Long Beach Officials prefer to be called Humanitarians but give little thanks to the help Migrant Children have brought their fledgling local economy.
The Memo partners with local bakeries to bring birthdays to Migrant Children detained in Long Beach Convention Center. Click Here to Support.
EDITORIAL Just imagine if White Northern abolitionists on the underground railroad charged runaway slaves nearly $1 million for parking. Or if German families who sheltered Jews from Nazis contracted for a $2 Million security deposit just in case repairs were needed after their stay.
If you were to read our City's contract to shelter migrant children at the Long Beach Convention Center you would find these sort of charges and more.
I don't fault the City for seizing a $35 Million contract for a Downtown that was fledging even before the pandemic. But there's little integrity in pretending that Long Beach had any choice but to jump at the opportunity to profit from the immigration crisis.
We are certainly in no fiscal position to put our necks on the line. We can hardly provide our own residents with enough fire engines.
It's so bad that City management is often afraid to apply for grants to help us keep fire engines for fear that we will have to return the money because our City falls below national fire standards.
While desperate to be praised as "humanitarians", the facts reveal that Long Beach is just as much in need of relief as migrant children are in need of shelter, food and clothing.
So then the nagging question is why have City officials gone to such lengths to portray their motives as "humanitarian"? The answer lies in a saying often credited to Winston Churchill.
In the middle of a political crisis Churchill is believed to have said, "never let a good crisis go to waste". In less than a year, some Long Beach politicians have taken Churchill’s political strategy to heart.
First Black men, then grocery workers and now Latin American migrant children. Each group have found themselves as useful hashtags and buzzwords for our local career politicians
In the wake of George Floyd protests there was the “Framework for Reconciliation”. With COVID-19 came “heroes pay” for frontline grocery workers. Finally, with our nation’s immigration crisis in search of facilities that didn't look like cages, Mayor Garcia adopted the buzzword “humanitarianism” to explain his motive for leading the charge to approve a $35 Million short term lease of the Long Beach Convention Center.
While most of these terms were little more than self-serving or even self righteous sound bites, what’s clear is that the most underserved Long Beach residents haven’t experienced much tangible good from all the rhetoric.
Framework for Reconciliation
While the framework for reconciliation helped raise Rex Richardson’s political profile, the stated purpose of the protests was police misconduct and at the very least police reform. In this vein little to no substantive progress has advanced. What has happened is that the Office of Equity has moved up the food chain from the Health Department and into the City Manager's office. And while there is some structural funding, the office remains grossly underfunded and understaffed.
For the first time in our City's history, our Chief of Police was recently found guilty of conduct unbecoming of a police officer by the Citizens Complaint Police Commission. However, there is still no word on whether the City Manager, who has final say, will take any action.
The Commission's inability to do little more than make a suggestion to the City Manager that routinely sides with officers and later pays millions of your tax dealers to cover officers' legal fees and civil rights settlements is precisely why swelling words like the "framework for reconciliation" is all hat and no cattle.
Heroes Pay
Perhaps well intended, "heroes pay" was a shortsighted feel-good law that revealed more about Long Beach’s inequities than anything else.
First, instead of meeting the far more pressing affordable housing crisis faced by all local workers making similar grocery store wages, here was a bright and shiny distraction rife with unintended consequences.
There was also the pesky fact that "heroes pay" excluded many other sectors of local workers also braving the front line of COVID-19 exposure.
Then, like clock work, immediately after City Council’s unanimous vote for “heroes pay” Krogers announced closing two grocery stores in the City. A classic show of shortsighted government intervention meets market economy realities.
The worst part was that the largest of the stores served our food desert in NorthLong Beach and left local residents unemployed.
During that same City Council meeting that passed “heroes pay”, Mayor Garcia gave a shoutout to workers at his favorite grocery store Gelson's. Tone deaf, the Mayor noted how pleased Gelson’s employees were with heroes pay.
Political support from employees at a high end grocer like Gelson’s makes sense. And for the affluent parts of our city, “heroes pay” worked out just fine. But for some of our most underserved residents "heroes pay" was like Gotham city without Batman. It unleashed the sort of outcomes that lead to more poverty, homelessness, crime and struggling families.
Never wasting a good crisis, for our local career politicians "heroes pay" resulted in positive news coverage which furthers their ambition. Never mind that it failed to overcome the true economic barrier to families struggling to carve out a dignified standard of living in Long Beach.
Humanitarianism at Long Beach Convention Center
Now elected officials have a new favorite hashtag. The word of the day is "Humanitarian". The definition of humanitarianism is the promotion of human welfare and social reform.
Without a doubt the welfare of Latin American children smuggled into our southern border is of course an humanitarian crisis.
At the same time, another humanitarian crisis happening within the borders of our own city is our homelessness and housing crisis impacting men, women, families and children in all parts of Long Beach. The city has been so lacking that ordinary residents have taken to their own devices to create ways to clean up homeless encampments and even get homeless people off the street when city staff routinely fall short.
The naked truth is that when it comes to homeless citizens living in Long Beach the City is thin on humanitarianism, but when it come to homeless people immigrating to America our City rolls out the red carpet.
But only for a hefty fee.
The flipped interest in humanitarianism has less to do with hypocrisy and more to do with dollars and cents.
Sheltering migrant children is a revenue generator for the City’s Tidelands Fund, police, fire and City Management. Even the City Attorneys office is earning a fee.
However humanitarian, the hard work of sheltering homeless citizens doesn’t pay nearly as much.
With the revenue from sheltering migrant children, the City can better afford to fund 2028 Olympic projects such as the $85 Million Belmont pool which is largely reliant on Tideland funding.
Dollars gained from migrant children might also compensate for mismanagement like last month's below market loan from the already cash-strapped Tidelands Fund given to the Aquarium of the Pacific .
Thanks to federal dollars brought in by migrant children the Convention Center and other coastal assets will have the shot in the arm needed ever since the City Manager reported in this years budget that the Convention Center, the Aquarium of the Pacific and the Tidelands Fund were hemorrhaging many millions of dollars along with our over $30 Million deficit.
Not calling things what they are leaves us vulnerable to harmful manipulation.
The reason we call Northern abolitionist and people who saved Jews from interment camps heroes and humanitarians is because they did good purely out of the kindness of their heart and at great personal peril. There was no quid pro quo.
In the case of the migrant children detained at the Long Beach Convention Center, we simply have two groups in desperate need of help. Children at the southern border needed help with shelter and finding families members to take them in. Long Beach, on the other hand, needed a bail out from the fiscal hole our elected officials have dug.
No, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t shelter kids in need. We absolutely should. I’m only suggesting that City officials spare us the self righteous word smithing and just own the fact that we desperately need the revenue as much as these poor kids need shelter and food.
Because in all honesty Long Beach residents have more in common with unaccompanied migrant children than we'd care to acknowledge. Like them, we too were abandoned by our local officials years ago. The only difference is that we freely elected our condition while they had no choice in the matter.
To Support the Migrant Children Birthday Fund please click here.