Recommendation to declare ordinance approving and adopting the official budget of the City of Long Beach for the Fiscal Year 2018-2019, creating and establishing the funds of the Municipal Government of the City of Long Beach and appropriating money to and authorizing expenditures from said funds for said fiscal year; declaring the urgency thereof, and providing that this ordinance shall take effect at 12:01 a.m. on October 1, 2018, read and adopted as read.  (Ordinance No. ORD-18-0023).  (A-17)
Motion carries. At 23, please. Report from Financial Management Recommendation to declare ordinance approving and adopting the official budget of the City of Long Beach for the fiscal year 2018 2019. Creating and establishing the funds of the municipal government of the City of Long Beach and appropriating money to and authorizing expenditures from said funds for said fiscal year, declaring the urgency thereof and providing that this ordinance shall take effect on October one, 2018. Read and adopt it as read. Any public comment on this? Please come forward. Are you going to address on file? If you recall last week at the suggestion of a generally pretty reliable consultant, I use Homer Simpson. I had to pass it along. The suggestion that we consider putting a framework on top of the Marina Vista. A tennis court, put solar panels there and even suggested a long boathouse lane there would be an opportunity for that. But then Homer got back to me and said he may have been a little over optimistic, although there's still an opportunity. And this is what he suggested we take a look at. What's the key to solar panels? Success is generating enough electricity to offset offset the use of that electricity. Around there. There are currently there's very little use of electricity around Marina Vista Park. However, however, Holmer suggested taking a look at who is paying for the streetlights along there. All right. Who is paying for the little bit of electricity used in the restroom? Who is paying the city for? Who's paying the electric bill? Fire station 14. And the thinking is that if you add those up there, it might be well justified to put in. The solar panel on the top of that framework of the tennis court. Again, somebody's got to be paying the bill at the fire station. Somebody has got to be paying whatever streetlights are there. So let's add somebody that's not me, but somebody that's really good at math. Put a pencil to the figures and see how it works out in a cell. Do what hopefully will be done with the third district counsel's office. Get a new roof and have a new. Roof paid for by the solar paneling of that. Thank you. Thank you. Next item, please. You're not excited. Apologize. All right. Hostile once again. Information on file. Wow. $3 billion budget and it's still not enough. I mean, how much money does the family actually need? Come on, guys. I have six parcel taxes on my house, Mr. Richardson. I don't need a seven. And I don't need an eighth possibly coming from L.A. County on this phony water runoff tax, 2.5 cents per square foot of hard surface. What a joke. And then there's another tax that wants to come down from Sacramento. Yeah, that's really funny. You're laughing. You know, you guys don't pay much attention. It's pretty rude, but that's the. That's your style. So no matter how much money we get, the city has so many more sources of income than most cities. And in the state of California, a port, an airport, their own water, gas. It's amazing. And it's still not enough money. And any time you need more money, you raise it. We pay the highest utility user tax on our utilities. Doesn't seem to bother anybody up here. Nothing bothers you from the state. We you know, you're going to support a gas tax that's putting a real burden on people of lower middle. I mean, extremely low or no income. I mean, people living in their cars that can barely make it or having to pay outrageous prices for gas. And you think that's funny? It's not. It's really tragic. You have these motorhomes that seem barely to run. You know, they're having to pay an exorbitant price for fuel, have a place to live. But, you know, you just keep passing everything that like I said, it's amazing how many times you guys vote no. I'd like to know a percentage. It's got to be less than 1% of the time. And most of this doesn't benefit residents. The city is run by and for public employees, not us. All you want us is to pay more taxes, and you seem to do that. And also, one thing I would like to you know, I'm very sorry about, you know, Captain role in his tragic passing. But I also think he should say some words for the other eight or nine or ten fire personnel and residents that perished in the fires in northern California. That was a tragedy also. So I think you should pay homage to all the people that passed away. They were all our heroes, too. So like I say, you know, I've been trying to do this for a lot of years. I'm tired of it. You know, I started out being at 50% on the ballot measures. If I was a baseball player, I'd be making millions. Now I'm hitting to 50. I guess I'm down the ballot almost being cut. Like I said, there's never enough money for the family. Thank you. Next speaker, please. I can't in good conscience recommend a vote approving this budget. I've seen the way you've spent the last year's budget. I've seen the amounts of money that go to pay for elections that we have to have conducted by the county. Because for some reason, the people in the city of Long Beach didn't vote enough or high enough percentage didn't vote. So now the county has to run these elections and we have to pay them to do it for us. We have to pay them to send out the mailers with the pros and the cons. When they get around to it. And a lot of residents didn't get them at