valturnsswitch1 It’s 8 a.m. in North Long Beach, and already the temperature is approaching 80 degrees. The afternoon heat promises to be brutal. But now there is still dew on the grass at Houghton Park and the air is lush—and Val Lerch has parked his car on Artesia Blvd. so that we can both admire a huge oil storage tank.

On the first morning after his last meeting as North Long Beach’s representative on the Long Beach City Council, Lerch is taking me on a trip down his many memory lanes.

“Now that is a good corporate neighbor,” Lerch says, gazing at the oil storage tank.

“WELCOME TO LONG BEACH,” proclaim thick block letters painted around the upper edge of the big round drum. “TOP OF THE TOWN!”

“I got them to do that,” Lerch says with satisfaction. “Because this company is Paramount Petroleum, and four blocks over is the City of Paramount, I just knew people would be driving here and think that they were in Paramount.”

Lerch is repulsed by the thought of such a geographic mistake. He loves North Long Beach. He was the council member here at the so-called “Top of the Town”—that is, the 9th District—for eight years, and he wanted more. But when Lerch ran a write-in campaign for a third term last spring, voters overwhelmingly said no. Now Lerch is moving on … no wait, not yet.

“And over there— ” he taps his window, “—we’ve got a very good cement factory!”

Now Lerch steps on the gas and we are on our way to see Long Beach’s first Fatburger—still under construction—its arrival the culmination of a courtship that Lerch says began seven years ago at the International Shopping Center Conference in Las Vegas.

Lerch is rightfully prideful as he reviews these accomplishments on his way out of office. Yet a piece of oil-tank public relations, a cement factory and another hamburger stand don’t exactly transform the impression of North Long Beach that most people had when he was sworn in back in 2002.

Now, as then, the spine of the 9th District is Artesia Blvd., the bleakest of business corridors, where heavy equipment rental outfits, fast food chains, discount stores and dive bars languish in small clusters, surrounded by empty storefronts and vacant lots. There are buildings that have gone unoccupied for a quarter of a century.

But on the morning after his last meeting on the city council, Lerch has offered me a tour of North Long Beach that he has promised will change those perceptions—or at least provide some mitigation. To make that point, all Lerch has to do is turn off Artesia onto any one of the streets branching to the north or south. So he does.

“Now you look at this neighborhood—I’m going to drive you around this neighborhood,” Lerch fairly commands and threatens. “Now you look and you tell me this isn’t as good a neighborhood—pride of ownership, all of that—as anything you’ll see in Belmont Heights, in East Long Beach. Well-intact neighborhoods!” He hits the steering wheel for emphasis. “Great little neighborhoods!

Great homes!”

This is where Lerch begins to get worked up.

“Ask the Los Angeles realtors: for the past 15 years in a row they’ve said that in North Long Beach you get more house per dollar than any other place.”

This is the theme Lerch has tried to hammer home for years—during those two terms on the council, yes, but long before that, too, at least since … well, if you had to pick an exact date, maybe the best one would be Dec. 18, 1976. That’s the day Val and Janet Lerch bought their first home in North Long Beach.

Years later, during the wedding of their oldest son, Anthony, Lerch had a revelation of what years of living at the Top of the Town had done for his family.

“We were sitting over there at St. Cornelius, and I turned to my wife and said, ‘We did it,” Lerch recounts. She said, ‘What?’ And I said ‘Look up at the altar.’ Up there was an African-American, a Filipino, a Latino and a friend who’s gay—all next to my son. That’s how we raised our children. And that’s North Long Beach.”

THE 9TH DISTRICT BEGINS at South St., continues north to 70th St., and is bordered on the east by Downey Ave. and on the west by Long Beach Blvd. The district is not noted for its glamour—according to Lerch, 78 percent of Long Beach’s non-port industrial property is located here. But there is pride.

The way Lerch tells it, the 9th District’s motto—its brand—was born in the middle of a fit of aggravation over the pretensions of the more well-heeled areas of Long Beach: news reached the North Long Beach Community Action Group that Bixby Knolls was billing itself as “The Heart of Long Beach,” and an exasperated member sputtered, “Well if that’s true then we’re … we’re … ‘The Top of the Town!’”

WE MEANDER DOWN countless residential streets—Olive, Falcon, Gundry, Indiana—and Lerch’s point about the neighborhoods of the 9th District steadily sinks in: they are surprisingly lovely. There are great stretches lined and shaded by Chinese elms, large pockets blessed with the sort of respectful refurbishment that can be found the pricier parts of Cal Heights. Throughout, there is greater architectural unity than anything one sees in east Long Beach or Lakewood. And everything is kept up, so that the only clue to the relative property values is the style of landscaping: native plant gardens and bougainvillea draping Spanish tile roofs in the gentrified neighborhoods, and bird baths and pinwheels nestled among the juniper bushes on the more working-class streets.

