Community Corner

Q&A with New City Administration: Part II

Quiksilver, commissions and the tasks before them are among the topics of discussion.


Following his appointment and his address to city employees and constituents Tuesday morning, Long Beach City Manager Jack Schnirman and the new City Council, consisting of President Fran Adelson, Vice President Len Torres, Michael Fagen, Scott Mandel and John McLaughlin, sat with the press to answer questions in the city manager's office at City Hall. McLaughlin was not present at the meeting due to a prior travel commitment, he said. The first part of this Q&A series was posted Wednesday. The following is the second part:

If you need to cut spending, what are the main areas where you would look to cut?

Torres: At this time right now we’re doing an analysis and that will be announced shortly. But remember that we’re talking people, and Mike Fagen and I, our style has been that we work with compassion with folks and that’s going to be at the very core of what we do.

Is there any fear that an outside entity may take over the city’s finances? 

Fagen: I believe that the worst is over for the city financially. We took our hits from the credit rating services. We established what the problem was. The voters spoke about it. And now we’re in the process of establishing a really competent and dedicated administration that will restore trust in the community, stabilize the city financially, and establish a workable and sustainable economic and financial plan for the city. And we’re going to hold ourselves to those standards. As long as we can display all those elements to the public and to the rating services, there’s never going to be any fear of those options happening. And that’s what we’re dedicated to.

Is there any talk at this time of reviving some of the commissions that have fallen by the wayside?

Adelson: There are plenty of commissions that have not been meeting, namely the ethics commission. We’ll definitely be looking at the commissions and reviving the commissions. And we’ll encourage public participation and ask people to join the boards and different commissions. Not political people. We want the public to join. That was one of the big issues of our campaign, is wanting participation from the public. That’s really important to us. We work for them.

Schnirman: Along those lines, even though it’s cold today [Tuesday], the City Council is going to be outside at the end of the work day today and going to greet the commuters coming off the train at rush hour, and just set the tone that Long Beach is a place that listens, the City Council listens. And we’re going to hear from people what’s on their minds.

Now that Quiksilver has decided not to hold the Quiksilver Pro New York surfing competition in Long Beach this year, is there any talk about inviting similar entities to host similar events?

Fagen: Look, Quiksilver was dynamite. That was such a terrific event for the city. It established Long Beach as a terrific partner for special events and for what I think is investment. Fran and I and Len and Scott all discussed a number of other options that goes toward stimulating the business and economic development in town. We’re already talking about other options. There are certain other events that may come here.

We’re actively communicating with the surf community now. We started that months ago because they are excited, they want to help as well. Believe it or not, a lot of these surf events, they go there and ask their opinions on a lot of this as well. We’re moving on a lot of different fronts about creating great events for the city that will drive economic development and create this vision for the city outside of the city. It’s a terrific town to invest in and we’re going to be good partners.

Adelson: And we also will let the public know every step along the way what’s going on. If there is someone coming here, we will let the public know and how the event is going to be run and what they can expect. We’ll have some hearings to get public input.

Do you feel overwhelmed by all the issues that are in front of you, from the reconstruction of the boardwalk to finances to traffic issues. How will you tackle all of these issues?

Adelson: There are a lot of issues, but you have a City Council that is all working very diligently together with a new city manager. We have confidence in Jack in his ability as city manager. We have confidence in one another. And I’ll say that all five of us are basically committed to working together to get this done. It’s important to the residents of Long Beach and it’s important to us. We live here, too. We pay taxes. And we will all work together.

Schnirman: We’re going to do this in an orderly fashion. We did a very condensed transition process, very orderly, and rolling out the best practices of a plan of how you get started. And we’re going to take a very systematic approach, one thing at a time.

This Q&A is in three parts: Part 1, Part 3.


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