Six clash in race for City Council

      Two slates of three candidates, each starring one incumbent, vie for election Nov. 8 for three seats on the City Council. The top two vote-getters will receive four-year terms. The third-place candidate will serve a two-year term.
      Currently, the Council consists of three Republican coalition candidates and two Democrats, so the results of this election will determine the balance of power for the next two years. The dynamic is essentially unprecedented in the city's history, since the Republican party in Long Beach has never been the incumbent majority party before.
      The GOP ticket this year features three full-blooded Republicans, including incumbent Councilwoman Mona Goodman, who won a two-year term in 2003, joined by former New York City police detective Valerie Buscemi and attorney Raymond Ellmer.
      The Democrats are countering with incumbent Leonard Remo, who is winding up the four-year term he won in 2001, plus retired teacher Denise Tangney and deputy Nassau County Attorney Robert Tepper.
      If many of the surnames in the race sound familiar, they should, as two offspring of former councilmen - Buscemi, the oldest daughter of Edmund Buscemi (and the sister of Long Beach Police Detective Lt. Vincent Buscemi), and Tepper, the son of Long Beach City Court Judge Roy Tepper - are seeking their first terms on the council.
      Tangney, meanwhile is well known locally from her work in the schools, and as the sister-in-law of Long Beach Police Lt. Michael Tangney, himself a former school board trustee. And she is the grandmother of Katherine Marie Flynn, the 7-year-old killed by a drunk driver on the Meadowbrook Parkway over the July Fourth weekend. Tangney was a passenger in the car with Flynn and was seriously injured in the crash, as were several other members of her family, but ultimately she chose to press on with her campaign.

A referendum?
      Both sides have more or less agreed that this election will serve as a referendum on the success of the coalition's 20 months in power, in which they passed two city budgets, over Democratic dissent, that included no property tax increases. The opposition on the council, consisting of Remo and Denis Kelly, who is not seeking re-election, said they voted against the budgets because they called for severe increases in user fees for city services and were contingent on several one-shot revenue items, such as the proceeds from the sale of the Superblock property and the Waldbaum's Plaza, a sale the Democrats were able to block.
      Goodman said her administration, which includes City Council President Jim Hennessy and Vice President Tom Sofield Jr., kept every one of its campaign promises made two years ago, despite finding what she called very questionable bookkeeping practices by the previous administration and inheriting a deficit in the millions of dollars.
      "All those years of one-party rule created a situation where people were being taxed out of their homes," Goodman said. "The city was being overdeveloped. There was no Master Plan, no vision ... And the reason I'm running again is to continue the progress. We turned around the $6.2 million deficit. Imagine what we can do now without that huge burden on our backs."
      Remo said there is more to the election than a simple referendum. "There are many people in Long Beach who are voting independent of political knowledge, and will vote based on their quality of life," he said. "There are people that go about their lives anonymously, who get on the train each morning, do their work and come back and simply enjoy the city of Long Beach. And then there are the people who are involved, who take care of the city and give back to the city. When I go to events in the city, I see many of the same faces each time. And that's a tight-knit group that crosses party lines."

Whose overdevelopment?
      Both sides promised to curb "overdevelopment," a word frequently used in city politics and just as frequently redefined to suit the moment. The coalition elected two years ago ran on a platform promising to stop overdevelopment, and points to a scaled-down version of the Superblock project as proof that it meant business. The coalition also got the city charter amended so that all of the city manager's appointments to the Zoning Board of Appeals must now be approved by the City Council.
      The city has hired a consulting firm to guide it through the 15-month process of updating the Master Plan, which has not been updated since the early 1980s. A Planning Advisory Board, consisting of citizen volunteers, has also been impaneled.
      But the Democratic candidates this year have made a pledge of their own. "We'd like to see a moratorium on new construction in the city, at least until the city plan is adopted," said Tepper. "Not to stop a homeowner from working on their home, but to stop the construction of another 100-foot-tall tower."
      Since the coalition took office on Jan. 1, 2004, Democrats claim, 400 new condos have saturated the market in Long Beach. "Until the zoning codes are looked at and reviewed, no organization should make shoot-from-the-hip decisions unless you are looking at rubrics and goals, and that's the Master Plan," Tangney said.
      The GOP countered by saying their focus this term will shift to affordable housing, and the "smart development" of the bayfront area where the incinerator currently sits. "And Long Beach owns that property," Ellmer said. "So it has the possibility of development and work-force housing."
      The Republicans stressed that the city's need for affordable housing can be balanced within the confines of "smart growth." "I'm interested in the seniors - my mom is a senior now, and I don't think she could afford to stay in Long Beach if my sister wasn't living with her," Buscemi said. "And my sister can't afford to buy a house here."
      She rejected the idea that the West End's notoriously homogenous makeup would prevent affordable housing from working there. "I live on Nebraska Street, and it's like the League of Nations," Buscemi said. "We have Asian people, African Americans, Hispanic people from South America, Central America and Puerto Rico. We have Irish and Italians. It's a great block. The kids don't care about this anymore, and I think the people are a lot less provincial than we tend to think they are."
General dynamics
      There have been accusations of political pettiness made by both sides, and the incumbents' descriptions of one another in separate interviews with the Herald were something less than civil.
      "The problem is the holdover Democrats played politics from day one," Goodman said. "And all they were was obstructionists. They didn't want to see the 'kids,' as they called us, succeed. I have a serious problem with that. How can you, as an elected official, not do the right thing for 35,000 people? Why? Because you want to regain City Hall and use it as a piggy bank?"
      The feelings are mutual.
      "When I got on the council four years ago, I joined Denis Kelly in starting a moderate reform movement," Remo said. "Because we [Democrats] had a 5-0 council majority, we did not feel we needed to always agree 5-0, which is a sense the three of us [Democratic candidates] share now. The promise of the [GOP] coalition was to open it up, to invite the two holdovers to work with them, to continue our progress. That came to a grinding halt. There was no conversation or bipartisan involvement, to the point where Denis and I, two elected officials, were shut out of the running of the government. ... They made a lot of promises, and there was a lot of bait-and-switch."
      Ellmer, meanwhile, was critical of Tangney's decision to stay in the race after the crash. "I think this is the type of job where you'd better be physically and emotionally ready for a lot of work and a lot of pressure," he said. "I'm not sure she can physically handle it."