| 🛑NO on Long Beach Measure JB
JB would burst open the floodgates to exponentially greater corruption in city administration by effectively eliminating Civil Service safeguards against a quid pro quo municipal workforce. The City of Long Beach has a payroll of well over $1 billion annually, with approximately 6,000 positions. JB would eliminate the independent Civil Service Commission (composed of appointed residents rather than politicians) which serves as a check and balance to ensure that only the most qualified are hired according to testing and Civil Service procedures. In its place, the City's non-independent Human Resource Dept. would control all hiring, putting these decisions under the official authority of the City Manager and the de facto authority of the Mayor.
The Mayor supports JB in order to take Long Beach back to a 19th Century style political spoils system, where he can reward any political supporter, special interest crony, or even personal relative with a high-paying, unaccountable City job. For more on JB (or to get your free No on JB yard sign today!) go to NOonMeasureJB.com.
🛑NO on Long Beach Measure HC
Measure HC is the twin sister to Measure JB, except that it would have the same corrupting effect on the workforce at the Port of Long Beach.
HC would disempower the independent Long Beach Harbor Commission and, as JB centralizes all hiring power in the hands of the City Manager, HC would centralize all hiring power in the hands of the Port Director, who similarly works at the de facto behest of the Mayor. By controlling a City Council majority politically, as the current Mayor does (as the leader of the Long Beach fiefdom of the greater LA County Federation of Labor big money machine, which buys and owns so many candidates in the region), the Mayor effectively has the power to dismiss the City Manager or the Port Director at any time.
Thus the City Charter form of government, where these two positions are supposed to function as independent chief administrators of City operations, accountable to the City Council as a whole, would be effectively curtailed. By giving direct hiring power over the 650 Port positions, a payroll of $100 million, to the Port Director, it effectively takes hiring out of the light of day of a public commission and hands direct hiring power to the Mayor. For more, see the sample ballot arguments here.
🛑NO on Long Beach Measure LB
Measure LB would lift a longstanding exemption form the City Utility User Tax enjoyed by two gas-fueled power plants, the facilities owned respectively by the Los Angeles Dept. of Water & Power (Haynes Plant) and AES which straddle the San Gabriel River just north of 2nd Street and east of Studebaker. Measure LB is part of the Mayor's push to paper over projected budget deficits as far as the eye can see due to his inability to take on the special interests who paid for his campaign and got him elected Mayor. This measure would generate an additional $15 million per year to the City.
The City staff report (analyzed and linked to in this LBRC email update, under the section entitled "Removal of Utility Tax Exemption for Power Plants") contends that removal of this exemption would not increase Long Beach ratepayer bills more than $0.50 per year per person because LADWP does not service Long Beach and AES power goes to the whole 15 million residents of the SCE service area. However, LADWP has challenged the ability of one City to tax another, and more worrisome, SCE has already vowed to challenge LB, if it passes, at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), where they will ask that the full burden of Measure LB be born solely by Long Beach ratepayers.
Therefore, while Measure LB may sound tempting as a source of revenue, the Long Beach Reform Coalition believes the Council should have asked for further review by outside legal experts. Should it pass, the City will have to spend millions on legal fees just to find out whether it will survive review by the CPUC or not. This assessment needs to happen before Long Beach residents are asked to vote on it.
🎉The Good News on the Local Front: We Already Beat Back Three Tax Measures!
Your Long Beach Reform Coalition already saved local taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year by challenging the Mayor on his egregious proposed tax grabs, which would have affected homeowners (and renters eventually), small business owners, and electricity ratepayers. We challenged the City Manager and City Attorney on his corrupt ballot wording scheme, and we won! These three tax proposals didn't even make it onto the ballot. It was a quiet but enormously impactful victory for LBRC.
🛑NO on Long Beach City College Measure AC
In 2008, voters handed LBCC a nearly half-billion dollar bond measure (an increase to property taxes) called Measure E. In 2016, voters approved another $850 million for LBCC in the form of Measure LB (2016), a further increase to property taxes. Measure AC would be another $1 billion. These bond measures are like home mortgages in that they take decades to pay back, via ever-increasing cumulative increases to property tax bills, and by the time they are paid back, as much or more money has gone to paying the interest on the debt as the principle.
And yet where is the accountability for these billions of accumulated local debt? Are we getting value back for our dollar? LBCC has a "Citizens' Oversight Committee" which holds a few perfunctory meetings a year, certainly not the kind of scrutiny required to ensure that this money is going toward essential projects rather than into the unseen pockets of contractors and consultants. And the elected Long Beach City College Board of Trustees has been distracted for years by the tyrannical rule of the Mayor's ally, Trustee Ntuk, who has used it as a platform to attack his political enemies.
This is not the time to hand billions more to LBCC. First, we need to elect Dick Gaylord to begin the reform process on the Board of Trustees before LBCC can begin to make the case for more money from the taxpayers.
