By: Chris Munzing
In the first of many public-works sessions open to the public, new city Comptroller Alice Schildkraut detailed the city's fiscal situation for the City Council and a crowd of residents. As the meeting progressed, it was obvious that Long Beach has a long way to go.
Unforeseen termination payments to retiring employees, skyrocketing insurance costs and an archaic accounting system have left the city with a deficit. Schildkraut said that by the end of the current fiscal year, the deficit could approach $6.4 million, but that figure can be affected by a number of factors.
Schildkraut said that she needed an assistant comptroller just to sift through the mess and find ways to resolve the problem areas. "[The city is] facing serious fiscal challenges," she said.
Schildkraut explained that there was little that could be done during the current fiscal year, because the budget has already been in place for six months. However, small adjustments can be made to try and alleviate some of the pressure. Both Schildkraut and City Manager Harold Porr III will be looking at possible department reorganizations, and also determining the impact of changes in user fees for various services, such as beach fees. Schildkraut said these were just possible changes, and that nothing was official.
What will need to be restructured is next year's budget, according to the comptroller. "The budget needs to include the items that were insufficiently budgeted for in the past," she said. "It has to be a budget that stands up."
In order to right the ship, a solid budget is necessary, as well as a buildup of reserves, Schildkraut said. During the current and past fiscal years, budget notes totaling $4.77 million have had to be added to account for termination and retirement payments.
Current reserves are low, if anything, according to Schildkraut. Having reserves would allow the city to be able to pay unforeseen termination and retirement benefits, as well as other unexpected expenses, without adding more money to the budget.
Schildkraut believes that having reserves would benefit the city greatly, because it would give Long Beach a certain amount of flexibility, and each new expense wouldn't sock the budget and the taxpayers.
The current plan to turn around the city's finances, through accurate budgeting and a large amount of belt-tightening, will not work overnight, however. Schildkraut said it will take more than a year to turn things around. She is confident, however, that it can be done.
Also presented at the public-works session was a report by the commissioner of public works, Robert Raab. Raab said that there was a long wish list of projects for his department that should be addressed, but limited his comments to what he perceived to be the top problems confronting the city.
The first item was the construction of a new well for drinking water. The current wells are extremely old, and Raab feels that taking the steps to install a well before a problem occurs is the best way to act. "The city has operated on crisis management," said Raab. "If something broke, we fixed it."
The age of the city's infrastructure was a common thread in the projects outlined by Raab. A 90-year-old water storage tank is already leaking and needs to be replaced, and three waste-management pumps in the West End are more than 50 years old. The pumps are used to transfer waste from the West End to the treatment plant.
Though his wish list was far longer than what was presented, Raab maintained that repairs needed to be done sooner than later or the city could be facing even larger problems.
