Chamber President Gordon tells the mayor and City Council what to do, including when to let you vote

A couple of Tuesdays ago, Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Randy Gordon became the mayor of Long Beach. “Please don’t call me that,” Gordon pleads with uncharacteristic sensitivity. “I certainly don’t consider myself the mayor.” He’s right. While he was at it, Gordon became the City Council, too.

Don’t worry, he wasn’t elected. In Long Beach’s current economic predicament—crumbling infrastructure, understaffed police force, highly paid city management, low sales tax revenue—the democratic principle of letting people express their will at the polls is suddenly considered an exercise in stupidity and wastefulness. Elections? They cost too much!

Gordon took power the efficient way—by bullying the titular mayor, Bob Foster, and the boobular City Council into unanimously surrendering it. That may look like a betrayal of the people who entrusted those officials with that power. But remember: those people were voters, and they voted in elections—expensive elections, which cost who-knows-how-much money, money that could have filled who-knows-how-many potholes or vacancies in the police department. From that perspective, selling out their constituency looks like another way for the mayor and City Council to trim government waste.

By the way, did we describe Gordon’s tactics as “bullying”? Honestly, that makes it sound so much harder than it was.

All Gordon really did was marshal signature-gathering campaigns against a couple of ordinances that the mayor and City Council had passed during the past year in attempts to protect working people. Gordon’s lists of signatures required Long Beach to put those ordinances to a public vote. But when the council began to plan the referendums that Gordon had made necessary—referendums that, together, carried a $500,000 cost— Gordon attacked them for wasting the taxpayers’ money.

It was a great gotcha! And it worked.

On Nov. 6, the same day other cities were having elections, the mayor and City Council avoided folding a referendum into next February’s state primary to defend the Big Box Ordinance it had passed more than a year ago. Instead, they let the ordinance die. The same thing happened in October, when the council abandoned the Labor Peace Agreement it had passed in January rather than defend it at the polls.

The Press-Telegram cheered Gordon during his fight and celebrated his victories over what it called “ill-designed ordinances designed to please special interests,” asserting that “this is no time to be spending $500,000 on an unneeded election instead of useful services.”

Of course, the P-T gushes over nearly every move the Chamber makes—such as its fawning account of the so-called “State of the County” address that Supervisor Don Knabe gave at a Chamber fundraiser two weeks ago—almost as if the daily paper were an unofficial Long Beach Chamber of Commerce newsletter. Turns out, it almost is.

The P-T and Chamber websites reveal that Press-Telegram publisher Dave Kuta sits on the paper’s five-member Editorial Board and the Chamber’s Board of Directors.

“Yes, I guess he is on that Chamber board,” acknowledged Larry Allison, who oversees the editorial page. “But our publisher has nothing to do with the [Chamber’s] Political Action Committee. I don’t know what else to say about that.”

Our suggestion: Something!

However the Press-Telegram might rationalize Kuta’s input in editorials that endorse an organization he helps direct—and which is greatly influencing the city’s direction—basic journalistic ethics require that Kuta’s relationship with the Chamber be mentioned every time the Chamber is. Anything else is kind of an abuse of trust and power.

And that brings us back to the mayor and City Council. Most of them rhapsodized about their support of the working man while running for office—and at the outset of their terms they seemed to be making good on their promises.

When the Big Box Ordinance was approved by the council in mid-2006, it prohibited retailers like Wal-Mart from offering full-on grocery departments. The idea was to protect the relatively good standard of living enjoyed by workers at most existing grocery stores from being lowered by the poor wages, benefits and working conditions that Wal-Mart would use to undersell those stores—in turn pressuring grocers to abuse their employees, too. It didn’t seem like so much to ask, considering the sweetheart deal Wal-Mart got from the City Council, which practically gave away the land for the company’s store in downtown Long Beach.

Then the council passed the Labor Peace Agreement in 2007. It guaranteed employees of hotels located on city land the right to organize a union in exchange for a no-strike clause. The idea was to enable the prosperity in Long Beach’s developing tourist-based economy to trickle down to the bellhops, maids and cooks who compose the ever-growing foundation of the city’s workforce. Besides, better wages and health benefits take pressure off the city budget. It didn’t seem like so much to ask, considering the hotels on city land owe their existence to the City Council, which provided them with millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.

However, from the moment the City Council approved those measures, Gordon was determined to overturn them—setting the stage for a classic battle between One Man and City Hall.

But Gordon never showed up on that stage. He got his own stage, wrote his own script, and played the lead role in a variation on the much-more-winnable theme of One Man Backed by Rich Business Interests and Connections With the Editorial Board of the Daily Paper vs. City Hall.

Break a leg.

In late 2006, Gordon parlayed the Chamber of Commerce’s resources with behind-the-scenes money from Wal-Mart into an organization called “Long Beach Consumers for Choice.” They collected enough signatures to force a referendum. One mass mailer, co-signed by Gordon and his assistant, Brandon Kline, posed the question: “Should politicians choose where you shop?” The packet included a referendum petition and a postage-paid return envelope. In December of 2006, Gordon submitted the petitions to the City Clerk, and the implementation of the ordinance was stalled pending an election.

To combat the Labor Peace Agreement, last spring Gordon put Long Beach’s most powerful lobbyist, Mike Murchison, in charge of a Chamber of Commerce subset called the Hospitality Alliance, composed of the city’s big hotels. Chamber money paid street teams for every signature they could get in support of suspending the Labor Peace Agreement. Again, they succeeded, and the ordinance was invalidated until a public referendum could be held. Instead, the Labor Peace Agreement was rescinded.

The Press-Telegram applauded Gordon and the Chamber of Commerce every step of the way, insisting they were fighting for an ideology based on free-market capitalism rather than protectionism—ignoring the massive public gifts the corporations had received. It was a brilliant strategy.

But it was a cynical strategy, too, and it might have been trumped if someone had had the courage to invoke the naïve name of democracy—which, we are often reminded, doesn’t come cheaply. Can there be a higher priority than spending money on an election, especially one provoked by a private interest group seeking to short-circuit the considered decision of elected officials?

Instead, the mayor and council have backed down, explaining in unison: “Elections cost too much.” Apparently, Gordon is in charge now. The Press-Telegram should be thrilled.

Tags: chamber of commerce, conflict of interest, journalistic ethics, Long Beach, press telegram, randy gordon