+

-

UPDATE 3:00pm | The motion to consider reducing the number of times that the Long Beach City Council meets per month has been withdrawn from tonight's agenda, according to an e-mail notice from the Office of City Clerk Larry Herrera.

Joseph Toney, Administrative Assistant to 3rd District Councilmember Gary DeLong, told the LBPOST.com this afternoon that currently there is no indication that the motion will resurface at a later date. DeLong introduced the motion about one week ago. Toney said he was not given a reason as to why the motion was pulled.

7:00am | The City Council tonight will consider a move to reduce the number of monthly public Council meetings. If passed, the move will also reduce the public's input and oversight of City Council actions, move even more of the city legislative process behind closed doors, and shift Long Beach into a political spectrum more aligned with much smaller cities.
��
As proposed by Councilmembers Robert Garcia, Suja Lowenthal and Gary DeLong, the motion, if passed, would reduce the number of monthly Council meetings to two per month. The Council currently meets three times a month--every Tuesday at 5 p.m. except for the last Tuesday of the month.
��
The current proposal seeks to limit the Council meetings to the first and third Tuesday of each month.
��
The three Councilmembers that proposed the cut said that the reduced meeting schedule would save money, allow Councilmembers more time to be in their communities, and provide more hours when Councilmembers can be reached by their constituents.
��
Councilmember Gerrie Schipske has expressed vehement opposition to the proposal, warning that "Two meetings a month will mean more decisions get made behind the scenes and public involvement will be squashed because after all 'we have a very full agenda with only meeting two times a month...so hurry along.' The people of our city are struggling financially and what is being proposed is an insult to every resident who would gladly change places with nine city councilmembers and work full time."
��
Councilmember Schipske may have a point.
��
In fact, most of the arguments for cutting an additional meeting don't seem to hold up to scrutiny.
��
Councilmembers Garcia and DeLong post their schedules online and neither seems to be drowning in meetings with constituents after 5 p.m. on any day of the week. Their schedules for the month of June reveal that neither listed any evening meetings with individual constituents on any days of the week beyond such things as neighborhood association meetings, speaking engagements, community events or function dinners.
��
Councilmember Lowenthal does not publish her calendar.
��
Meetings with neighborhood associations and such no doubt entail mixing with constituents, however, the point is that two of the three arguments put forth by the proponents of the motion imply that there is a great demand and need to free up that one Tuesday a month to expand their constituent outreach.
��
Councilmember Garcia's and Delong's calenders do not support this. In fact, their calendars suggest that they have ample time on non-Council meeting days to hold additional meetings with their constituents.
��
The argument for creating more available time for constituents to reach the Councilmembers also does not make sense when you consider that the average citizen would not typically be able to get hold of Councilmembers in the evening hours anyway. Keep in mind that Council meetings are held at 5 p.m., when most City Hall offices, including those of the Councilmembers, are not open.
��
In other words, the Councilmembers proposing the cuts are currently not meeting with individual constituents on other days of the week during the time the Council meetings are held, there appears to be no additional demand to do so and there is no way for the public to reach out to them during the normal Council meeting time even if they were free.���
��
As additional justification for this move, the Garcia, Lowenthal and DeLong motion points to a 2003 finding by city staff that moving to a twice-monthly council schedule would save $3,120 a month, or just over $37,000 a year.
��
However, the 2003 staff report--used at the time to justify reducing the number of council meetings from four a month to the current three a month and attached to the current proposal--did not itemize how the $3,120 savings would be achieved.
��
The proposal before the current Council on Tuesday also does not specify how the savings would be achieved--it merely reiterates the 2003 city staff findings and does not include the 2003 report's separate attachments that did break down how the $3,120 amount was deduced.
��
However, according to City Clerk Larry Herrera who helped put the 2003 report together, the estimate of $3,120 in savings per cut Council meeting is no longer valid because the way that City Council meetings are handled is now much different than it was in 2003. For example, staff from his office no longer use overtime to cover their required attendance at the meetings. And, other than a few technical staff members to run equipment, the remainder of the city employees required to be at each Council meeting are all salaried employees like the City Manager or City Attorney and do not collect overtime.
��
However, Herrera added that the city does pay about $1,000 per meeting for an interpreter service to simulcast the Council's live TV and online broadcast in Spanish.
��
