City Council District Five Candidate Questionnaire: Ian Patton

What is your background and how does it inform your decision to run for election?

I was born and raised in the Bixby Knolls and Cal Heights areas of the new 5th Council District, went to Long Beach public schools, and gained a history degree from UC Berkeley. I am a third generation rental housing provider, inheriting and expanding the business started by my immigrant grandfather.

I am also a lifelong student of politics and public policy, having gotten my start volunteering for our late state senator and assemblywoman Betty Karnette and after college having worked for our late congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald in her district office. Later I worked for a number of years part-time as a political consultant, in addition to managing and investing in rental property.

I am running to be that too-often missing in action resident advocate, small business advocate, and taxpayer advocate.

As the volunteer executive director and co-founder of the Long Beach Reform Coalition, the organization I have built and served free of charge for the last four years, my running for Council is a natural extension of our efforts to build greater City Hall responsiveness, transparency, and accountability. 

According to the city’s latest Housing Element, the City Council could take up the issue of creating a rent stabilization ordinance next year. What are your thoughts on a citywide rent stabilization ordinance in Long Beach?

I can’t think of a more disastrous, counter-productive policy for rental housing affordability and the provision of quality housing.  The LA RSO, is an unmitigated catastrophe, producing a city with both some of the most unaffordable housing combined (with) some of the least desirable housing.  We already have a statewide rent control law.  Creating a new municipal, more extreme rent control regime is a frighteningly demagogic way to burden those new renters least able to afford what would be their forced subsidization of older, more established tenancies.  The further those tenancies are forced below market, the higher the rest of the market goes to compensate.  That is why “rent control” cities like LA, Santa Monica, and San Francisco are all the least affordable.  It’s a form of economic re-engineering traditionally rejected by both liberal and conservative economists alike.  It’s also an unfunded government mandate, like all price controls, which inevitably has the opposite effect from what was intended.  Even worse, adding layers of bureaucracy to the already extraordinarily difficult process of eviction, making building management almost impossible, sometimes leads to dangerous conditions.  At a minimum, residents with extreme nuisance neighbors have absolutely no recourse because their property managers are stripped of all management tools.  The result of a policy like this would likely be an interim period of disinvestment in our current housing stock, followed by an increasingly rapid exodus from the industry by the mom & pop owners of older stock low rise buildings as they give up on trying to juggle mortgages while manage unmanageable properties declining in value.  Ultimately the end result (is) perhaps what many politicians who support rent control really want:  a wave of displacement of working class landlords and their tenants alike, as corporate developers (buy) out the landlords, move out the tenants, and redevelop older properties on coastal real estate into gentrified luxury housing.

Would you support the creation of a citywide rental data registry that would require landlords to report lengths of tenancies, rent amounts collected, and whenever they begin, alter, or end a tenancy?

No.

Tenants rights advocates across the country have called for a codified right to legal counsel for tenants facing eviction and have been successful in San Francisco and New York. Would you support a right to counsel ordinance in Long Beach?

No.

Is housing a human right?

No.

I believe shelter *is* a human right.  I do not, however, believe that a free hand out of a studio or one or two bedroom apartment is a human right.

Tell us about an approach, policy, or program that has been successfully implemented in another city to reduce homelessness that you would like to introduce in Long Beach.

I’m not aware of a city that has followed the failure of allowing homelessness to sprawl out of control by then doing a policy about-face and enacting sensible policies to get it under control. 

Typically what you see are politicians either paying lip service, while the problem expands and ignoring it, or the expansion of the homeless-industrial complex.  In the latter case, you see compassionate voters led to support taxes for solving housing and homelessness jointly–such as the billions spent in Seattle or Measure H in LA County and Measure HHH in LA City (which together raised nearly $5 billion dollars, purportedly to solve the problem in our region)–and the money either gets tied up in bureaucracy and eventually put into the pockets of all the developers and service providers, both for profit and non-profit, who make so much money off this industry.  Seattle has spent $100k per unhoused individual while the problem has only gotten worse and the City of LA built a fraction of units promised to house the unhoused, spending $500,000 to $700,000 per unit, for housing which most homeless simply aren’t ready to occupy independently anyway, given drug addiction and/or mental health issues, and while the LA homeless crisis has continued to spiral out of control in LA even worse than it has here.

