The City of Long Beach officially opened to the public its new civic center July 29, during an event that included remarks from current and former officials affiliated with the $520-million project, as well as tours of the new facilities, which will house city hall, council chambers and the port’s administration building.
The new center is the culmination of five years of negotiation and planning, after the city council in 2014 approved a public-private partnership (P3) with Plenary-Edgemoor Civic Partners to design, construct, fund, operate and maintain the complex for the next four decades.
Although the Port of Long Beach will now be headquartered in the new plaza– moving from its interim location near the airport– it financed its new building independently with revenue bonds, according to city officials.
The public sections of the center will include a new main library, which is scheduled to open Sept. 21, as well as a revamped Lincoln Park.
Officials indicate that the private-development aspect of the center will include transit-oriented mixed-used developments, high-rise condos and retail.
“The grand opening of this civic center is truly a testament to our collective ability to work together to achieve something that has never been done before in municipal government,” said Public Works Director Craig Beck, to the audience, “and that is this P3 project that we’re here to celebrate.”
Beck added that the project yielded 6,000 union jobs.
“That was 1.6 million work hours to help construct these beautiful facilities,” Beck said. “12.6 million pounds of steel went into the construction of these buildings, which is about the same [as what] it took to build the Eiffel Tower.”
He also said 105,000 tons of concrete were poured, which is analogous to the weight of about 100 cargo container cranes at the port.
“And we have a very green facility,” Beck said. “The solar arrays that were built generate 930 kilowatts of power. That’s enough to charge everyone’s cell phone in this audience for a year.”
Calling the civic center “the new home for democracy in Long Beach,” Mayor Robert Garcia told the crowd that Monday’s event was a celebration of “our future together as a city.”
“We’re all aware that this new City Hall, our port headquarters, our library, the buildings that we are constructing here– they’re not just made of steel and glass,” Garcia said. “What really drives them are the people inside.”
The mayor then called for applause for the thousands of employees who work for the City and who will be occupying the buildings. Those workers had begun moving into the new civic center a few days earlier.
Garcia also introduced his predecessor and the namesake of the new council chambers– Bob Foster– however, problems with various microphones began to occur as Foster addressed the crowd, and the remainder of the event was riddled with technical issues, as City staff unsuccessfully attempted to find a mic that worked. The microphone problem became the source of amusement among city officials, who continued the event by addressing the crowd without technical amplification. Garcia remarked that the issue would not ruin the occasion, and the mood among the officials who spoke was indeed positive and celebratory.
However, some community organizations are not happy about the new civic center, for various reasons.
Ian Patton, executive director of the Long Beach Reform Coalition (LBRC), an umbrella organization under which numerous community groups united last year to defeat the Measure BBB term-limit extensions proposed by the current city council, was critical of how Long Beach officials have handled the project.
“Our mandate is transparency, and the main issue with doing a project like this as a public-private partnership, aside from the highly unusual fact that the people of Long Beach won’t actually own their own city hall for the next 40 years, is the lack of transparency,” Patton said. “A traditional major public-works project bond measure would have had full transparency baked in, as legally required, for the benefit of the voters. Instead, a private consortium has formed an LLC and the City and the port have signed a massive 700-plus page contract with it. The financing portion of the project is very opaque, with no elucidation, that I can tell, regarding the profit margin of the private parties, nor even the interest rate being paid for the multi-hundred-million-dollar commercial loans from Allianz and Sumitomo banks.”
Patton added that he questions the long-term success of the project, should the new-development portion prove to be less profitable than expected over the decades.
“One also must ask why the City never went through the request-for-proposal process to get bids on a seismic retrofit of the ‘70s-era city hall building just vacated,” he said. “Several experts suggested the cost of doing that could have been for far less than the $200 million claimed by the City at the time that the new civic-center project proposals were being finalized. But this is all water under the bridge now. Going forward, we need to see a lot more transparency on major projects like this. It’s a different mindset. It’s almost like crowd-sourcing. The chance that serious errors get made goes down considerably the more the public, volunteering its effort, can lay eyes on the same things that city bureaucrats can lay eyes on.”
Another vocal critic of the project is the head of one of the organizations in the LBRC– Carlos Ovalle, executive director of People of Long Beach, which formed last year in response to four measures the city council put on the ballot.
The Signal Tribune asked Ovalle if he believes the new civic center was a necessary expense.
“I’m an architect. If no one builds, there is no need for my profession, and I have no way of making a living,” he said. “But I am a citizen first, and I believe in living within our means. I taught that to my children, and I expect every reasonable person to abide by that bit of common sense. In that sense, no, the new civic center was not necessary. It would’ve been far less expensive to upgrade the existing civic center to be structurally sound and energy-efficient. And it would remain ours, instead of having to pay rent for the next 40 years.”
Ovalle added that, although there are instances when a P3 may be advisable, given that there was no need for a new building, that necessity did not exist.
“There were two bids for the P3, but the project went with Clark Construction even though they were not the low bidder, for reasons that I find questionable,” Ovalle said. “Furthermore, there are no safe-bet P3 arrangements. There are many things that can go wrong, leaving the taxpayers holding the bag.”
When asked if he thinks the new civic center will benefit the city’s residents in any way, Ovalle said that, although he is sure it is a “fine building,” he is not convinced it has any redeeming value for the citizens.
“Quite the contrary,” he said. “If the P3 fails, the residents of Long Beach will be left with a huge debt burden. I haven’t visited the new city hall, but, to me, the heart of a government building is the room where the public gets to exercise power, the Greek Demoskratia, the essence of our democracy. In the old city hall, the council chambers were exposed to the public via large glazed surfaces. It may have always had the drapes closed but, to me, the fact that they could draw the curtains was a symbolic openness. Beyond that, the stadium-type seating allowed the public to sit up high, symbolically taking its rightful place over the public servants. All of that is gone in the new council chambers. Now the dais is high, and the public is low– symbolically a reversal of the role from democracy to authoritarianism.”
