Staffing shortages. Pandemic economic hangover. A homelessness emergency. A structural budget shortfall. These are just a few of Long Beach’s ongoing struggles.
But every January, regardless of the crises the city is facing, the mayor of Long Beach says the state of the city is strong. Bob Foster did so every year. Then Robert Garcia. Now Rex Richardson has picked up the habit. “The state of the city is strong,” he proclaimed at the beginning of his State of the City address on Jan. 9, the phrase spelled out in big block letters behind him: THE STATE OF THE CITY IS STRONG.
Richardson spent most of the next 50 minutes selling the idea that this is true, continuing the tradition of making the annual event more pep rally than frank appraisal. But however much is good in Long Beach, it may be what Richardson glossed over that is most telling.
Noting that last January the City of Long Beach “announced a local state of emergency making homelessness our top priority,” most of what Richardson said on the subject was either in praise of the city’s accomplishments in 2023 (adding 200 shelter beds, expanded outreach, moving 700 families into permanent housing) or purely aspirational. What Richardson completely neglected to address was the fact that, by the city’s own count, homelessness increased 4.6% between 2022 and 2023, continuing a trend of year-over-year increases that goes back to 2017 (this after the city declared a homelessness “state of emergency” in 2016) — imbuing his promise that “We’ll continue to build on our momentum” with unintended irony.
While Richardson focused on the effectiveness of expanded outreach to get people off the streets (including a $5 million grant from the State of California earmarked for that purpose), he provided little else in the way of specifics. And though he celebrated the number of affordable-housing projects both recently completed and in the pipeline (noting that the timeline for obtaining approval for such has been compressed to 60–90 days), when speaking to the Press-Telegram in August he was blunt about the financial reality on this front: “‘We need $30, $40, $50 million to really get to where we need to on affordable housing — that’s not in this budget. We don’t have dedicated revenue for that.’”
Although Richardson spent a significant portion of his address selling the audience on the robustness of the local economy (e.g., a recent Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation designation as “the most business-friendly city in L.A. County”; JetZero’s commitment to spend a $250 million government grant in Long Beach and bring 500 new jobs over the next five years), he made at least general acknowledgement of challenges on this front. “We have tough financial realities ahead that we need to confront,” he said. “State and local deficits and the ending of federal recovery dollars add urgency behind our revenue-growth strategy.”
But once again the above-referenced Press-Telegram article (which is even posted on the mayor’s webpage) better reflects the magnitude of the problem:
[… E]ven with the upcoming fiscal year’s structural shortfall squared away, Long Beach is still grappling with projected long-term deficits through the 2027 fiscal year — with a $38.6 million general fund shortfall combined anticipated during that time.
“We’re still in a structural shortfall,” [City Manager Tom] Modica said. “We are relying on one-time dollars this year and next year — we believe — but we need to solve that structurally going forward.”
And while Richardson did acknowledge that “many [local businesses] are still grappling with lingering effects of the pandemic and trying to bring more customers in while dealing with incidents like vandalism” and referred to the City’s “Roadmap to Downtown Recovery,” he did not explicitly acknowledge any other problems, such as the numerous downtown storefronts in prime retail locations such as Pine Avenue that have been vacant since even before the pandemic.
Speaking of staffing shortfalls plaguing numerous City of Long Beach departments and noting that “it takes seven months — and in some cases up to a year — to hire someone in our City,” Richardson praised a 2023 pilot program that has shortened some of those windows to under 90 days. And though he did call on the city council “to begin the process of presenting a charter amendment to the voters of Long Beach this November that will modernize our City’s hiring system reducing the time it takes to fill vacant positions [by] creating a single, unified City department to manage all hiring.”
But Richardson did not admit to just how bad things are. According to the Long Beach Post, over 20% of city positions were unfilled as of August 2023, a situation that the city itself characterized as “significant challenges” when issuing a notice for “potential delays in refuse collection” downtown. That same month, the Long Beach Police Department noted that by the end of 2023 they might be 24% understaffed; and since then Long Beach has attracted major media coverage for “rising downtown crime rates.”
On Jan. 9, Richardson spent so much more time speaking of good things to come (a new Hard Rock Hotel in 2027, hosting Olympic events in 2028, making the General Fund independent of oil revenue by 2030) than owning the bad things here now that it might have been more accurate to call his address “The Future State of the City (we hope).”
To be sure, the state of Long Beach at the start of 2024 is nowhere near as stout as the mayor made it seem.