The Signal Tribune emailed 15 identical questions to the seven Long Beach mayoral candidates — Joshua Rodriguez, Rex Richardson, Lee Goldin, Oscar Cancio, Terri Rivers, Chris Sweeney and April Ronay — and gave them one week to respond. We only received responses from Sweeney and Goldin at the time of publication.
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These responses are copied verbatim from candidate Goldin.
1. Long Beach is a majority-renter city, but has few renter protections. Do you think the City should be doing more to protect renters from rising costs or rent and substantial remodel evictions, and if so, what would you propose?
Clearly the city needs to do more. Short term, we need rent control and higher standards for landlords on remodel evictions. Long term, we need to create programs to help renters become homeowners. We start by driving out real estate speculators with the highest tax rate possible. To those who warn this will drive out the landlords, that is precisely the point. We run the slumlords of town on a rail, buy back their properties on the cheap and set up lease-to-own programs to help renters become homeowners.
2. Local organizers have been calling for an eviction moratorium on residents impacted by federal immigration action. According to the Los Angeles County Department of Economic Opportunity, undocumented workers contribute an estimated $253.9 billion in total economic output, equivalent to 17% of the County’s Gross Domestic Product in 2025, yet 70% of businesses in LA County experienced staffing shortages following ICE raids in June 2025. What’s your position on an eviction moratorium for those impacted by the increased ICE raids?
The only people who need to be evicted from Long Beach are the ICE agents themselves. I am 100% in support of an eviction moratorium for those impacted by the increased ICE raids.
3. Do you think the City is doing enough to protect its residents from federal immigration enforcement? How do you think the City should respond to ICE in Long Beach?
The city has done nothing to protect our residents from these raids. I would instruct the LBPD to detain any ICE agents as domestic terrorists and drop them off at the local FBI office. I would order the Police Oversight Commission to commandeer police helicopters and utilize police surveillance cameras to track all ICE activities in Long Beach and livestream the footage on the City website. I would also advocate to revoke the business licenses of any non-local businesses who offer products or services to ICE agents.
4. Long Beach has to meet State housing requirements of 26,502 units (15,346 have to be affordable) by 2029. What is your plan to build more housing to hit that goal of overall and low-income housing?
Long Beach needs to make use of the unused city lots along the Atlantic boulevard to develop a road to recovery and rehousing through community construction. This requires creating a hyper-localized version of the Works Progress Administration, reallocating city funds wasted on surveillance tech, consultancy fees and bloated executive salaries towards hiring local construction crews to build local affordable housing.
Since the state is requiring the development of this housing, the City Attorney would need to sue the State Attorney for adequate funding to meet the goals placed on our city by outside control if it becomes apparent that the local budget is not sufficient to sustain the state’s requirements. Ultimately, this problem is caused by the State while the burden is placed on the City by the State. Local government must hold the State government accountable for the issues it causes yet forces us to solve.
5. Long Beach’s Black population has been slowly dwindling over the years, mostly due to the high cost of living. What are some ways you would approach this issue?
Driving our Black neighbors out of their homes amounts to nothing less than a form of economic ethnic cleansing. Instead, we need to drive the corporate landlords out of town with aggressive taxation which will lead to a short-term drop in real estate prices.
We use this as an opportunity to buy their properties up on the cheap and implement lease-to-own programs subsidized from the earlier taxation. Through innovative programs like these, we can reverse this racist trend and help local families build generational wealth.
6. The city’s police budget has doubled over the last 20 years, yet it still struggles with staffing shortages. Do you think the police department’s budget is too high, too low, or at the right amount but in need of restructuring?
The police budget is out of control. We need to direct that funding to acute addiction treatment, mental health care and youth assistance programs. We need to invest long-term in addressing our city’s social problems, rather than pay others to punish us for the outcomes of these issues.
More police on the streets and surveillance equipment in the skies will not make us safer, it will turn our city into a turnkey miniature police state. Other cities with similar populations spend far less on police budgets and achieve far better outcomes. We have criminalized poverty and addiction in our city and it needs to stop.
7. In 2018, in Long Beach, Black people were arrested at a rate 2.11 times higher than white people, even though the white population in Long Beach is at least double that of the Black population, according to the Vera Institute. For non-violent, non-serious incidents, Black people were arrested at a rate 2.06 times higher than white people. On the specific charges of drug possession and disorderly conduct (situations that allow for officer discretion), the Long Beach Police Department arrests Black people at rates 1.8 and 1.72 times higher than white people, respectively. How would you address this disparity as mayor?
What is true in the United States is true in Long Beach. Many groups experience a much different justice system than white people in Long Beach just as they do in the country at large. As mayor, I would ensure that the Police Oversight Commission launches a full investigation into this matter.
Fundamentally, we need to solve the underlying issues in our society like addiction and income inequality that lead to crime, not criminalize the groups that suffer most from these issues.
8. Long Beach has made homelessness its number one priority over the last few years, yet there has been little progress, as evident in the 6.5% increase in homeless residents in last year’s Point in Time Count. What is your proposed approach to reducing homelessness in Long Beach?
Solving the humanitarian crisis of homelessness requires acute addiction services and acute mental health care for those citizens on the streets due to such problems. For those housing vulnerable renters living paycheck-to-paycheck, the City must institute aggressive renter protection including rent control and higher standards for renovictions.
How do we pay for it? We already do. Our politicians siphon billions of taxpayer and donor dollars that should go to community construction, renter protection and direct services into the hands of the greedy housing developers who got us in this mess. In order to end homelessness, we need to stand up against corporate landlords who hold ordinary citizens in financial bondage through crippling rent and crushing cycles of personal debt.