The real question is what approach to take to homelessness here in Long Beach.  Do we take the dishonest, photo op-centric approach of City Hall which wastes millions in grant dollars with abysmal results or instead a rationalized public policy approach involving experts not bound by the exigencies of City Hall politics.

The Long Beach City Hall solution is to spend millions on a city-owned shelter which is poorly located (and extraordinarily expensive because it’s on landed zoned for cannabis warehouse cultivation) and nearly unusable. The City Hall solution is providing little funding to and oversight over our poorly located homelessness services Multi-Service Center (MSC), rendering it nearly useless. The City Hall approach is to pretend like the federal 9th Circuit Court ‘Boise decision’ forecloses the possibility of enforcement (of our anti-camping ordinance) after other forms of social worker intervention fail, when in fact the ‘Boise decision’ does no such thing.

My approach would be to listen to experts in homelessness, many of whom I have already consulted, for years, who cite our failure to engage in regional coordination, to provide sufficient vouchers, to properly spend our grant dollars, to properly site our city facilities intended to provide temporary shelter, bridge housing, and services, to conduct our homeless count properly (we’re one of the only cities that compiles our data in house rather than using an outside third party firm), to track our homeless population properly (i.e. aligning with the national HIMS Homelessness Information Management System run by HUD), and generally to take the crisis seriously (rather than as a political annoyance we shower with empty words and promises).

Specifically I would work to sell off and relocate the poorly located MSC and new City shelter (nearly on the border with Compton and being used as a cannabis cultivation site, a joke that would be funny if it weren’t so tragic), make them accessible 24-7 (rather than the current M-F, 9-5 ‘bankers hours’), increase services, and pair these improvements with actually enforcing our anti-camping ordinance.

My signature proposal is that we form a regional joint powers authority for multi-county planning for both capital investment and grant dollars dissemination and multi-agency coordination. The unhoused don’t see or care about city boundaries, so city-centric political “credit” oriented policies will never work. Just as air quality is a regional, multi-county matter handled by SCAQMD, we need multi-county coordination for the planning, siting, and distribution of homelessness services funds.  And we need it for all cities and counties in the region to move toward a more uniform anti-camping enforcement system. There is nothing humane whatsoever about turning away and simply allowing a mentally ill and/or drug addicted fellow human being to “choose” to die on the streets. 

That is a choice by politicians to sacrifice human lives because they find the problem too difficult and expensive to deal with when they would much rather spend their time (and, later, our money) at expensive fundraisers wining and dining well-healed and powerful donors, whether labor or corporate bosses, who buy politicians and expect a return on their dollar in the form of non-competitive contracts, tax abatements, development approvals, and other economic perks.

Meanwhile, as I experienced when I volunteered for the Long Beach Homeless Count, we have people out on the streets who desperately need the services we ineffectively provide to a small extent and mostly can’t pay for sufficiently, due to all the money we corruptly divert from the basic functions of a civilized society.

As part of a plan for all new buildings to have net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, the Los Angeles City Council is considering a proposal to bar all new commercial and residential construction projects from including gas line hookups in favor of all-electric appliances. Would you support a similar undertaking in Long Beach? Editors’ Note: Since the asking of this question, the Los Angeles City Council voted in favor of banning most gas appliances in new construction. 

No.

A recently drafted city memo proposes to end oil drilling in Long Beach by 2035, when local oil fields will no longer be financially viable. Should the city end oil drilling operations before 2035?

Yes.

Have you taken campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry and, if so, do you plan to continue taking contributions from that sector?

No.

The Long Beach Police Department currently employs approximately 800 sworn police officers. Do you think the current number of sworn police officers should:

Increase.

A city-hired consultant recently recommended changes to the Citizen Police Complaint Commission that would create an inspector general position to investigate the LBPD. However, the inspector general could only investigate police shootings, in-custody deaths, and complaints against command staff with the approval of the City Manager. Past commissioners and community members have argued that the CPCC’s current subordination to the City Manager has rendered it toothless. Would you be in favor of an Inspector General position with the unfettered authority to investigate officer misconduct and use-of-force?

Yes.

Please explain what changes, if any, you would like to see implemented to better hold LBPD officers accountable for misconduct and/or excessive force?

