Amid budget-related service reductions, is City Hall spending over $10K per year on bottled water?

On July 30, the City of Long Beach held a press conference to address how they propose to address structural budget shortfalls of $85 million over the next two years. Proposed cuts include library hours, police overtime, homeless services, and roughly 200 layoffs.

But as Mayor Rex Richardson, City Manager Tom Modica, and City Budget Manager Rebecca Bernstorff addressed themselves to the hard choices the City must make in order to make ends meet, there was an irony hiding in plain sight. Over the course of the two-hour event, the trio consumed four bottles of water, despite the fact that every drinking fountain in City Hall — including two within 100 feet of where they sat — has a dispenser for refilling canteens. 

What’s the big deal, you ask? Four measly bottles?

Putting aside the fact that bad behavior (like unnecessarily contributing to environmental damage when eco alternatives are easily available) is bad behavior regardless of scale or whether the herd normalizes it, the point here is that every dollar spent in one area is money that can’t be used elsewhere. And while Long Beach leaders are telling us that we’re in dire financial straits and every dollar counts, it seems they may be prioritizing buying bottled water for staff — who could easily get their water from City Hall’s two dozen refill stations — over minimizing service cuts.

How much is the City spending on bottled water? Full disclosure: I don’t know. In response to a previous request for pertinent public records, the City claimed that “we have no reasonable way of searching for those individual purchases, as we do not keep financial records distinguishable by that criteria,” and so “the documents you requested cannot be produced because the City does not use specific vendors to provide these products, nor do we keep financial records that distinguish these products by their accounting sub-object code.”

It’s within the realm of theoretical possibility that every plastic bottle we see staff sucking on at city council (etc.) meetings was bought and brought by the sucking staffer. But maybe it’s something more like this: say that for every 10 onsite employees, City Hall doles out four bottles per day (in other words, each employee consumes two per week). With City Hall open 250 days per year, if we price the water at 10 cents per bottle, we wind up with an approximate expenditure of $10,000 per year.

The actual expenditure may be significantly higher: City Hall is not the only place City employees — over 80% of whom work offsite — consume bottled water while on the clock; presumably City employees average more than 0.4 bottles a day per capita (remember that Richardson, Modica, and Bernstorff went through four in two hours); and while 10 cents per bottle is an approximate price for the cheapest brands bought in bulk, more expensive brands like Fiji — which accounted for two of the four bottles consumed at the budget press conference — can run over $1 apiece even in bulk. 

But put all that aside and say the total expenditure is (“only”) $10,000 per year. Although pay rates vary by position and tenure, if that $10,000 were applied to next year’s budget shortfall rather than to bottled water, it could restore somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 hours of police overtime cuts. Or 200 hours of homeless services. Or lessen a $110,000 cut to the Emergency Communications Division — which the City admits will end up “resulting in adverse impacts on training and recruitment efforts” — by 9%. 

Considering that everyone at City Hall has a drinking fountain with a canteen refill station right down the hall from their desk, could there ever be an easier budget cut than bottled water at City Hall?

A less straightforward question is why Long Beach’s electeds seem so committed to doing the wrong thing environmentally, adding to the problem of plastic pollution and maintaining our overdependence on oil, that they might prioritize their bottled water over preserving > $10,000 worth of services that residents will lose in 2027.

(Note: Richardson and Modica did not reply to multiple queries for this article.)