MAYOR BOB FOSTER’S ‘GROUCHO STRATEGY’

In the Marx Brothers’ classic A Night At the Opera, Groucho is dining in an elegant restaurant at the height of the Depression with a lady friend. The waiter hands Groucho the check. “This is outrageous,” Groucho responds…as he hands the bill to his dinner guest and says, “I wouldn’t pay it if I were you.”

During the long runup to the brutal budget cuts adopted Tuesday by the Long Beach City Council, Mayor Bob Foster has used the same strategy. Faced with three costly city employee union contracts he championed in 2007 and 2008 despite their pension consequences—a voluntarily reopened police contract and two five-year (not normal three-year) contracts with firefighters and non-public safety employees—Mayor Foster now hands the bill to the unions and, if they don’t pay it, to taxpayers.

If the unions agree to contract changes Foster wants, the cuts are avoided and Foster is a hero. If the unions don’t agree to the contract changes, the cuts occur and Foster and his allies blame the unions.

Either outcome lets Foster position himself as a champion of pension reform, one of the hottest hot-button issues statewide, when he’s now a candidate for statewide office.

Pretty smart, huh? Heads he wins, tails they lose.

We see things differently. Although we think Mayor Foster is right-on regarding pension reform (better late than never) and the contract changes he’s advocating are basically sound, we find his bizarre statements on police levels deeply disturbing. His de facto flip-flop on police levels — a priority duty — is even more alarming.

The Mayor’s willingness to punish the public with across-the-board cuts instead of sensibly prioritizing them — handing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Aquarium and privately run art interests while cutting public safety services coupled with a thinly-veiled desire for a future tax measure — is the type of thing that has so many people at Tea Party boiling points over the attitudes of some in government.

The coming weeks will tell whether Long Beach’s city employee unions pay the bill or taxpayers do.

The strategy was funnier when Groucho used it.