By Doug Miller
, only one of the six can accurately be described as new to the game, as the field also includes two former councilwomen and a political veteran who is running for the first time.
The incumbents are Robert Tepper, a Democrat and the council's sitting vice president, who is in the final months of a two-year term after finishing third two years ago, and his opponent, Tom Sofield Jr., a registered Democrat concluding a four-year term earned when his Republican coalition swept the regular Democrats out of power in 2003.
Tepper is running with Gina Guma, a former Democratic councilwoman and Board of Education president, and Lawrence Benowitz, a retired business executive who has been involved in local politics for 30 years, running several anti-Democratic-establishment campaigns but never throwing his own hat in the ring until now.
Sofield is running for the third time with Mona Goodman, who was part of the winning coalition ticket in 2003. They are teaming with John McLaughlin, the only genuine newcomer in the bunch, who is making his first foray into Long Beach politics after recently retiring from the New York City fire department.
The battles and the bad blood of four years ago (and again two years ago) loom once more over this election. The GOP will trot out its familiar platform of steady taxes and prudent government, while the Democrats are urging voters to allow them to continue the progress the city has made over the past two years.
Sofield and Goodman, with their former running mate Jim Hennessy, who is stepping down at the end of his term, first ran for the council in 2001, narrowly losing to the team of Denis Kelly, Leonard Remo and Danny Kearney. Kearney resigned with six months left in his term, and was eventually jailed for a crime unrelated to his duties in the city. He was replaced on the council by Guma.
Heading into the final months of the 2001 campaign, the Republicans have long said, they had the momentum but were derailed by history. "Analyzing the first campaign, I think we would have won, but Sept. 11 kind of stopped everything," Goodman said.
Two years later, amid a regional outcry prompted by a wave of tax hikes that accompanied the county's reassessment, Sofield, Hennessy and Goodman captured the city's first GOP majority on the council since the early 1970s. They led the city for two years, and produced two city budgets that did not raise taxes.
But Goodman, who, by finishing third, won a two-year term, was unable to repeat, and in 2005 the Democratic team of Tepper, Remo and Denise Tangney routed her and her GOP coalition running mates, Val Buscemi and Ray Ellmer. Remo and Tangney were the top vote-getters, leaving Tepper to lead this year's ticket.
The coalition
Hennessy was stricken with cancer in 2006 and, while he continues to recover, he announced last winter that he would not seek re-election. McLaughlin, a newcomer from a Democratic family, volunteered to take Hennessy's seat on the GOP's coalition ticket. "When this majority let this 25 percent tax increase go through, it kind of irked me," McLaughlin said. "I'm like everyman. I'm not anointed by anyone. I wasn't brought up through the political system."
Sofield, who has sat in the minority with Hennessy since Goodman's defeat, complained last week that the achievements of his administration have been left to rot under the Democrats. "We worked hard to develop a master plan for the city," Sofield said. "And the new majority on the council has left it to collect dust on a shelf."
It has been a rallying cry of the coalition that in its two years in office, the tax rate remained steady. Despite the freeze, Goodman said, the coalition was able to improve lives. "We have a fabulous record of fiscal conservatism," she said. "We inherited [in 2003] a $6 million deficit that we solved, and, after my two years with Tommy [Sofield] and Jimmy [Hennessy], produced a $5 million surplus. And with all that, there were a tremendous number of provisional [city] employees ... that we were able to make into civil service employees and eligible for retirement benefits."
This year the city began a wave of infrastructure improvements, including street pavings, park improvements and facility upgrades, particularly in the recreation department. The city's pool got a new liner, and plans are in the works to overhaul the Magnolia Street Recreation Center, with construction of a new artificial-turf field getting under way.
The improvements were funded largely by a $5 million bond approved unanimously by the council, but only after a $15 million bond, which required at least one GOP vote to pass, was rejected by Sofield and Hennessy, who said they wanted smaller bonds spread out over several years rather than one large one.
Sofield said the city's bond-rating upgrade in February was the result of his administration's management. "The city's bond rating has gone up because of the greater fiscal flexibility that Moody's saw, based on the two years we were in office," he said.
The Democrats
The Moody's upgrade is one of many achievements of the past two years that the Democrats believe should be credited to them. The 25 percent tax increase, they said, was instrumental in stabilizing the government to the point where it was eligible for an upgrade, and was necessary to offset the non-recurring land sale revenues Democrats claimed the GOP relied on to balance its no-tax-increase budgets.
"The Republicans created the tax increase," Tepper said last week. "And since then we've lowered taxes 4 percent and developed a number of new revenue streams for the city. The bond rating went up because the city is now being run properly."
Guma cited the new banners on the city's lampposts, which feature the work of area photographers and are sponsored by local businesses, and she added that she is excited that the city is looking into selling advertising on its buses. Tepper, meanwhile, pointed out that the retention of an auditing firm led to the discovery of thousands of dollars in uncollected revenues in the city's utilities.
Benowitz compared the GOP coalition's style of government to the Republicans who got Nassau County in trouble in the late 1990s. "That prior administration basically followed the financial direction of Tom Gulotta," Benowitz said, referring to the former Republican county executive. "If we continued to follow the Republican administration's financial advice, we'd probably be sitting here today discussing why we have a financial review board handling the city's finances, and not talking about a Moody's upgrade."
For Guma, whose first stint on the council lasted just six months, this year's race offers an opportunity to finally be part of the city's rebirth, she said. "The past few years [of Democratic rule] have been wonderful, and I want to jump in on that," she said. "I have a lot of ideas I want to share with my fellow council members, if elected."
Such as?
"Such as stepping outside the box," she explained. "I think they've started to do that. I see a lot of projects where revenue has been generated."
Comments about this story? Dmiller@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext .213.