Soon we are traveling down Obispo, grimy warehouses and crumbling parking lots on either side of the street, and Lerch is shaking his head.

“We have literally ignored our business corridors, and when people come to North Long Beach this is all they see,” he laments. “But what they don’t know—” Lerch interrupts himself, turns to me and says, “Get ready. This is going to blow your mind.”

He slows, signals, and turns right on a street called St. Francis Place.

“This blows everybody’s mind. This is the St. Francis neighborhood.”

Mind blown: beautifully maintained mid-century moderns on either side, tree canopy, enormous lots, the sudden appearance of Priuses, Audis and Volvo station wagons.

“It’s charming—look at all these cul-de-sacs,” I can’t help but say out loud, meanwhile mentally tabulating how much equity my husband and I have in our home.

Confident he has made an impression, pleased that he is finally understood, Lerch leans toward me and speaks in a solemn voice: “The diversity of North Long Beach. Million-dollar homes. Three-hundred-thousand-dollar homes. Everything in between. And we’ve got pockets of these all over the place. Beautiful homes. And you know what? I’ll take them over El Dorado Park. Any day of the week.”

WE DRIVE THE CURVING STREET in silence, admiring the sunlight on the brick, the palms, the trellises of Lerch’s beloved 9th District. Then, after a minute or so, it seems to dawn on Lerch that this morning—the day after his last meeting on the City Council—the district is his in a different way than it was yesterday. It’s been more than three months since the April 13 election, when Steve Neal outpolled him more than 2-to-1.

“This is one of the precincts where I took 90 percent of the vote,” Lerch muses as we cruise along. “And you know why? Because two blocks over is Andy Street. And I changed Andy St. for them.”

The election and Andy Street: the nadir and zenith of Lerch’s city council career.

Back in 2007, I wrote a cover story for the late District Weekly that revealed the transformation that had been accomplished on Andy St. An astonishingly successful neighborhood renewal program took a small dead-end street—so violent that the US Postal Service refused to deliver the mail—and turned it into a truly livable neighborhood with block parties, neighborhood watch meetings and swarms of kids playing tag after school.

The transformation required years of work and coordination among residents, the police, the courts, the City Council, Neighborhood Services—and above all, LaVerne Duncan of the Department of Community Development. Though the neighborhood is still a work in progress, and its maintenance still requires vigilance on the part of  all players, there is no question that Andy Street has been an extraordinary success, earning the participants press coverage, awards and numerous invitations to national urban planning conferences.

“Those things don’t work unless you find a LaVerne Duncan—and a Val Lerch,” says Lerch. “Willing to push everything aside and get it done.”

True, although Lerch’s statement avoids mentioning Lerch’s early approach to Andy Street, which was steely—bloodless, even—but perhaps necessarily so.

When initial improvement efforts stalled, when the drug dealers dug in like ticks and refused to leave, when the SWAT team was still making regular appearances around the blocks of apartment, Lerch held a meeting in which he told Duncan and others that Andy Street’s time was running short. The city would have to “fix it or end it.” The neighborhood would be made safe or it would be razed.

Lerch steers his car off St. Francis Place onto Downey Avenue. It gives us an opportunity to glance down Andy Street for just a moment. The trees planted back in 2007 are larger, and they’ve leafed-out beautifully.

“I went to a conference and I told them, ‘I can take all the credit for it because I’m an elected official,’’’ Lerch continues. “But unless you have a LaVerne Duncan it’s not going to work. You gotta have somebody that falls in love with the community.”

I remind Lerch that I had spoken with the Andy Street residents, that they had told me of his involvement—how he attended every block party, every cleaning party, raking alongside them, all day, a lot longer than he needed to be.

Lerch shrugs, seems embarrassed, and says, “Well, you know…”

He changes the subject.

“Now over there…” he begins, and shows me the site of “the old Target,” hulking, empty, and destined to stay empty until 2014; Target still holds the lease and refuses to let it go, not wanting to see any competition come to a neighborhood that it’s already abandoned.

NO, VAL LERCH IS NOT the 9th District’s representative on the Long Beach City Council, anymore. Yes, he was defeated soundly. Yet Lerch talks about last spring’s election as though the results ought to be accompanied by an asterisk. He doesn’t seem to feel that he lost among his constituents so much as to outsiders from organized labor.

“The reason why I was not successful in a write-in campaign is because of the positions I took on two issues against the unions—and they brought armies out against me,” Lerch says as we continue to roll along. “The guy who succeeded me [Steve Neal] lives, breathes and eats union. That’s what he does; he’s a union organizer. They found him and ran him against me because of the two stances I took.”

In the first of those votes, Lerch in 2007 helped defeat a so-called Big Box Ordinance—which would have prevented retail stores like Wal-Mart (100,000 square feet or larger with over 10 percent of their square footage dedicated to groceries) from being built in Long Beach. The idea was these stores hurt small businesses and stores with unionized workers.

