City Council Inauguration Day 2010: A Retrospective

When Democrats Len Torres, Fran Adelson and Scott Mandel are sworn in at the City Council inauguration at noon New Year’s Day, will it be anything like the last ceremony two years ago?

Held on Sunday, Jan. 3, 2010, every seat was taken and scores of spectators stood in the sixth-floor council chambers at City Hall as second-term Republican council member John McLaughlin, first-term Democrats Mike Fagen and Len Torres and the new City Court judge, Frank Dikranis, were sworn in.

Season Long Beach political observers tried to recall when they had last witnessed such a large turnout at an inauguration ceremony for the then 87-year-old City Council.

“It was incredible, just wild,” Larry Elovich, the city’s Democratic leader during the 1960s who had attended 25 previous City Council ceremonies, said at the time. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

McLaughlin and Fagen, who had the two highest vote totals in the at-large November election in 2009, captured four-year terms, while Torres won a two-year seat. With McLaughlin’s re-election, Republicans retained a 3-2 council majority, which included President Thomas Sofield Jr. and Vice President Mona Goodman. Democrats Lenny Remo and Denise Tangney had stepped down. Issues ranging from taxes to parking to boardwalk rehabilitation took center stage during the campaign.

On the campaign trail, McLaughlin, a retired FDNY lieutenant who was working then on his master’s degree in fine arts at Queens College, pledged to reduce taxes, to continue moving part-time city employees to full-time status and to hire more storm management consultants. “I really want to continue doing what we’ve been doing to keep working on the infrastructure of the city,” he said then.

Among the prominent officials in the audience that day was newly-elected Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano, to whom Fagen and Torres extended an invitation as a sign of bipartisanship that Fagen said he hoped could extend to the city administration.  

During the campaign, Fagen vowed to bring greater transparency to city government, and to end what he called City Hall’s “friends-and-family program,” charging that the city hires employees’ unqualified acquaintances and relatives.

He also proposed adding non-tax revenue streams, including an Adopt-A-Highway program, in which businesses would sponsor sections of a newly constructed boardwalk, and naming-rights deals with corporations to finance the ice arena and Recreation Center.

“We’d like to bring some special events to the city, to the beach this summer,” Fagen said. “And Len is working on some lucrative grants, and all in all we’d like to bring some fair and open government back to the city.”

“Affordability” was Torres’s campaign mantra, as he promised to cut spending on city employees’ overtime and to consolidate and streamline services. He highlighted the fact that he was the first Hispanic candidate to run for a City Council seat.

“As a Latino, the Hispanic community was very supportive of me, but they didn’t get me into office — it was all of Long Beach,” said Torres, a  retired teacher and administrator. “Now, as a council member, I represent all of Long Beach.”

In a meeting after the ceremonies concluded, the new City Council voted to retain Goodman as vice president and Sofield as president, in spite of an effort by Fagen to nominate Goodman as president.