As the Aquarium of the Pacific celebrates 10 years of operations, former Harbor Commissioner Joel Friedland still smells something fishy

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

The better part of 10 years has passed, and I’m not sure I’ve got the right number anymore, but I know it’s Joel Friedland the instant he answers the telephone. That flat, clipped, no-nonsense monotone is unmistakable. So is the fact that he answers by saying, “Joel Friedland speaking.”

“Good to hear your voice again,” I begin, and clipped monotone or not, I’m not blowing smoke—there’s something solid about the way this man talks. “Remember me?”

“Yep, one of the smart guys,” he says, nearly without expression. And he’s not blowing smoke, either—or not so much as you might think. He’s mostly calling me smart because he senses that I think he’s smart.

We both know why I’ve phoned: the Aquarium of the Pacific. It’s the only reason I’ve ever called Joel Friedland—three times now, spanning the last decade.

“I’m not so much against the Aquarium,” he quickly reminds me, as he always has—as he will again, several times, during our conversation. “I just think they way they did it was illegal.”

Friedland thought that in 1998, when I wrote a story for now-defunct New Times Los Angeles about his objections to the Aquarium’s $117.5-million financing scheme (the guarantee of its private construction bonds with public money), the lawsuit he filed to stop it and his dire predictions for the facility’s economic self-sufficiency.

Friedland thought that in 2000, when I did an update for OC Weekly as his forecasts were becoming reality—when a drastic shortfall in projected attendance forced Long Beach officials to make big cutbacks at the Aquarium and to begin spending millions of dollars in public money to service the annual debt payment on the private bonds.

And Friedland thinks that now, as the Aquarium begins a year-long celebration of its 10th anniversary, with just about everybody pretending to forget that a project that was supposed to pay for itself now costs the city in the range of $5 million to $6 million a year—a bill taxpayers will be footing annually for decades.

“I have nothing against the Aquarium,” Friedland told me in 1998, just before it opened. “I just think the people who want it should pay for it. As a taxpayer, I’m opposed to using public money to guarantee a private project. As a capitalist, I believe that if people want to invest in something, they should take a risk just like everybody else.”

But no capitalists wanted to risk their money on an aquarium in the mid-1990s. Especially in Long Beach, where the Navy was headed out of town, the shipyards were closing, McDonnell-Douglas was scaling back and the Walt Disney Company had recently bailed on big plans for an amusement park—including an aquarium—around the Queen Mary. Apparently, capitalists didn’t believe the glowing feasibility study by Coopers & Lybrand—hired by the development company Kajima International, which wanted to build the Aquarium—that promised some two million people a year would file through the facility, which would provide enough money to pay back the construction debt and feed the fish, with money left over.

“There were no takers,” Friedland recalls. “But then, inserted into the middle of a prospectus almost two inches thick, came a statement from the Port of Long Beach that would ensure the bonds were guaranteed. There would be no risk to bond holders. And when those bonds went on sale, they sold out in a couple of hours. They were five times oversubscribed.

“All this time those people have been making risk-free money. And the people of Long Beach—because the city guarantees the bonds now, using funds it gets by taking 10 percent of the Port’s profit every year—have been paying for it. I still think that’s wrong.”

Ten years later, I’ve called Joel Friedland to find out whatever happened to the only guy with the gumption to stand in the path of a very big plan that was being steamrollered by a lot of very influential people.

Surprise! He got flattened.

Friedland figures that, one way or another, his opposition to the Aquarium’s public-private partnership cost him his seat on the Long Beach Harbor Commission, affected his standing in certain circles of the community and slapped him with a reputation as a negative, eccentric crank—the kind former Mayor Beverly O’Neill used to call CAVE people (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) when they opposed her projects . . . which, by the way, included the Aquarium.

“If you don’t want to go along with what all the cows want to do, then, you know, it makes you an enemy,” Friedland says now. “They label you a naysayer. That’s stupid. It was just a difference of opinion, but the reaction of certain people was to make me into an enemy.”

Go-along-to-get-along is a deeply ensconced trait in Long Beach. It’s amazing how much the city is still haunted by its historic inferiority complex—a fear of being overshadowed by Los Angeles or outshined by Orange County. What makes this neurosis truly dangerous is that it seems to manifest more and more intensely the higher you look on the social ladder or government chain of command. Most residents already recognize Long Beach for the great place it is to live.