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9. Long Beach is facing a $40 million budget deficit for next year, and that deficit is expected to grow rapidly. What is your solution to closing this deficit?
While many candidates call for an audit of the City budget, I have already conducted my own, uncovering millions of dollars in consultant fees, unnecessary surveillance tech spending and lopsided salary scales for City leadership.
Since the majority of the budget is salaries, other candidates think we should start cutting staff and services to bridge the gap, but that will only cripple our city’s ability to serve its citizens. Instead we need to ensure those salaries actually go to residents of Long Beach, increasing the tax base without raising taxes on local residents or businesses while expanding City income.
Additionally, we must negotiate all contracts to the port to ensure that the billionaires and outside corporate interests using our town as their personal piggy bank pay their fair share to support City services.
10. The Equity and Human Rights Commission has recommended that the City adopt a Civil and Human Rights Investment Screening Policy. Do you support the adoption and implementation of this policy?
Yes I support this policy, but I will not need millions from the City budget to implement it. The research into which businesses fail to meet the basic standards of human rights has already been conducted by the same watchdog groups which advocate such policies.
The alleged budget collapse that this policy would cause is more propaganda from corporate shills in local government and their billionaire class puppeteers. Ensuring that the businesses we allow in our town are not part of the international cartel of human and ecological exploitation is not a “nice-to-have.” It is a basic requirement for ensuring our Long Beach is part of the solution for a better world, not part of the problem.
Our current mayor’s alignment with the City Manager to defer the adoption of the policy is a classic kick-the-can-down-the-round strategy from a career politician in waiting.
11. Do you support the use of Flock cameras, License Plate Recognition and Facial Recognition software being used on residents without their consent?
I am opposed to the use of Flock cameras and related Orwellian software with every fiber of my mind, body and soul. I have zero trust in the local, state or federal government’s ability to use the data collected by these systems in an ethical fashion, let alone the corporations developing these capabilities.
From the perspective of ensuring the rights of women, Flock is a deadly public safety hazard. Local police have long used their power to surveil, stalk, abuse and intimidate women. In light of the nation-wide efforts to infringe on the bodily rights of women, Flock technology could be used as a way to collect evidence for kangaroo court proceedings in which the justice system is weaponized against women to criminalize their bodily autonomy.
Flock must be stopped to prevent the rise of the Police State in America and the deadly grip of the patriarchy at large.
12. Long Beach continues to suffer from extremely high levels of pedestrian and driving-related fatalities, despite Vision Zero’s goal to get to zero fatalities by 2026. What do you think has been the main obstacle in reaching zero fatalities, and how can the City truly begin to make a difference in addressing street safety?
Frankly, the drivers in Long Beach are out-of-control. I was recently the victim of a hit-and-run and when I confronted the person at fault, he assaulted me and threw my phone in the street. So why are drivers so crazy here? I think it’s because our leaders have squashed the livelihood and soul of this city so hard that driving like Mad Max racing Dom Teretto is the only way people have to feel powerful and in control of their lives.
Long-term, we need to build a city that serves the people well enough that they don’t think driving into a bikelane to pass a school bus is the only way to feel empowered. Short-term, I think the only recourse is literally the laws of physics. We need to line the streets with so many speed bumps that it is essentially impossible to exceed the speed limit.
13. In the past, countries have pushed out their homeless residents in preparation for hosting the Olympics. How will you balance making the city presentable on a national stage while also caring for its most vulnerable populations?
I’m not interested in making the City “presentable” on a national stage, I am interested in making Long Beach a beacon of freedom and equity on the international stage. The eyes of the world will be upon us, and instead of hiding our most vulnerable population, we will use this moment to show the world the horrors these people experience and how radical efforts to reform and rebuild government services can end their suffering.
2028 is not the time to hide our unhoused neighbors, it is the time to tell their stories. I believe the changes I outlined in my earlier responses can solve the humanitarian crisis of homelessness and the Olympics will be our moment to show the progress we have made so far and what must be done next to house the 3,500+ people needlessly suffering on our streets and in their cars.
14. The city has been actively courting defense industry contractors to establish business in Long Beach, while many residents have been vocally opposed to the strategy of reliance on that industry on moral grounds. Where do you stand on this issue?
I am one of those residents who have been vocal in my opposition to courting the digital gunrunners and war profiteers who have stained the moral soul of our great City of Long Beach. In short, “Space Beach” is a lie and a hoax foisted upon us by the Military Industrial Complex, a system that poses the gravest of threats to the safety of the human race and our planet.
The term “Space Beach” dishonors the legacy of leaders like John Fitzgerald Kennedy who had the bravery to turn our weapons of destruction into vehicles of exploration and scientific discovery. Since his murder, leaders like JFK are few and far between. As mayor, I would invoke his spirit and fight against the warmongers and war profiteers, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
15. Residents in West, Central and North Long Beach suffer from poor air quality and less green space than in other areas of the city, contributing to a shorter lifespan on average in those areas. What are some ways Long Beach can close this gap and improve the quality of life in West, Central and North Long Beach?
I live in North Long Beach and experience the poor air quality and lack of access to safe, well-maintained parks every day. For too long, the City of Long Beach has prioritized industrial growth over the health of its residents.
We need to enact more stringent safeguards on local polluters and hold companies whose operations cause negative impact on the health of our neighbors to account. We need to ensure that the resources allocated to creating and maintaining parks and green spaces are distributed evenly across all neighborhoods in Long Beach.
