Is developer Tom Dean so accustomed to the city’s sweets that he’s sneaking a slice of land without council approval?

PHOTO by DAVE WIELENGA

It sounds cliché, but the loving generosity that Long Beach government officials seem determined to bestow upon local land/oil/political baron Tom Dean may truly know no bounds. This is the impression provided by the latest batch of city hall documents obtained by The District Weekly. Amid the paperwork are the sickeningly saccharine details of two taxpayer-funded Valentines that city staff and elected officials gave Dean last February.

“It’s bad enough that the city mismanages taxpayer assets to give sweetheart deals to well-connected insiders,” steams Terry Jensen, a lifetime Long Beach resident who has a long career in commercial real estate—and is the man who acquired the large stack of city documents by filing a public records request. “But it is incredible—it’s unconscionable—that these deals are going on at the same time the city is talking about laying off police, firefighters, city workers and cutting budgets.”

You already know about the first deal.

On Feb. 3, staff recommended and council voted 6-2 to preliminarily approve a heart-shaped land swap that gave Dean 12.1 acres of prime port-adjacent city property in exchange for 33.77 acres of his contaminated oil fields—minus the oil rights—in the Los Cerritos Wetlands area.

Except, that wasn’t the first deal.

In fact, precisely one item earlier on that same Feb. 3 agenda, staff had recommended and council had unanimously endorsed a lease amendment that gave Dean up to a half-century of control over two other valuable pieces of the taxpayers’ pie—a combined 5.77 acres located in the heart of the harbor area—for nearly nothing. How near? Three cents per square foot. That’s going to translate into rent of about $14,260 per month or $171,120 per year.

If that strikes you as underpriced for a swath of property perfectly situated to serve the port’s truck traffic—the parcels literally sit at the edge of a Terminal Island Freeway on-ramp—Dean, himself, has proven you right. Two months after Public Works Director Mike Conway coaxed the council into approving the lease by claiming Dean needed the land to store the heavy equipment of his crane business, documents show Dean is now trying to sublease the two parcels for truck and container storage at 22 cents per square foot. That’s more than seven times higher than the rent he’s paying taxpayers.
But Dean’s not only getting fat off city land. After feeding for so long off the taxpayers’ dessert cart, he may be getting greedy, too. Or perhaps he’s sugar buzzing. There’s got to be some explanation for a publicly circulated real estate listing that suggests Dean has helped himself to another slice of public land—a 2.1-acre strip that connects the parcels he’s officially leased—without even bothering to get City Council approval.

The listing by Dean’s preferred real estate broker, Coldwell Banker Commercial, advertises a “Heavyweight Container Yard” and describes the site as “5-to-11.83-acre container-permitted.” At 22 cents per square foot, Dean’s annual revenue would work out to be between $900,000 to and $1,100,000—almost $1 million more than the rent he’s paying the city.

How does a 5.77-acre lease become 11.83 acres? There are at least two parts to the answer, and they bring us to that know-no-bounds generosity mentioned at the outset of this story: First, as previously noted, it’s done by grabbing and adding that 2.1-acre strip to the approved leases; second, as seems to be disturbingly typical, it’s done with some sleight-of-verbiage in the city staff’s description of the deals to the city council.

City Manager Pat West downplayed the value of the city’s asset when he introduced the deal at the Feb. 3 council meeting, describing it as “an excess piece of property adjacent to the Terminal Island Freeway.” Comparatively, Coldwell Banker agent Jonathan Wickwire’s listing subsequently described the property’s location as “on the Terminal Island Freeway, a heavyweight corridor.”

Conway’s report to council not only minimized the value of the land—emphasizing its “unique constraints and limited market”—but also the dimensions of the property. He spoke of “usable acres,” rather than the exact size of the parcels, and based Dean’s rent payments on the much smaller areas. But as the Coldwell Banker listing shows, Dean is marketing the entire 11.83-acre site at prices far above what Conway’s presentation suggested it is worth. Conway told council the city had tried and failed to market the property, but Jensen’s public records request asked for all marketing materials, and the city attorney apparently could find none.

“This is so typical of these damn staff reports,” says Jensen, a former member—appointed by ex-Mayor Beverly O’Neill—of the Redevelopment Agency board. “It’s plausible bullshit—it sounds good if you don’t know the business. Everybody who does know rolls their eyes.”

Conway, of course, is the guy whose cozy negotiations with Dean resulted in the land swap also mentioned earlier in this article—the exchange of the city’s easily developable 12.1-acre Public Service Yard against the Los Angeles River for 33.77 acres of could-be wetlands out near Studebaker Road and Second Street. City Attorney Robert Shannon is so concerned about what Conway may have omitted or mischaracterized in his presentation to council on the deal that he is bringing it back for reconsideration on May 5.

In a brief telephone interview about the port-area lease, Conway told The District Weekly that the numbers are sketchy because they haven’t been finalized yet.

“The recommendation to council called for the lease of a gross area, as well as a net area that could be utilized efficiently and upon which the rent is based,” Conway said. “We haven’t completed calculations on the net area yet. As grading and improvements continue on that site, those will be determined.”

In a series of follow-up questions presented to Conway by e-mail, The District Weekly asked about the unauthorized claim that Dean seems to have laid to the 2.1-acre strip that connecting the two parcels he’s leasing from the city. For background, Conway was reminded of an e-mail Dean sent to him on March 12, 2009—the morning after Dean received what he called “the final square-footage numbers” of all three parcels from the city’s senior surveyor, Kimberly A. Holtz. In this e-mail, Dean appears to be advising Conway that he is going to be using the center strip at a rent of $1 per month.

“Then I agreed to use the center as a drive isle [sic], but only rented for $1/mo. as I can only use it for access. This is to keep the traffic engineer happy,” Dean wrote to Conway.

Conway’s e-mailed reply to The District Weekly didn’t exactly answer the implications of Dean’s assertions. “WLB [Dean’s limited liability corporation on this deal] inquired about leasing the intervening dirt, and this was not pursued. We are finalizing the actual net square footages of the property under lease, so I don’t believe the square footage and lease rates referenced in the e-mail are accurate. WLB has no authority to use or market the intervening property.”

The question is, what are they—city staff, city council, anybody—going to do about it? Or more to the point: What are citizens going to do about it?

Tags: city council, land-swap, Long Beach, Los Cerritos Wetlands, Mike Conway, Terry Jensen, Tom Dean