Longtime Long Beach resident Terry Jensen has finally sold his house—the one on the edge of the Virginia Country Club, where he lived when he run unsuccessfully for the 8^th district seat on the Long Beach city council in 2004. He’s moving into his other house—the one that’s been occupied by rental tenants on the Alamitos Peninsula, where 3^rd district city councilman Gary DeLong faces reelection next year.

Last week I asked Jensen, a successful businessman in the development field and a former board member of the Long Beach Redevelopment Agency, a short and simple question:

Are you going to run against DeLong for city council in 2010?

Jensen replied with a long, scintillating answer:

“Lots of people have been asking me about that: Why don’t you run for the 3^rd district seat against DeLong. But people have also told me they want me to run for mayor against Bob Foster. And I have to admit, as attractive as the idea of running for council is, running against Foster and debating him—that’s really attractive to me. I would love to debate him. He may be a wonderful man, but what he has done to this city I can’t stand.

“What Foster tried to do with Measure I [a property parcel tax, ostensibly to pay for infrastructure improvements, although the money was not designated to specific projects] was an abomination.

“I tried to debate him [at a meeting of the Long Beach Press Club last year, when Foster refused to attend] on the merits of the proposal then. I wanted Mayor Foster to have courage to listen to what I had to say and then tell me why I was wrong. If someone could have shown me the error of my ways, that I twisted logic or my facts were wrong, I was ready to be corrected. But Foster didn’t have the courage to do that. According to his chief of staff, he didn’t think I had the stature to do it. Well, sorry Mr. Foster, but I’m not sure there was anyone of any stature who could tell me that what I said was wrong. The voters sure didn’t [Measure I lost on Election Day].

 “The city is in worse shape today than when Foster took office [in 2006]. He ran promising to fix our potholes—pension potholes and the ones in our streets—but the first thing he did was raise pay of the city workers … well, after he consolidated his power by changing the city charter. I keep waiting for him to solve our fiscal problems, but he hasn’t done anything but chip around the edges.

“He keeps blaming Long Beach’s problems on the national economy, but we would be broke, anyway. We’re just broker because of the national economic situation.

“I would love to be able to debate Foster. Could I beat him in an election? I don’t think so. He’s going to have a war chest the likes of which no one has ever seen before in this city. He’s going to have professional campaign guys who will skewer anyone who runs against him.

“Only way in back of my mind do I think that maybe we could get the people on the west side, and in the fifth district to rise up and say, ‘No more.’ We’ve elected our mayor from lower east side for the last 16 years, and the city has gone in the tank. We haven’t had a robust city since [ex-Mayor Beverly] O’Neill got elected [in 1994].

“The guys who are going to vote for Foster are his neighbors in Naples, residents on the Peninsula. They know where their bread’s buttered.

“In the 3^rd district? People say to me, ‘You could beat Gary.’ And now, maybe so—if my own change of opinion about him is any indication. I was for Gary when he ran in 2006. I gave him money. I went to his fundraiser at [the law firm of] Keesal Young & Logan. Every mover-and-shaker and civic-minded celebrity in the city was there. But I’ve been disappointed with him. DeLong supported Measure I. He’s one of the leading proponents of the disastrous wetlands swap. He voted yes on the police pay raise … although he voted no on the firefighters’ pay raise, which was curious—I’m not sure why he would vote yes on one, no on other. So I’ve been really disappointed.

“DeLong never seems to take a strong position on anything. Instead of saying, ‘I am absolutely opposed to any increase in traffic at 2^nd and PCH and would not support any development where the number of [vehicle] trips would exceed the number of trips currently allowed by law—period,’ I haven’t heard him say that. He talks about mitigation measures. Hell, any traffic engineer will do a mitigation study that will say whatever you want it to say.

“With him, it’s all political speak: ‘We’re studying it,’ or ‘We’re waiting to hear what the constituents say.’ OK, well, I’m moving to the Peninsula and we say, ‘Crap! This is a parking lot down here!’ If developers want to put a parking structure and a 12-story building in the middle of the congestion that already exists—well, it’s going to be a mess. We don’t want to see that.

“I like Gary, personally. He’s a great guy. But I don’t think he’s done that good of a job. When I ask him about [supporting] Measure I, he says, ‘You saw that I didn’t vigorously speak for it.’

“I said, ‘You endorsed it and gave him [Foster] money!’

“He says, ‘But I didn’t promote it.’

“I said, ‘You’re either for something or against it, and you’ve got to have the balls to say it, one way or the other. If people agree, they vote for you; if not, they don’t.’

“Would I run? Only if I thought people were interested in putting somebody in that office who will focus 80 percent on fixing the budget. Virtually every problem we have can be tied to that budget. They haven’t fixed it in Foster’s four years, or in O’Neill’s 12 years before that. But no matter who is mayor, it all comes down to the council.

