bobfoster Mayor Bob Foster has learned a lot since taking office. He’s become so enlightened that he now dismisses years of testimony by Long Beach’s previous police chief, the professional judgment of Los Angeles’ current police chief and multiple research studies cited in a recent Rand corporation study—which L.A.’s current police chief publicly cited in testimony to his city’s council.

Mayor Foster has proposed reducing L.B. police level by a per-capita equivalent of cutting over 25 percent of L.A.’s police level to balance City Hall’s budget.

The Mayor of L.A. County’s largest city would be driven out of office if he advanced such a lunatic proposal.

If council members in L.A. County’s second-largest city—that’s us, in Long Beach—let Mayor Foster lead them like lemmings into an action so untenable elsewhere, they will Velcro themselves to a vote that in our opinion will show L.B. City Hall has reached the point of functional insolvency.

Insolvency isn’t bankruptcy but it is the inability to meet one’s financial obligations as they become due. Mayor Foster and City Manager Pat West have basically said that L.B. can’t meet its contractual obligations without cutting police to levels unacceptable elsewhere—or cutting other L.B. services to levels unacceptable here and elsewhere.

Mayor Foster tries to blame this on (1) the economy and (2) pensions, but neither of these provide a serious defense for him.

Mayor Foster advocated each of the three major agreements that he now demands be reopened and did so despite their obvious pension consequences at the time.

LBReport.com and others pointed out at that time that the 2008 agreement with non-public safety employees included a de facto “pension spike,” cascading on the infamous 2002 pension spike (that Foster used as a campaign weapon in 2006) by raising the base pay on which the pensions are calculated.

As for the cops, candidate Foster welcomed the endorsement of the POA in 2006 and once in office urged voluntarily re-opening and adding pay and benefits to the Police officers’ contract on grounds it would prevent losing police officers; the action was approved by a unanimous Council. That was followed by two five-year (instead of normal three-year) contracts with L.B.’s Firefighters (8-1, Gabelich dissenting) and non-public-safety employee unions (7-2, Gabelich and DeLong dissenting).

The contracts Foster advocated and a Council majority approved were arguably not sustainable at the time. The bad economy has simply hastened the day of reckoning and made the immediate problem worse.

Although Mayor Foster blames the economy and pensions, the inconvenient truth is that other cities — ranging from L.A. to Signal Hill — can and do provide their taxpayers with higher levels of police despite the bad economy … and still manage to provide libraries, parks and other services.

But it’s Mayor Foster’s “education” rationalizing thinner police levels—an Invasion of the Body Snatchers substitution of his once sensible brain for something other worldly—that is most disturbing. Mayor Foster not only asks the Council to send L.B.’s police level backward to where it was when City Hall itself admitted police should be increased; he now basically takes the position that cutting police to that level doesn’t matter.

That’s the exact opposite of what L.B. City Hall said when it took millions of dollars in federal and state police grants to raise L.B.’s police levels. Something truly terrible has happened when Mayor Foster tells a televised interview that providing police beyond those levels would turn LB into an “armed camp.”

LBReport.com does not support the Manager/Mayor’s proposed across-the-board cuts (euphemized as “proportional reductions”). No responsible family cuts money for the mortgage, food and medical care in the same proportion as trips to Disneyland. We believe in prioritized spending. We have offered our own “Plan C” items as alternatives to the Manager/Mayor Plan A and B cuts. They will win us no friends but they’re our proposals.

We urge council members to propose those or offer their own “Plan C or D or E” alternatives and we urge them to use every possible parliamentary device, including unflinching multiple substitute motions, to force recorded votes on those alternatives.

We favor extending the Council budget proceedings for as long as it takes to avoid the police cuts recommended by the City Manager and the Mayor. If there are council members who want to cut off discussion (“call for the question”), let them require a recorded vote that will show taxpayers who they are.

If the substitute motions on budget alternatives fail, we urge council members to vote “no” on the Manager/Mayor’s budget. We urge council members not to put their good names to police cuts that should be prioritized, not proportional.

Under a worst-case scenario, the Manager/Mayor proposed budget would take effect Sept. 15. Fine. The Council can then undo that action on any Tuesday by agendizing and requiring votes on alternatives. 

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