

In October 2019, the City Council voted 7-0 (Supernaw motion, seconded by Price, Richardson absent) to approve MWN's Community Hospital lease with the City. It lets MWN terminate the lease if the LLC decides it no longer wishes to operate the facility as an acute care hospital. In that case, the lease requires the City to reimburse MWN for its start-up costs plus the LLC's share of retrofit costs plus the LLC's cumulative net operating loss. The lease also requires the City to pay half the cost of seismic upgrades, amounting to $25 million payable by the City over 15 years in 1 million to $2 million annual sums. The accumulated sum could be so large that the City would likely have to let MWN or another entity buy Community Hospital to pay it off.