Agreement is reached on new bulkheads for North Park

The Long Beach City Council Tuesday night announced an agreement to end a seven-year-long dispute with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority over the construction of bulkheads to prevent serious flooding in the largely Black North Park section of the city.

The agreement was announced by corporation counsel Rich Berrios and Public Works commissioner Joe Febrizio, and was met by cheers from the audience.

Berrios had been saying for weeks that a deal with the MTA was close. The authority had wanted its workers insured against injury while city contractors built the bulkheads, among other issues.

It’s done,” Berrios said. “It’s final.”

Long Beach will receive $39 million in funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for work on what is called the North Shore Critical Infrastructure Protection Project. Febrizio said that final preparations are under way, and work should be begun soon.

The bulkheads are of critical importance to North Park residents, whose streets regularly flood during rainstorms, affecting basements, vehicles and lawns as well. Residents have been asking for help almost a decade.

“This is amazing,” Crystal Lake, a North Park community leader who has played a central role in seeing to it the bulkhead project became a reality, told the council. “After all the emails, the phone calls, the going back and forth. This is an unbelievable moment for me.”

The bulkheads, Lake said, will “shore up almost the entire” barrier island. “This is our history, our heritage and our home.” She thanked the council members and the city administration for their efforts.

James Hodge, another community leader and the former chairman of the Martin Luther King Center in North Park, thanked Febrizio. “We’ve been working on this project for many years,” Hodge said. He noted that a considerable amount of money had been spent in Long Beach after Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, but, he added, little had been done for the North Park area.

“I don’t know why it was left out,” Hodge said. “It’s the poorest area. But I don’t know if that’s the reason.” He said he recalled his mother and father bailing out basements decades ago.

Febrizio explained that the city would install 2,700 linear feet of cantilevered steel bulkhead to stabilize the shoreline between Monroe Boulevard and Veterans Memorial Park. A new stormwater pump station will also be built at Riverside Boulevard and the bayfront that will evacuate 4.32 million cubic feet of stormwater every 24 hours from the watershed, including all of Riverside Boulevard.

The city will also replace all city water and sewer equipment, remove an abandoned gun range and pave Water Street with new asphalt composite.

Representatives of the MTA, which operates the Long Island Rail Road, did not comment at Tuesday night’s meeting. A spokesman had said in the past, however, that the agency was eager to finalize a deal with the city. The details of the negotiations were not disclosed Tuesday night.

For his part, Febrizio said that the negotiations were difficult. “It’s a very big, bureaucratic organization,” he said of the MTA.

Councilman Roy Lester acknowledged the complexities of the talks. But, he added, “We’ve been waiting for his for a long time.”