Community leaders say BKBIA board's dissolution to have no real impact

Cory Bilicko:
Managing Editor
The Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association’s (BKBIA) mayoral-appointed advisory board is now non-existent, since the Long Beach City Council voted to eliminate it during its last meeting. However, the effects of this decision may also be non-existent, according to Blair Cohn, executive director of the BKBIA.

“That was a redundant ‘commission’ set up prior to the BKBIA being formed and was never dissolved with the formation of the BKBIA,” Cohn wrote in an emailed response to the Signal Tribune on Tuesday. “The commission was rediscovered when Mayor [Robert] Garcia’s office set out to resurrect all commissions and get people involved.”
In a phone interview later, Cohn explained that the redundancy was basically an oversight.
“I guess what you’d call it is a glitch,” Cohn said. “So, way back, this is when [former 8th District Long Beach City Councilmember] Jeff Kellogg was in office, and when there was talk of trying to organize the area, before the BID (business-improvement district) was put together, there was a commission [to get it] started. Since Jeff could not appoint members, he had the mayor do it as a formal commission, like [the mayor] does any commission round.”
Cohn said that soon after that commission was appointed, the actual BID was formed, leaving the commission to sit “on the shelf.”
“It was really not functioning because the BIA (business-improvement association) does its thing,” he said. “It’s self-governed and has contracts with the City and so on and so on. So, when [current Long Beach Mayor Robert] Garcia came in and wanted to bring all the commissions back, he went through everything— every single one of them— and they found this one.”
Cohn said the mayor’s office then contacted him about that commission but he didn’t know what it was. He said he later found out that there had been an attempt around 2007 to dismantle it but somehow that effort was unsuccessful.
“So, what they’ve just done is say, ‘We’re going to eliminate this commission and let the BIA do its thing,'” Cohn said. “It’s a long story for a small thing, but that’s it in a nutshell.”
Cohn, who is the BKBIA’s fourth executive director, explained that, in the late 1980s, there had indeed been members appointed to the commission but they had not been utilized.
“If anything, they may have been advisors, and those same people may have become board members later to the BIA, when the association was formed,” he said, adding that it was just an organized group that later evolved into an actual BID in 1993.
Eighth District Long Beach City Councilmember Al Austin, whose district encompasses Bixby Knolls, made the announcement about the commission’s dissolution in his June 1 newsletter.
“The City Council will conduct the first reading of an ordinance that would eliminate the Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association’s mayoral-appointed advisory board, bringing its organizational structure in line with that of the rest of the city’s business improvement districts,” he wrote.
Jonathan Kraus, Austin’s chief of staff, characterized the action taken by the city council as “ministerial in nature.”
“It basically just brought the municipal code current with the practice that is in place for years in that the board of the Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association is selected as specified in the bylaws of the BKBIA,” Kraus said in a phone interview Wednesday.
Kraus added that Mayor Garcia had requested the change to the ordinance and that Austin had made the motion. Kraus explained that state law requires that BIDs have an advisory board that is appointed by the city council.
“For most advisory boards in Long Beach, it’s stated that it’s the business-improvement district board that’s selected as per the bylaws of that association,” Kraus said. “When the ordinance for the BKBIA was created in 1989, it specified that it would be a mayoral-appointed advisory board. In reality, for many years, the mayor would just appoint whoever was selected by the business association on that board. So, it was kind of a redundancy. The ordinance basically brings it into how it’s actually been practiced in reality and how all of the other associations in the city are formatted, just to specify that the board of the association serves as the advisory board.”