A tangential argument made about reducing the number of Council meetings is that, if passed, the reduced schedule would only slightly increase the length of the two meetings per month.
��
However, the past 12 City Council meetings consumed just under 45 hours and 40 minutes, an average of nearly 3 hours and 50 minutes per meeting, or, 11 hours and 30 minutes per month for three meetings. Even acknowledging that some perfunctory business conducted during the meetings would not have to be repeated if the third meetings' business were moved into the remaining two meetings, a switch to a twice-monthly schedule would still require at least an additional hour and a half per meeting--meaning that the two monthly meetings would average around 5 hours and 20 minutes.
��
In addition, a search of city council schedules for all the communities surrounding Long Beach, as well as the California and national cities that bracket Long Beach in population, shows that a twice-monthly council schedule would align Long Beach's legislative process with smaller rather than larger cities.
��
The city councils for the communities surrounding Long Beach all meet twice a month, except for the city of Compton's council, which meets three times a month. However, these cities are all much smaller than Long Beach. These communities include: Artesia, Bellflower, Carson, Cerritos, Cypress, Downey, Hawaiian Gardens, Lakewood, Los Alamitos, Paramount, Seal Beach, and Signal Hill.
��
However, the four largest cities in California--Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and San Francisco--all meet at least once a week with the Los Angeles City Council meeting up to three times per week. Fresno, the fifth largest city in the state by population, theoretically meets every week, though they hold their meetings on Thursday and cancel any meeting in a week with a federal holiday. When you add in four seasonal holidays and nine meetings canceled due to summer and winter recesses, on average, the Fresno City Council holds 3.5 meetings per month.
��
Long Beach, which holds three city council meetings a month, is the sixth largest city in the state.
��
The seventh largest California city, Sacramento, also has their city council meet every week, except for two-week summer and winter recesses. The council for city number eight, Oakland, meets three times a month.
��
It is not until you get to city number nine, Santa Ana, with roughly 130,000 less people than Long Beach, that you find a city council in California that meets only twice a week. Number 10, Anaheim, with roughly 135,000 less residents than Long Beach, also has a two-times per month city council schedule.
��
In fact, only eight of the 18 cities nationwide having populations within 100,000 of Long Beach (both above and below), have twice-a-month city council schedules. The other ten have councils with either three times a month or every week schedules.
��
Long Beach has often been called "the big city with the small town attitude," but, really, is this the point we have reached in Long Beach? Where the City Council takes this saying literally? Where the City Council actually wants to make Long Beach function like a small town?
��
And all without a single voter's input.
��
The question to ponder is, if you owned a company, would you allow your employees to set their own work schedule?
��
This is exactly the situation the residents of Long Beach find themselves in.
��
Each of the current City Councilmembers were elected fully aware that they would be required to attend City Council meetings three times a month.
��
For her part, Councilmember Schipske has said she will introduce a City Charter amendment that will call for a 50 percent cut in the part-time salaries of all nine Councilmembers and the full-time salary of the mayor if the meeting reduction is passed.
��
"When the council and mayor's salaries were set in 1988, they were set based upon four council meetings a month. Sometime around 2004, the Council reduced the meetings to three and now they want to reduce it to two. So, I am proposing that the voters get to vote on reducing the salaries of the mayor and city council commensurate to the 50 percent reduction in public meetings," said Schipske on her personal blog last week.
��
Voters in Councilmembers Garcia, Lowenthal and DeLong's districts should let their respective Councilmember know before Tuesday's 5 p.m. meeting that their proposal to cut the number of public Council meetings is wrong. A phone call or an email would suffice.
��
Voters in other Council districts should tell their Councilmembers to oppose this myopically bad idea, as well.
��
The job of the City Council is to represent the people. The main public manifestation of this representation is at the City Council meetings. As Council member Schipske said, it is an insult to the residents of Long Beach that anyone on the Council should vote to minimize that representation or their workload.
��
And, if this motion passes, let's hope that voters take note of which Council members voted yes, and remind these elected officials come the next election day that the citizens of Long Beach want Council members that can handle the heat in the kitchen and at least show up to work three times a month.
�

Follow CityBeat on Facebook and Twitter.

Click here to read our policy on covering the Long Beach City Council.

Comments

Click Here to Join the Discussion on this Story

29 Comments so far.

Display Name :
E-mail Address :
Comment :