By Doug Miller
The Long Beach City Council held its official budget adoption hearing Tuesday night and picked up exactly where it left off after last year's budget hearing: at each other's throats.
Of course, there were two fewer throats than expected in attendance: Democratic Councilwoman Denise Tangney and Democratic Council Vice President Robert Tepper were absent, prompting Council President Leonard Remo to announced that while the budget hearing would go on as planned, the vote would be pushed back to a later date, sometime before the May 31 deadline.
The battleground is City Manager Edwin Eaton's proposed 2007-08 budget, which will go into effect July 1 unless cuts are agreed upon by a majority vote of the council. The $73.95 million spending plan would keep taxes at the same level as the current budget, which notoriously raised property taxes by 25 percent yet resulted in what has been reported to be a $5 million surplus.
Since there would be no vote, no proposed cuts were offered, and the bulk of the speakers offered their support for grade-changes to members of the CSEA, the civil service union. But Republican Councilmen Jim Hennessy and Tom Sofield Jr. promised when they did introduce their proposed cuts, it would total at least a 16 percent tax "rollback."
"Councilman Sofield and I want to give some of the surplus back to the people," Hennessy said. "It's our belief that the money was taken from us. The only thing missing was a gun to our heads."
Sofield, meanwhile, attacked the missing Democrats for, as he put it, disrespecting the process by not showing up. "One of them had the toothache and the other is stuck doing Oprah Winfrey?" he demanded.
Tangney and members of her family were invited to Chicago to appear on Winfrey's syndicated television program to discuss the 2005 murder of her granddaughter, Katherine Marie Flynn. Flynn, 6, was killed in a late-night car wreck on the Meadowbrook Parkway caused by Martin Heidgen, a drunk driver. No airdate has been set for the episode, but it will likely be broadcast this summer.
Hennessy meanwhile bemoaned the proposed raises for several non-union city employees, such as Transportation Director Michael Robinson, whose salary increases by $20,000 in the proposed budget, and said he believed this budget would result in an additional surplus of $2 million.
Eaton denied any such surplus would result, saying at most the budget might result in an $800,000 cushion. He and his budget were defended by Remo, who said the idea of a tax rollback was irresponsible. "Next year we'll still have to get that money back," he said. "I would rather have consistency and less of a yo-yo effect."
