Taking Long Beach’s temperature

“The city is starting to feel the effects of the recession,” City Manager Charles Theofan said during a brief, state-of-the city-style talk he gave at a Long Beach Chamber of Commerce meeting last week.

Finances, infrastructure, policing and, of course, parking were among the topics Theofan touched on in the ballroom of the Allegria Hotel on Jan. 25, before a crowd that included City Court Judge Frank Dikranis and former City Council member Lenny Remo.

Theofan cautioned that Long Beach may have to pay the state as much as $170,000 in the form of a Metropolitan Transportation Authority tax imposed after the city finalized its budget last spring, and that Gov. David Paterson is slashing about 10 percent of the state funding the city receives each year — about $300,000. “And even though they say that we’ll eventually get it back, that really doesn’t help when you have to pay the bills at the end of the month,” Theofan said. “... So the city is down about $500,000 that we anticipated would be in our budget.”

He was short on details, however, about how the city plans to make up the shortfall, saying only that it must reduce unnecessary expenditures and look for different ways to expand revenue. “We’d like to avoid very much any tax increase,” he said, “so that’s what the goal is going to be.”

One of the most important projects the city has undertaken and will continue to focus on is long-neglected infrastructure work, Theofan said. He noted that Long Beach is in the midst of rehabilitating a sewage-pumping lift station on New York Avenue and rebuilding the Indiana Firehouse in the West End, a project that, he acknowledged, “unfortunately will cost us approximately $5 million when it’s completed.” Critics who have complained about mismanagement of the project have pointed out that an entirely new firehouse could have been built for $3.8 million.

A $6 million bond, which the City Council passed 4-1 in December, will fund repairs to bulkheads in the northern Canals neighborhood as well as road reconstruction. When the bond passed, Theofan did not name the streets that would see upgrades, but last week he specified Broadway, between Long Beach and Edwards boulevards.

“It’s a tough endeavor because it costs so much money,” he said of the infrastructure projects. “We would have thought, with the recession, that the cost of major construction would go down, but it hasn’t. It continues to increase, so every project that you undertake is big, big, big dollars.”

Theofan pointed out areas where the city has expanded parking — a leased lot at Temple Zion, a municipal lot on Maryland Avenue in the West End, and two new rented lots, on Shore Road and Broadway.

He also highlighted the city’s 10-year contract with the Town of Hempstead that allows Long Beach to transport its waste to a transfer station in Merrick instead of a facility in Babylon, which saves on man-hours and wear and tear on trucks. “So now we’re saving a tremendous amount of money,” he said, “and what we’re paying per ton to dispose of the refuse is less than what we paid when we drove out to [Babylon].”

In January, the Police Department hired six new officers. In a city where residents question the overtime hours and pay of police officers and others in the department, particularly in a down economy, Theofan said, “You may ask the question, If you’re having financial problems, how are we hiring police officers? Well, the reality is, by hiring young, new officers that are able to get out on the street, we could reduce overtime, which is a very significant factor in our Police Department.”

One problem, he said, is that the Nassau County Police Academy has not graduated a class in more than two years, “and we don’t know when the next time [is] they might have a class. So we have to take advantage of that opportunity.”

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