But there has been a tendency for city officials (and the insiders who prop them up and prod them on) to feel dissatisfied with Long Beach’s miles of namesake shoreline and bored by taking care of the streets that connect an assortment of ethnic, cultural, architectural and economic neighborhoods that pretty much encompass the modern American experience. They want to do something special to put Long Beach on the map—never mind that as the state’s fifth-largest city, it’s already there (go ahead and look). They want something that will reflect their own importance.

Ultimately, this desperation for get-rich-and/or-famous-quick schemes simply makes them—and Long Beach—the perfect sucker for every huckster’s pitch. It enables opportunists to mask their self-serving plans as civic pride. Three recent reports from City Auditor Laura Doud on the state of some of Long Beach’s most treasured institutions reveal how tragically that pathology is playing out again.

• The Queen Mary: A just-released audit shows how longtime operator Joe Prevratil used an incomprehensible financial structure to enrich himself by nearly $8 million while driving Long Beach’s city icon into bankruptcy. Of course, this is just the latest in a 40-year tradition of using the legendary ship to turn local bucks into civic bilge.

• The Long Beach Museum of Art: The first half of a two-part audit emphasizes that the Foundation that runs the museum has only $388,000 of the $3,060,000—do the math: a shortfall of $2,672,000—that is needed to pay back the construction bond on its new gallery, due in about 14 months. Also? A bunch of masterpieces are missing.

• The Sea Festival: An audit released on April 15 reveals that the event’s president, Chris Pook, stiffed the city for $37,000 while operating it without official oversight and while spending $273,000 in city money and using city-paid staff.

But in this latter case the audit goes further—to the root of the overall problem—by suggesting that Pook’s fast-and-loose operation of the Sea Festival is symptomatic of a pervasive civic culture: “Specifically, we found that the city may not be identifying and recovering all incremental costs attributable to privately held events,” the report said. In other words, certain private-sector insiders in Long Beach use public resources without oversight.

Meanwhile, and perhaps not coincidental-ly, Long Beach as a whole is facing a $17.1 million structural deficit.

All of this may establish Friedland’s decade-ago fight against the Aquarium’s financing plan as a model for putting your foot down. But it could also be a cautionary tale of a homeboy who was turned upon by his hometown.

Fashion Avenue was still unpaved in the 1940s when Joel Friedland was growing up on the west side of Long Beach, just over the Los Angeles River. Trucks saddled with big tanks would come by a couple times a year and drizzle oil all over the street in front of his house to keep the dust down.

“As a kid, my playgrounds were Admiral Kidd Park, Silverado Park and the flood control channel,” he recalls, breaking into a rare chuckle. “Even at that time there was a huge amount of trash that used to come downstream.”

Friedland attended Poly High, graduating in the mid-1950s, and went into the family business his father had founded in 1944. Seaside, Inc., produced and exported protective coatings for wood furniture. Eventually, Friedland took over the company. Seaside’s successful tradition advanced and prospered under his leadership.

Along the way, Friedland made a name for himself as a voice for local business, a political activist on the west side and a source of campaign fundraising—a big fish who swam in some of the city’s most exclusive ponds. But there was always something different about him.

“My wife says I’m an 18th-century person,” says Friedland, who is actually only 70. “Back when Jim Hankla was city manager, he once told me my politics were to the right of Attila the Hun. I’m not exactly sure what either of those statements mean, but I’ll admit I don’t like the newfangled telephones and that kind of stuff.”

In fact, Friedland has a very good idea of what people are driving at when they describe him that way, and he sounds proud.

“I’ve got some traditional values, and I never change my spots,” he says. “I won’t sacrifice my own system of ethics or morality for sake of money or any other consideration. I just won’t do it. I was never a ’fraidy cat.”

Friedland’s status in the community was epitomized in 1987, when then-Mayor Ernie Kell appointed him to the Harbor Commission, the five-member board that oversees the Port of Long Beach.