I have participated in this debate and attended the (intentionally) poorly advertised community outreach meetings the City held to give public feedback to the CPCC restructuring consulting firms (Polis and Change).  The central issue is whether or not the new Inspector General is answerable to the citizens police commission or to city management.  The CPCC has been an acknowledged failure due to the fact that it never had any independent authority, never had a sufficient budget or robust investigative staff, was never treated with any deference by the police dept.’s Internal Affairs, and has been systematically overruled by the City Manager, as provided for in the original ballot measure’s language.  In other words, it was set up to fail.

We need a real Police Commission, like in LA, where the commission is the head of the department, sets policy, and confirms the appointment of the chief.  Short of that, a restructured CPCC should have the ability to hire, fire, and direct a new Inspector General, who should have the ability to have real time access to all police files and systems, should automatically be involved in OISs (officer-involved shootings), should be able to investigate anything, and should have a sufficient budget to perform his or her office’s oversight duties.

Ultimately, bad apple officers have the potential not only to cost lives and tens of millions in wrongful death payouts, they can demoralize the whole force.  But it’s not just about bad apples.  We need far more robust training and hiring standards (in most jurisdictions more hours of training are required to become a cosmetologist than are required to become a police officer) for officers who are expected to make life and death hair trigger decisions.  And we need a much larger force, so individual officers aren’t exhausted on overtime and can become involved in the community and be proactive community-oriented policing model exemplars.

Long Beach has been working to implement an alternate crisis response (ACR) program that dispatches mental health professionals instead of police officers to calls for service related to mental health crises. Would you support expanding the criteria for the ACR to divert calls away from LBPD beyond mental health crises? If so, which types of calls for service?

While I’m not an expert on this growing trend, I think most agree that some of what police are expected to do could be better handled by highly trained crisis intervention social workers.  But whenever you have a dangerous situation, you usually need law enforcement to be on hand, as well.  This is an idea that needs further study, but I would be inclined to start by having more teams deployed that include both social workers and police, with the social worker taking the lead and the police only intervening if necessary for the safety of personnel or the public or if serious criminal activity is going on.

The city’s Technology and Innovation Commission recently issued a full-throated recommendation to put a citywide moratorium on the use of Facial Recognition Technology until privacy and civil rights safeguards are put in place. Do you agree with this recommendation?

Yes.

Have you taken campaign donations from the Long Beach Police Officers Association and, if so, do you plan to continue taking their contributions? 

No.

According to county data, accidental overdose deaths have spiked over the pandemic, especially in Long Beach. Harm reduction has become a key public health intervention in preventing overdose deaths and cities like New York and San Francisco have opened safe consumption sites to address the problem. Should Long Beach open a safe consumption site?

No.

Several cities have decriminalized psilocybin mushrooms, otherwise known as ‘magic mushrooms,’ including Detroit, Santa Cruz, and Oakland. What are your thoughts on decriminalizing magic mushrooms in Long Beach?

It’s not something I’d take a position on without further study.

Long Beach’s minimum wage is currently $14 an hour for businesses with 25 or fewer employees and $15 an hour for all other businesses. Los Angeles’s minimum wage, which increases annually based on the Consumer Price Index, will rise to $16.04 in July. Should Long Beach adopt an annual minimum wage increase to keep pace with cost of living?

No. I believe it should be a floor, not an elevator.  In other words, it should be a safety net against exploitation, not abused as a tool to attempt to raise wages above the market rate wage for unskilled labor, which leads to greater unemployment.  Much like rent control, it’s basic economics that putting a price control on the price of labor on the supply/demand curve inflates the wages of some while others spill over into unemployment.  Some businesses can sustain the higher input costs and others can’t.  Furthermore, and just as or perhaps even more important, imposing a minimum wage on the municipal level in a regional employment market is also incredibly counterproductive.  You’re just incentivizing businesses to locate outside the city boundaries.  So the minimum wage should really be left to the State, and in general it should be just below the wage level determined by supply and demand, in order to prevent any workers from getting caught in an exploitative environment but not leading to the greater suffering of unemployment.

Fare collections accounted for 12-15% of Long Beach Transit’s operating revenue pre-pandemic, totaling roughly $14.8 million. Should Long Beach consider investing more funds into LBT in order to transition it to a fare-free transit system?

Yes.

Seeing as councilmembers are only employed part time, what would be your other area(s) of employment if (re)elected?

I am a rental property owner/manager/investor and an erstwhile paid (before I became a full-time government reform local activist for the last five years) communications consultant.