A taxing issue?
For the last two decades, we have worked to make this community safer, healthier and a better place to raise a family and open a business. Our progress as a city is only possible as a result of contributions from countless community leaders, educators, residents and business leaders that have come together to make our city stronger.
Our city is facing two pressing challenges. How we address these challenges will determine the kind of city we leave to future generations.
The first challenge is the $2.8 billion in unfunded infrastructure needs. While the City currently spends more than $65 million a year on capital infrastructure, it simply is not enough to meet our needs. Many of our streets, sidewalks and alleys are in desperate need of repair. We also have a tremendous need to upgrade city water systems for conservation and storm drain systems for neighborhood protection and water quality. Every year we fail to make needed investments, the cost to upgrade our public infrastructure increases.
Our second challenge is the need to hire additional police to combat increasing crime rates that are climbing across the state and to restore fire staffing to maintain 9-1-1 paramedic response times at stations across the city.
Voters are aware of the significant reductions the City of Long Beach has made in the last decade, including reforming pensions to save the City more than $250 million over 10 years, eliminating more than 700 city positions, including 200 police officers, and making government more efficient.
Therefore, we are asking you join us in supporting Measures A and B, which is a temporary one-cent sales tax increase on this June’s ballot. The ten-year, temporary revenue measure would decrease to half a cent after six years and sunset after 10 years.
This additional revenue will provide us with a historic opportunity to make repairs to our city’s streets, sidewalks and water systems, and to ensure we protect our 9-1-1 response times and first responders. The sales tax is shared by everyone, including visitors to our city.
In addition, we ask you to support Measure B on the same ballot. Measure B would create a new rainy-day reserve fund. This new fund would place the first 1 percent of any new revenue in a reserve fund that would provide long-term financial stability for the city and protect service levels in a prolonged recession.
Robert Garcia
Mayor
Long Beach
As of Jan. 1, 2016, Chicago had the highest sales-tax rate of any city in the country, at 10.25 percent. Long Beach could soon match Chicago for that dubious honor, however.
With a current rate of 9 percent, our mayor and city council claim they need an increase to 10 percent in order to hire more police [and] firefighters, and to fix long-neglected infrastructure.
I always thought public safety and infrastructure were supposed to be the first priority of city government. Long Beach has it backwards though. They spend well over $200 million on a new civic center and soon thereafter are asking residents for a sales-tax increase. Of course they claim it’s for public safety and infrastructure (although they can actually spend it on anything they want). Who’s going to vote for a new tax to build an unneeded new city hall and a smaller main library than we currently have?
If that’s not bad enough, the City is seriously considering spending upwards of $100 million on a new Belmont Plaza swimming pool. Yes, that’s $100 million for a pool! Yet, when the City had a chance to buy the former Boy Scout Park in north Long Beach, they couldn’t come up with $4 million!
These are just two of the numerous ways this city government wastes our tax money— the list could go on and on. Just look at a few city council agendas sometime and see all the money spent on “consultants.”
An LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority ballot measure this November would add another half-cent sales tax for 40 years and extend the Measure R half-cent sales tax by 18 years. (Because the current Proposition 30 quarter-percent sales-tax increase expires at the end of 2016, the net increase would be a quarter percent.)
That would make our sales tax rate 10.25 percent, along with the cities of La Mirada, Pico Rivera and South Gate, which already have a 10-percent sales tax.
Richard Gutmann
Long Beach