“I would have voted for Gary in 2006 if I had lived in the 3^rd district. I told him once, ‘I wish there were five of you on the council.’ I regret that now, because I think there are five of him on the council.

“Gary was the one who just made the motion on that $25 million oil bond, the one where we’ll take a financial advance now and have to buy more of our energy on the spot market in the future. He’s been slamming the wetlands deal through. Goddammit, Gary, I don’t get it!

“So, I’ve been thinking about running against DeLong, thinking about running against Foster, thinking about both of them. But have I said I would? No. Have I ruled it out? No, I haven’t. I’m thinking about it.

“This is a watershed election in 2010. If we can’t change how our elected officials are managing our resources then, we never will. It’s time to throw the bums out and make changes.

“I am a fiscal conservative. We’re gonna have to focus on essential city services over everything. We’re gonna have to focus on having clean neighborhoods with quality streets, curbs and gutters. “We’re going to have to focus on having good parks. Good schools. A safe city. If we do that, we’re going to have to put a fence around Long Beach to keep out all the people who would want to live here.

“Are our police and fire departments the most efficient? No. I’m sure there is a lot they can do to get better—but they need leadership to do that. I’d pay our city workers the highest in the state as long as they were most efficient in state. In the private sector, when you have factory, it’s not how much you pay your workers, it’s what they produce.

“There is not a team approach in solving problems. Our city workers are demoralized. You start cutting departments to the point where the workers do not have the resources necessary to do job—and they know they didn’t do good job—you are just demoralizing them.

“I ran for city council once and I didn’t ask for much help. I ran against Robb Webb, because I didn’t think he was doing a good job, and I took votes away from him. Rae [current 8^th district councilmember Gabelich] won because I ran.

“If I ran against Foster, I would have to have overwhelming support from people all over city who are tired of being second-class citizens.

“I hear from a lot of people who agree with me—people who I talked with when I was speaking out against Measure I. Many of them are Foster’s neighbors in Naples. They’d say, ‘We agree, but we can’t say anything.’ They were worried about getting on the mayor’s bad side. Well, those people have to start stepping up.

“They go to black-tie events. Some of these people do really nice things, give millions to charities but they don’t have … I don’t know … the courage to say something in public—to say, ‘Bob, you are doing a lousy job, something’s not working, we have change the way we are doing business.’ They believe that, but they don’t say it.

“I know what they say to me privately. Some do business with the city, and some hope to. Some of their livelihoods depend on doing business with the city. But all around them city is falling apart. They would be better off if they’d say, ‘Stop it!’

“Foster swept into town, the president of a publicly regulated utility, and called himself a businessman. But if he wanted a raise, all he had to do is go to the Public Utilities Commission and say he needed more money. I was a small businessman—I had to write checks, make payroll. If there was not enough, I didn’t get paid, but my workers did.

“I’ve lived here in Long Beach nearly all my life. I remember when it was a clean city, beautiful in the 50s, 60s and 70s. It’s not the same city it was.

“I read the other day that the Redevelopment Agency is spending more money in downtown’s east village to put in low-energy light poles. They get everything they want downtown but neither the city nor the RDA is doing much on west side of town or in north Long Beach.

“People keep asking me, ‘What are you worried about—you’re moving to the Peninsula?’ Ha! It doesn’t matter. I could move to an island, with a moat and armed guards, but if we allow any neighborhood to degenerate, what about the one next to it? And then the one after that? You lose one neighborhood, the whole city loses. It kills me, it kills me.

“I’ve been going to the SuperMex up in north Long Beach for years. None of my friends will go there. I walk in and the staff knows me. I like it there. But I look at the neighborhoods— with drug houses, parolees and dilapidated cesspool apartments—and I guess I can understand my friends’ reluctance. But why is it this way? Because people don’t have the jobs they used to have in Long Beach.

“The RDA has spent well over $170 million on streets, curbs and gutters—things the city is supposed to be providing. What if we put that RDA money into developing middle-class jobs in clean industries?

“I’m not a wealthy guy. I consider myself very fortunate, but I don’t have the money or connections to run an expensive campaign. But I might run. If I had the support of people who thought enough of my integrity, passion and enthusiasm—and that I’m smart enough. With my character, commitment and honesty, if people think that’s good enough, and were willing to work to make a change, I would do it. If not, they can watch the city go down in flames.”

I had two other questions for Mr. Jensen: Did he remember that I was copying everything he was saying? Did he realize I was intending to publish it?

This time, his answer was shorter.

“Publish whatever I said. I mean every word of it. Somebody has to have the courage to say what they mean.”

Tags: alamitos peninsula, Councilmember Gary DeLong, fiscal conservative, Los Cerritos Wetlands, Mayor Bob Foster, Naples, Redevelopment Agency, Terry Jensen, Virginia Country Club