“I’d always known Joel to be a man of good character,” says Kell. “He stands out as someone who stands up for what he believes. He doesn’t go along with public opinion all the time. I thought that was a good trait for a position like harbor commissioner.”

“When Kell appointed me,” says Friedland, “he told me, ‘I want you to keep being Joel Friedland.’ I said, ‘Ernie, I have to—I can’t be anybody else. I’m not going to lie.’’’

According to Friedland, that’s why he resigned from the Harbor Commission at the end of 1994—six months before it voted on a plan that enabled the Aquarium’s public-private financing scheme to go forward. “But the thing is, I didn’t know that at the time,” he says. “I didn’t know that I was being tricked—extortion is really what it was—to resign.”

Friedland believed he was resigning from the Harbor Commission so he could sell his west side business property to the Redevelopment Agency without a conflict of interest—a last-minute condition of sale that threatened to thwart the transaction and cause him severe financial damage. Friedland now believes the whole issue was orchestrated by Hankla to get him off the board and clear the way for Aquarium approval.

“Hankla knew the Aquarium deal was coming and he knew I would never go for the Port guaranteeing those bonds,” says Friedland. “Of course, I only had one vote, but he was afraid I would speak up—that I would use my seat on the Harbor Commission as a bully pulpit.”

Hankla denies Friedland’s accusation. “That had nothing to do with the Aquarium,” he says simply, allowing his weary tone to insinuate his feelings about Friedland’s contention all these years later. Interestingly, Hankla is now a member of the Harbor Commission—in fact, has just been elected to an unprecedented second term as its president.

But Friedland didn’t need a pulpit. When the Aquarium financing plan was revealed, he opposed it as a private citizen, writing letters to the editor and attending meetings of the Harbor Commission and City Council. Soon after those panels approved the plan by unanimous votes on back-to-back days in June, Friedland filed a lawsuit to invalidate the plan. His suit charged that by guaranteeing private bonds to build the Aquarium, the Harbor Commission had illegally authorized a gift of public money, and that the City Council had illegally pledged public funds for a use that was inconsistent with the public trust of the Tidelands Fund.

Friedland lost. His suit finally concluded its long, futile journey through the courts in March 1998—about the time construction on the Aquarium was being wrapped up. Significantly, however, the court rulings never addressed the central issues of his suit—only that he didn’t file it within the required 60-day window.

But the court case wasn’t all Friedland lost, and the extent of the offense he caused by raising a ruckus was epitomized one evening when he and former City Council Member Ray Grabinski attended an event at the Long Beach Arena. Friedland says that another former city council member named Les Robbins—a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officer—suddenly approached menacingly. “I wound up with his fist stuck in my face,” Friedland says, as matter-of-factly as ever. “He came up to me angry, like he was going to hit me. He had a big ring on his finger. He put his fist right in my face. All because I had a different opinion. All because I was going against the grain.”

“I don’t have any recollection of doing that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if did,” says Robbins, who now writes for the Beachcomber and has long ago retired as a council member and a law enforcement officer. “Joe had become such a cynical and negative old man by then that he was opposed to doing just about anything in city. He was one of the Harbor Commissioners who didn’t want anything near the waterfront that could in any way, shape or form compete with the Port of Long Beach.”

Ten years after, Friedland is writing loans for Farmers & Merchants Bank. Nothing wrong with that, of course. He proudly invites me down to the Rossmoor branch to take a look.

“It’s the strongest bank in California, owned by the same founding family for more than a century,” Friedland says softly, standing next to his desk, which sits amid a bunch of other desks in the middle of a paper-shuffling hush. “It has survived and stayed strong because it gets the true answers to three basic questions when it makes a loan: ‘Why do you need it? How are you going to pay it back? When are you going to pay it back?’ That’s why I’m comfortable here.”

The Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific officially opened on June 20, 1998—on schedule, under budget and dedicated to providing visitors with a simulated tour of the world’s largest and most-diverse body of water, from Southern California and Baja to the Northern Pacific to the Tropical Pacific. Over the years, its animal population has grown to more than 12,500 creatures, representing more than 500 species, and its exhibit space has expanded to include the Shark Lagoon and a Lorikeet Forest aviary.

