City Council Meeting Preview – Avance de la Junta del Consejo Municipal

by FORTHE Staff  |  Published February 6, 2023 in Journalism

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Léelo en Español aqui.

This week the police department will ask the Long Beach City Council to approve a $1.2 million purchase of additional surveillance equipment using federal grant funds. Other notable items include a hearing for a proposed warehouse in North Long Beach that has attracted a couple of appeals from neighbors and changes to the city’s local preference ordinance.

The City Council meets on the first three Tuesdays of every month at 5 p.m. You can find the full agenda here.

Item 12: Hearing for Proposed Warehouse in North Long Beach

The council will hold a hearing for a proposed two-story combination office and warehouse facility at 5910 Cherry Ave. in North Long Beach. The applicant, Link Logistics, a subsidiary of private equity firm The Blackstone Group, would lease space in the building to e-commerce companies and the facility would include 44 truck loading docks. The plan calls for the demolition of a 50-year-old single-story office building and several out-buildings currently on the lot. There are two appeals against the proposal that claim the development would cause increased noise and air pollution in a community of color that is already burdened by environmental degradation.

Item 17: Lawsuit Forces City to Reconsider Self-Storage Facility

The council will vote on retracting their approval for a proposed self-storage facility along the LA River after a judge ordered the city to conduct an environmental impact report in October. The lawsuit was filed by a coalition of environmental groups alleging that the city had not properly assessed the development’s negative effects on air quality, wildlife, and the surrounding communities. The project, which would have been located just north of the 405 Freeway, could be reapproved once the analysis is completed, the city said, though no timeline was provided. Activists have stated that they want the city to instead create a park at the location.

Item 18: Changes to Local Preference Ordinance

A proposal to tweak the city’s local preference ordinance to encourage more Long Beach businesses to contract with the city will go before the council. The city is hoping to increase the  preference bonus cap for local bidders from $10,000 to $50,000. This would mean that while the discount would remain at 10% of the bid’s proposed cost, the bonus amount could be up to $50,000 for the purposes of determining the lowest bidder. The city also wants to apply a 10% preference bonus to local vendors when seeking quotes for city purchases under $25,000, which currently don’t fall under the local preference program.

Item 20: LA Company Expected to Receive $2.5 Million Tiny Homes Contract 

City staff is seeking the council’s blessing to award Los Angeles Company HOME EC dba Connect Homes with a $2.5 million contract to build and install 30 to 35 tiny home units. These modular units will be used to temporarily house people experiencing homelessness at the Long Beach Multi-Service Center. The tiny homes are being paid for through a Project Homekey state grant, part of which will also go toward covering operational costs for three years. After the three-year mark, the city says it will seek additional state grants to pay for maintaining the temporary housing.

Item 22: Police Want to Spend $1.2 million on More Surveillance Equipment

The LBPD wants to spend $1.2 million in federal grant money to buy more automatic license plate readers. Less than two years after the LBPD was caught unlawfully sharing license plate data with federal immigration authorities and used license plate data to have two BLM protestors falsely detained, the LBPD is assuring the public that they will use these mass surveillance tools only to catch robbers and murderers. Without independent oversight or common-sense surveillance laws in place, the LBPD is asking the City Council to put a million-dollar’s worth of faith in the police’s ability to police its own use of invasive technology that can reconstruct historical travel patterns with extreme precision. Why? Because 2028 Olympics.

Apenas estamos en el segundo mes de 2023 y la policía ya anda con sus cosas. ¡Informate de lo que pasa en tu Ciudad! Mañana es la junta semanal del Consejo y cubrirán temas muy importantes como – un contrato de casas diminutas, una propuesta para un Bodega en North Long Beach y que la policía quiere gastar $1.2 millones en más equipos de vigilancia.

El Consejo Municipal de Long Beach se reúne los primeros tres Martes de cada mes a las 5 p.m. Puedes encontrar la agenda completa aquí.

Articulo 12: Audiencia para Bodega Propuesta en North Long Beach

El consejo llevará a cabo una audiencia para una propuesta bodega de dos pisos en 5910 Cherry Ave. en North Long Beach. El solicitante, Link Logistics, una subsidiaria de la firma de capital privado The Blackstone Group, arrendará espacio en el edificio a empresas de comercio electrónico y la instalación incluiría 44 muelles de carga de camiones. El plan llama a la demolición del edificio de oficinas de un piso de 50 años y varios edificios anexos. Hay dos apelaciones contra la propuesta que afirman que el desarrollo provocaría un aumento del ruido y contaminación del aire en una comunidad de color que ya está agobiada por la degradación ambiental.

Artículo 17: Demanda obliga a la Ciudad Reconsidere la Instalación de Auto Almacenamiento

El consejo votará para retractar su aprobación de una instalación de auto almacenamiento a lo largo del río Los Ángeles después de que un juez ordenara a la ciudad realizar un informe de impacto ambiental en octubre. La demanda fue presentada por una coalición de grupos ambientalistas alegando que la ciudad no había evaluado adecuadamente los efectos negativos del desarrollo sobre la calidad del aire, la vida silvestre y las comunidades alrededor. El proyecto, se habría ubicado justo al norte de la autopista 405, podría volver a aprobarse una vez que se complete el análisis, dijo la ciudad. Los activistas han declarado que quieren crear un parque en el lugar.

Artículo 18: Cambios a la Ordenanza de Preferencia Local

Una propuesta para modificar la ordenanza de preferencia local para alentar a más empresas de Long Beach a contratar con la ciudad se presentará ante el consejo. La ciudad espera aumentar el tope de bonificación de preferencia para los postores locales de $10,000 a $50,000. Esto significaría que, si bien el descuento se mantendría en el 10 % del costo propuesto de la oferta, el monto de la bonificación podría ser de hasta $50 000 para determinar el postor más bajo. La ciudad también quiere aplicar una bonificación de preferencia del 10 % a los proveedores locales cuando busquen cotizaciones para compras de la ciudad por menos de $25,000.

Artículo 22: La policía quiere gastar $1.2 millones en más equipos de vigilancia

El LBPD quiere gastar $1.2 millones de subvenciones federales para comprar más lectores automáticos de matrículas. Menos de dos años después que se descubrió que el LBPD compartió ilegalmente datos de matrículas con inmigración y usó datos falsamente para detener dos manifestantes de BLM, le asegura al público que usará estas herramientas de vigilancia masiva solo para atrapar ladrones y asesinos. Sin supervisión independiente o leyes de vigilancia de sentido común, el LBPD está pidiendo al Concejo Municipal que confíe en la capacidad de la policía para vigilar su propio uso de tecnología invasiva que puede reconstruir patrones históricos de extrema precisión. ¿Por qué? Los Juegos Olímpicos de 2028.

Translation by Maria Lopez.

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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

Term

Definition