In the second of those votes, Lerch helped defeat the Labor Peace Agreement, which would have given people who work in hotels located on city land the right to join unions in exchange for a pledge not to strike. Both issues were accompanied by big-money campaigns by the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, which threatened to challenge their passage with expensive special elections.

Lerch is unapologetically pro-business—pro big business—and he emphasized it several times during our drive.

“Some people have criticized me on redevelopment over the years, because I’ve said, ‘We don’t need to create more mom-and-pop operations here. Our biggest problem is mom-and-pop.’ We need to get something a little larger: Big Saver, Target, things like that. Because now we have a water store here, and a water store there, and you’ve got all these little stores doing the same thing. It’s not a very good environment for the growth of business.”

Lerch pulls his car to the curb, sighs, and turns in his seat to face me.

“Let me say this: I will fight to my death for the unions to have the right to go into any shop and organize. I will fight to my death for laws that will give them the right to organize. But I will fight to my death for the shop to have the right to tell them to go to hell. That’s my own personal position. It should be a level playing field. But when you have unions go after elected officials to ban Wal-Mart in a neighborhood—well, that’s just wrong. I will not create laws that allow unions an advantage over business.”

No, he won’t. Not anymore.

ON LERCH’S FIRST DAY IN OFFICE he told his staff he wanted to begin by answering the phone on all constituent calls. He figured there would be no better way to learn the problems plaguing his district.

The very first call came from a woman who lived in a tiny house sandwiched between two apartment buildings, right where Orizaba meets the 91 freeway.

“She’s a pain in the behind, but she’s really wonderful, a watchful eye for her neighborhood,” Lerch recounted. “She said, ‘Orizaba tunnel! It’s terrible! There’s urination and defecation and dumping, and all of the kids who go to McKinley Elementary have to walk through that tunnel and see all of it, and no one’s doing anything about it!’”

Lerch learned Caltrans had jurisdiction over the tunnel—and that Caltrans wasn’t particularly interested in doing anything to clean it up. (“Caltrans. The worst friend you can have,” grumbles Lerch).

After months of wrangling the city found a solution: they refurbished the tunnel’s outer wall, artists were brought in, decorative tile was laid, and children from McKinley Elementary were drafted to paint the mural. The blighted entryway was designated a city art project, the responsibility for maintenance then passed to the city, and the tunnel

is now clean and safe. It was a crash course in the real work of a hands-on city councilperson: nuisance abatement, partnership-building and byzantine funding arrangements, all coordinated in the margins of bigger, less helpful agencies.

Cupped in the curve of the tunnel is a broad sweep of concrete, and on either side, easily missed, are basketball hoops.

“There’s a basketball court there.” I say. “That’s so great.”

“No, there’s no basketball court there,” Lerch insists.

“Yeah, there are two basketball hoops,” I say. “Right there.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lerch continues. “I have no idea.”

I stare at him; it takes me a few moments to catch on.

“Well, the imaginary basketball court was a great idea,” I say.

Lerch is laughing; he has totally cracked himself up.

“When we did this we had to beg and borrow,” Lerch explains. “This was a partnership with about three different organizations. When we were about halfway through with this some people from the neighborhood asked if we could put a basketball court in there. All we could say is, ‘There’s no more money. There’s just no more money.’

A few days after the dedication a city employee—I’ll never give you his name—called me and said, ‘We’ve got basketball courts. I don’t know how it got there, I don’t know where the money came from, but the courts are there.’ And they were. So ever since then, I like to deny that they’re there.”

 AFTER TWO HOURS, THE TOUR CONCLUDES where it began—Lerch pulling up to the 9th District field office at Houghton Park—and it has been both touching and impressive in its thoroughness.

Every neighborhood is traced with the fondness of a wistful senior pointing out the small-town landmarks of a long-ago courtship, but instead of soda fountains and front-porch swings I have seen Lerch’s first mural project, his leafiest, greenest median strip, his Big Saver.

The nature of a city council position lends itself to this sort of sentimentality. Unlike most city officials, council members immerse themselves completely in the problems of specific neighborhoods and deal directly with the residents, so personal involvement is a given.

On the other hand, as with any elected position, a council member must leave office with a great deal unfinished. The partnerships, agreements and blueprints for projects large and small are left in trust on the desktop, and the outgoing officeholder can only hope, as he turns out the lights, that his successor will choose to push things to completion.

That’s where Lerch finds himself now.

“How are you feeling?” I ask him.

“Well, you know. I feel good. A little relieved,” he says bravely. “My life is going to be less complicated, less cluttered.”

“Are you going to miss the work?”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “I’ll miss it.”

He pauses.

“I’m going to miss coming up with an idea, walking into someone’s office, and saying, ‘Let’s see if we can get this done.’”