Optimism, as usual: Mayor touts progress, opportunity in Long Beach State of the City address

“You can win, so long as you keep your head to the sky,” sang the youth chorus / drum line that opened Mayor Rex Richardson’s annual State of the City address Tuesday night. “Be optimistic!”

You couldn’t ask for a more apt opener, as Richardson unfailingly touts the LBC as strong and getting stronger, regardless of how much more nuanced the reality is. 

In case you missed it, here are a few highlights…and lowlights:

New Kids in Town

• The State of the City was held on the eve of the groundbreaking ceremony for construction of the Long Beach Bowl, a waterfront amphitheater that will hold around 11,000 people. Scheduled for completion in June, Richardson noted that the Bowl is slated for 25 events in its first year of operation, after which it will host upwards of 40 per year.
• Iconic swimwear brand Speedo will relocate its North American headquarters to Long Beach, a choice informed by the fact that Long Beach will play host to 11 events during the 2028 Summer Olympics, the majority of which are aquatic.
• Joining Greece and Denmark in selecting Long Beach for the location of their respective Olympic National Hospitality Houses is Ireland, which promises a wide variety of cultural programming, events, and live entertainment right on Pine Ave.
• Much ado was made about Marathon Burger opening a Pine Ave. location come March. But even for those who do eat red meat, no doubt some want nothing to do with anything related to Snoop Dogg since he chose to perform at an event celebrating Trump’s inauguration last year.
• This summer will see the debut of a Long Beach pro baseball team — though not one associated with Major League Baseball; instead, the team will play in the independent, 11-team Pioneer Baseball League. The name, though, has been a cause of confusion. First Richardson teased the audience with three choices on which the public voted last year: the Parrots, the Regulators, and the Coast. The audience’s clear favorite was the Regulators (a reference to team co-owner and Long Beach native Warren G’s song “Regulate”), while the least favorite was the Coast. The video segment that followed revealed that fans chose “the Coast,” but then Warren G said something to the effect that the team would be called both the Coast and the Regulators. After the video, Richardson said the same thing: “It’s the Long Beach Coast, and the Long Beach Regulators.” The first question I was asked after the event was, “Did you understand what he meant about the team name?” Everyone I queried was similarly confused — including a member of the mayor’s own staff, who had been asked the same question by others. The Long Beach Post got clarification from a team spokesperson: “the Regulators name ‘will appear through select in-ballpark experiences, special activations, creative storytelling and limited merchandise drops.”’ Really? If y’all wanted to call the team “the Regulators,” why have a fan vote? It’s a way better name than “the Coast,” for fuck’s sake.

Most Unrealistically Optimistic Goal
Well, nothing could compete with the ludicrous wish Richardson made last year: “to position Long Beach as the coastal live music capital of the world.” Uh-huh. But this year’s winner has almost as little chance of coming true: “to achieve our goal of ending homelessness [by] 2030.” A “critical step” down this path, he said, is the Youth Shelter and Navigation Center, which provides not only temporary housing but mental-health and vocational support. That’s great (even if it has only 12 beds), and it’s not the only way in which the City is trying to reduce homelessness, but real talk can only be helpful. No homelessness in Long Beach in four years is not real talk.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
“Long Beach has now seen consecutive years of declining years of street homelessness,” Richardson claimed. That’s true — just don’t skip over the word street, because it’s also true that last year, overall homelessness rose 6.5%. That truth he left out.

Richardson strongly tied homelessness to housing affordability and praised Long Beach on that front, too, saying that “among the 14 largest cities in the state, Long Beach has had the third-lowest rent increase over the last three years.” I have no idea whether that’s accurate: we were told someone from the Mayor’s Office would get back to us with supporting data and followed up when they didn’t, but no dice. Whatever the case, something tells me things sound less rosy if we make it a round number like 15 or 20, rather than 14. Who makes a list of the top 14 anything?

Chased Off the Stage, Again
Last year was the first time in the 15+ years I’ve attended State of the City events that protestors disrupted the proceedings. But this year Richardson was chased off not once, but twice. The first came 10 minutes into his speech, when a pair of men stood up and yelled, “Rex, when are you going to protect Black workers?” Twenty minutes later, a group of about 10 people began chants of “ICE out of Long Beach!” Richardson again departed as the group was ushered out. Near the end of his speech more protestors took up the same chant, this time also exhorting Long Beach officials to “do more” to resist, but Richardson refused to depart for a third time. (Prediction for 2027: From now on, people will always see the State of the City as an opportunity to voice their grievances in front of a captive audience. This is the new normal.)

Solidarity
While I don’t know whether Rex is somehow not properly protecting Black workers, interrupting his speech to protest ICE seemed inapt, as both he and the city council have been unequivocal in their denunciation of ICE under the Trump administration. And once he returned to the stage, Richardson passionately reiterated that position: 

These are serious times we’re living through, and we get it. What we shouldn’t be doing is [the Trump administration’s] job for them by dividing ourselves: we should be sticking together, [and] that’s what we should be doing this minute. That’s how Long Beach makes it through. […] Let me say this directly and unequivocally clear: ICE does not belong in our city, ICE does not belong in our hotels, ICE does not belong in our schools, not in our places of worship, not in our places of work, not…in…Long…Beach…period!” 

He noted that in 2018 the city council approved the Long Beach Values Act, which codified various ways in which the City would resist onerous enforcement of federal immigration law; and that the Act was strengthened last year, “ensuring that no City resources are used to aid ICE, and holding all City departments and contractors to the very same standard [so that] residents can trust and access City services, send their children to school and [go to] work, making sure they can engage their [local] government without fear.”

Hot Air?
In acknowledging the fact that for generations certain areas of Long Beach have been disproportionately affected by Port of Long Beach emissions (“For families in West Long Beach, air quality isn’t an abstract issue: it’s asthma inhalers, it’s missed school days”), he touted last year’s “historic partnership, a new standard and enforceable agreement between the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and the South Coast Air Quality Management District” as a pathway to “faster zero-emission infrastructure [and] cleaner air for surrounding frontline communities.” But nonprofit, nonpartisan news org CalMatters urged the SCAQMD to vote against “the so-called cooperative agreement” on the grounds that “impacted community members were not meaningfully included” in the process of crafting the agreement, which “weakens the [D]istrict’s ability to reduce emissions and it creates a dangerous precedent.” CalMatters noted that the agreement “includes a five-year ban on rulemaking. That handcuffs South Coast Air Quality Management District, effectively blocking the agency’s authority to address port pollution when the South Coast Air Basin can least afford a delay.”

Most Unsurprising Omission
Regarding the LBPD, Richardson declared that “professionalism and respect for human life […] should not be the exception: this should be our standard.” Asserting that this is the standard, he cited declining crime rates and the fact that 2025 was the first year ever without a single officer-involved shooting. Something he didn’t say was that going into 2025, complaints of officer misconduct had risen by over 10% each year since 2021. (Stats on 2025 will be released this spring.) It’s a subject he and the city council have consistently refused to comment on or (according to City records) ask questions about, just as they refused to comment on a 29% jump in use-of-force incidents between 2023 and 2024. So much for what he said next: “We’re also committed to transparency.”