🟢VOTE for Dick Gaylord for LBCC Trustee (Area 4)
Dick Gaylord, a long time Long Beach resident, realtor, and civic leader, would be a refreshing breath of fresh air and would deny Trustee Ntuk his majority, restoring the functionality of the LBCC Board of Trustees. Here's his campaign site.
🛑NO on Los Angeles County Measure A
County Measure A represents a doubling down on the failed and graft-riddled current approach to homelessness in LA County. It would double the County Measure H (2017) quarter-cent sales tax, making it a full half-cent on every dollar spent, and removing the ten-year sunset provision, rendering it a never-ending infinity tax. This would take Long Beach up to a cumulative 10.75% sales tax, thanks to a bill in Sacramento allowing LA County cities to surpass the state sales tax cap (in anticipation of Measure A).
Measure H has made homelessness worse, not better, by wasting hundreds of millions of (regressively collected) tax payer dollars, enriching developers, consultants, and nonprofit execs while feeding into the failed Housing First (rather than shelter first) model and hardly adding any new shelter units or substance abuse / mental health / life recovery services.
The solution to homelessness isn't more taxpayer money (especially not a sales tax, which burdens the homeless and low income residents disproportionately) when already billions are being spent, mostly in federal and state grants, and wasted. We need to change how the money is being spent, and we need to begin with a massive audit of homeless spending (as a federal judge has already ordered in the City of Los Angeles).
Neutral on County Measure G (no endorsement)
Currently the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors wields enormous power largely under the radar of public scrutiny. Measure G would increase the five-member board to nine, reducing the size of each district by nearly a million constituents from the current 2 million-person supervisorial districts. Perhaps even more significantly it would shift the governance model from the current board-appointed County CEO managing the bureaucracy to a countywide elected CEO, effectively an elected 'mayor of LA County' for the first time ever.
There are pros and cons to Measure G, including the possibility of electing one or two more supervisors who might be more independent of the LA County Federation of Labor controlled county political machine. And an elected County CEO might draw more public and media attention to the functioning of county government, with all its sprawling responsibilities and bureaucratic dysfunction. On the other hand, an elected CEO would be an incredibly powerful position, which might overshadow the Board of Supervisors, concentrating political power to an even greater degree, rather than democratizing it.
🟢YES on California Prop. 36
We all know that property crime, especially retail smash and grabs, are out of control due to Prop. 47 (2014) making theft under $950 a misdemeanor. Prop. 36 is polling with overwhelming public support for obvious reasons, despite passive opposition from Gov. Newsom. Restoring felony status for property theft crimes is essential for bringing back order to heavily impacted localities like Long Beach.
🟢VOTE for Nathan Hochman for Los Angeles County District Attorney
Prop. 36 reforms the disastrous Prop. 47, which was co-authored by the current District Attorney, George Gascon. For over a decade, he has been part of the movement to tie the hands of local prosecutors rather than addressing the root causes of crime. Gascon's own prosecutors, along with families of crime victims, have been up in arms that they aren't being allowed to do their jobs.
Plus, the Public Integrity Division within the DA’s office—supposedly the cop on the block to prevent corruption in local government and among local elected officials—has seemingly been effectively decommissioned. Gascon took personal control over the unit, and you never hear of any prosecutions of elected officials by the DA’s office (not that we have seen any action out of that unit since the days of DA Steve Cooley, when he famously prosecuted the City of Bell officials). All the prosecutions in LA in recent years (three City Council members and Supervisor Ridley-Thomas) have been by the feds, the FBI investigating and the US Attorney’s Office, not the DA.  Gascon is a Long Beach resident (Naples) and chummy with local politicos, like former Long Beach police chief, Sheriff Robert Luna.
Hochman, when personally questioned by LBRC’s executive director, emphasized the importance of the Public Integrity unit and pointed to his experience leading the LA City Ethics Commission. He has made reversing the extreme non-prosecution policies of Gascon his centerpiece and vows to be a moderate, even-handed crime fighter, who would value fairness for the accused without condoning lawlessness.
🛑NO on California Prop. 33
Prop. 33 is yet another attempt to unbalance the housing market by opening the door to potentially extreme versions of local rent control, a demagogic ploy for the votes of renters who would be its main victims in the long run. In particular, Prop. 33 would allow for vacancy decontrol, meaning a city could pass an ordinance permanently converting units to non-market rate, even when the tenant moves out. This would completely destroy the mom & pop housing provider industry, which provides the vast majority of the most affordable housing locally. Rather than leading to lower rents, it would lead to many units being removed from the housing market entirely and greatly increasing the cost of rental housing, whatever is left of it.
🟢YES on California Prop. 34
Prop. 34 would end the loophole allowing the sponsor of Prop. 33 to abuse its nonprofit status, continually pumping millions of dollars into trying to pass state propositions election cycle after election cycle. |
