The City Manager pulled three tax & fee hike measures from City Council consideration for the Nov. ballot.
Following our July 8, 2024 letter to the City Manager (see previous eblast below or our youtube video)—which called out the illegal nature of poll-testing official language for ballot measures—all three city-level proposed tax and fee increases on Long Beach residents have been removed from Council consideration!
They were proposals to:
- Hike REAL ESTATE TRANSFER TAX (a nearly 9-fold increase to the city’s home sale tax!)
 GONE!
- Hike BIZ LICENSE FEES (a doubling of the fee on small businesses and independent contractors) GONE!
- Hike the ELECTRIC FRANCHISE FEE (a tripling of fees passed-through directly to ratepayers) GONE!
As noted in our letter and video, the City Manager blatantly told the Council in June that he would be conducting further polling to continue refining the 75-word ballot summary text. Undaunted by bad polling, City Hall seemed intent on barrelling forward, confident in its ability to manipulate the electorate—niceties of the law be damned.
Following our letter, however, they have made a u-turn and removed these tax measures!
They now do not appear on the City Council agenda for August 6, the last day for Council to place items on the November ballot.
This is the vital work of the Long Beach Reform Coalition reaping results for all Long Beach residents!
 The City Manager and City Attorney both did respond to our letter.
While they provided nothing but a thinly veiled excuse for the City Manager's admission (of illegally poll data-engineering the ballot), it gave us occasion to write them back.
In that second letter to City Hall, we revealed further evidence, more recently discovered, exposing City Hall's dishonesty.
The City Attorney's cover for the City Manager was that her lawyers had drafted the polling survey text. Little did they know that we had already acquired overwhelming direct evidence that that was utterly false.
Indeed, we have emails between City Manager Tom Modica and polling firm FM3 Research, showing him micro-managing the poll-testing of exact terminology intended to appear as the official 75-word summary for ballot measures.
And these taxpayer-funded polling surveys have lengthy sections devoted to testing a whole range of arguments for passage, asking which are most "convincing" to the survey-taker, on a scale of "very convincing" to "somewhat convincing" to "not convincing" to "not believable". They even test potential counterarguments which might be made by a Vote No campaign.
The City Manager even went so far as to insist that a proposed real estate transfer tax hike be described to voters as coming out of sellers' "profits".
He instructs the polling firm to have the script their callers read out, "State that it is a tax assessed to the seller who pays for it out of the profits of the sale."
Anyone whose bought or sold a home knows that transfer tax is negotiable between parties, and of course the term "profits" is very politically loaded language (probably intended to win renters' votes while failing to note that such a tax eventually raises the cost of housing for everyone).
You can view all our correspondence to and from the City Manager & City Attorney here:
 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zx72B8XMiKlaXnRPCaUEvhoN1OuOydbW?usp=sharing
Despite this important victory, there are still three ballot measures—which should cause varying degrees of alarm—which the City Council will be voting on during its Aug. 6th meeting.
Especially troubling is a push to remove civil service safeguards from the hiring process for City personnel, centralizing power around the City Manager and ultimately in the hands of the Mayor, whom he de facto answers to (so long as the Mayor controls at least five votes on Council, as he currently does).
We will have further information on these measures in a subsequent eblast. |