all. We have to pay for the lawyers. To get engaged with the people who write the can arguments. They engage outside counsel so that the people writing these arguments. Are already behind the eight ball. They just can't even survive. They're looking at the possibility of having to pay your legal fees if they lose. So they always end up caving whether or not they're offered commissions or not. It's my understanding that the budget includes $250,000 for legal expenses for illegal aliens. I'm not going to debate the merits of that. What I'm going to ask for is $250,000 for the citizens to defend themselves against the city. That I think is more than fair. We are citizens. We're not illegal aliens. We do vote. Those of us who come down here do. The budget. I will not approve because of the already admitted $100,000 that will be spent on informational fliers that will be sent to, as Joe has brought to our attention. Only four or seven of the voters. The state of the animal shelter is appalling. You can groan. The animals are groaning. I'm groaning. I can't stand to listen to this. This is really unbelievable. One veterinarian is what the auditor recommends. One. How much could that cost? A quarter of a million. You know what? If you give me the legal fund, I'll give it back. They can have it for the animal shelter. You need to learn how to spend your money more wisely before you'll get any support from this citizen. Thank you. Next speaker. Hi, Karen. Race side resident of District one. Work in District. Two. I want to commend the City Council for the amazing job that they did on the budget preparation and the community meetings. I don't know where these other people were in, why they don't understand what the budget pays for. It pays for our city services. And all the city employees that I work with and the city council have been very conscientious and spent hours preparing this budget. It's the most fair and equitable budget I've seen from the city in a long time. I think we're moving in a very positive direction, and I want to commend you for the work you did. The only thing that I would like to see is that we start the process earlier so I could not stay and a lot of my friends could not stay till 2 to 3 in the morning. And Stacy, you shouldn't have had to either. We felt for you. So keep up the good work on the budget preparation. And the only thing I would suggest started earlier. And do something so that people can understand. What their taxes paid for. Because the roads, the sewer, the water. That's what our taxes paid for. And I think the city does a fine job of doing those services. Thank you very much. Thank you. No, no. I want to thank the previous speaker for raising an issue that the previous two speakers. Exactly why do citizens not trust your budgets? It's because one of the reasons is that the budget doesn't really tell you what services you're getting. It says instead what departments are going to get, how much money. It doesn't say anything about, in quantitative comparative terms, how the departments are performing. And the more information technology is out there, the less relevant information. Over the past few years, the city has provided to residents on the website to be able to see how much is each dollar getting. In the way of each kind of service. So you, the residents can't compare and you cannot even make reasonable tradeoffs as to should we have, for example, more people in public works doing tree work as versus street sweeping. So that is a real problem. The. Previous speaker. Praised your efforts to try to understand from this budget what's actually going on. But the problem is that we're not there. The budget does not tell you. Another reason, though, that people do not trust your spending relates to the unfortunate incident event that we are commemorating today. 911. If you recall what you actually saw on TV screens, it wasn't terrorists. It was planes. It was planes crashing into an iconic building. It was a display of. All. That was wrong with mid-20th century corporate vanity. The notion that you take clerical and information workers and stuffed them all together in a vulnerable, congested, high cost, high energy consuming central building. The lesson of 911 was that we were able to survive the loss of all those information workers because we had distributed networking, and that was already back in 2001. Things are much better than that now. Was this lesson applied for the housing of Long Beach City employees? Absolutely not. The thought was we just got to have another central tower, demolish this one and put up another one. When we learn the lessons of history and budget accordingly, people may have a little better confidence in your decisions. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. I mean, what public figures. I should thank you both, Mayor. I just wanted to thank the many, many, many, many members of the community who came out to community budget meetings, who also came down to City Hall for budget oversight committee meetings. I want to thank my two colleagues on budget oversight. I know we had a lot of tough decisions to make, and I really appreciate all the work that went into knowing and understanding what that 500 pages entailed and the details of it over weeks and weeks. And then for our students that are here today. We're always open to any feedback that you have. Our budget is completely online, as are our expenditures on an annual basis, and so they make for great class projects. I know back when I was a grad student in oh five. I used city budgets and if there's any other questions I can answer for you. I'm always happy to do so. So I urge my colleagues support of this important item to pass a. $3 billion budget with a B. Thank you very much. Would you please cast your vote?