Attendance has been on the upswing, the last few years reaching 1.4 million visitors annually—although some 200,000 of those are unpaid visits from school kids. The anniversary celebration that will continue all year is full of plays on the number 10: a focus on the Aquarium’s 10 most-popular animals, 10 daily prize giveaways, 10 daily music performances and anyone born on the tenth of any month gets in for 10 bucks.

There’s no denying the appeal of the place, from the dramatic shape of the tanks that curve majestically inside right up to the wavy architecture of the roof, which is meant to suggest the ocean waves—but might also make you think of a mirage.

Whatever local citizens have in the Aquarium they helped bankroll in the mid-1990s, it isn’t what they were sold. The Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific wasn’t supposed to cost them anything. Then again, that’s not what the place is called, anymore. A few years ago, “Long Beach” was suddenly dropped from its name, with neither notification nor explanation.

Now it’s just the Aquarium of the Pacific, and depending on who’s doing the talking—and when—that translates into a zoo, a museum, a school, a demonstration project for green construction, a crossroads for the cultures of the world, a networking site for business or a really cool place to have a wedding reception.

“It’s so much more than just a fish tank,” says Hankla. “It’s a cultural and educational icon that celebrates our diversity as people and our proximity and dependence on the Pacific Ocean. It’s the culmination of a joint vision that has turned a tidal mud flat into the centerpiece of our city’s revival.”

After significant restructuring of the original financing, Long Beach now owns the Aquarium of the Pacific. The city receives an annual payment of $3.528 million from the Aquarium’s board of directors. But it coughs up millions more in yearly debt service on those private bonds mostly from Tidelands funds—which are enriched by an annual $10 million from the Port of Long Beach . . . an arrangement that began about the time the Aquarium’s financing scheme was approved.

Is it worth it?

“Let me ask you this,” says Hankla. “Which school in the Long Beach Unified School District pays for itself? This is in all respects a school. Which museum that you know of pays for itself? The Museum of Natural History has been at death’s door many times. When you stop and think that for many years the city was paying $2.5 million annually to the Hyatt Regency, the Aquarium is not out of proportion.”

Steve Goodling, who heads the Long Beach Visitors and Convention Bureau, says the Aquarium has “helped elevate” the image of Long Beach. “Many people still think of us as a Navy town or run down, and the Aquarium’s family orientation changes that. It also educates the locals. When we are bidding for conventions, associations often ask their local memberships about the city. The Aquarium is something locals can recommend.”

Aquarium director Jerry Schubel, who’s been at the helm for six years—and who inherited the financial nightmare and has turned the facility into one of the most prestigious in the country—insists that the economic impact on Long Beach has been about a half-billion dollars over the past 10 years.

“On top of that, it’s a wonderful institution,” he says. “It’s hard for me to imagine what Long Beach would be like without the Aquarium.”

Not for Joel Friedland.

“I’ve never been there,” he says. “I’m not interested, and it’s a matter of principle, too. It irritates me, the way it was done—so much that I couldn’t very well enjoy going down there.”

Friedland still believes the use of public Tidelands funds to pay the private Aquarium bonds is illegal, and he huffs a little when informed of Schubel’s estimate of the Aquarium’s economic worth and Hankla’s comparison of the Aquarium with a school.

“Building a school wouldn’t be an allowable use of the State Lands Trust, either,” Friedland cracks. “The whole thing was a shell game—money comes out of the Port and into one or more of the Tidelands funds and then, through some way that nobody can quite figure out, the Aquarium’s bills get paid. If millions of dollars are available, shouldn’t the people have some say on how it is spent?”

Friedland is still speaking in that flat monotone, but as we’ve talked I’ve begun to think I can detect some emotional nuance in his expression. Near the end of our conversation, I dare to ask him my first personal questions: How did it feel to go up against Long Beach’s most powerful people, many of whom were your personal friends? Did all of this hurt you? Was it painful?

“It didn’t change anything,” Friedland says curtly.

And pauses.

But then, goes on.

“When you’re involved in politics, you think everybody likes you, but in fact it doesn’t happen that way. You assume people who are nice to you have good feelings for you, but they don’t. It wasn’t painful. Not really. I didn’t like the way it turned out, but you pay your money and you take your chances.

“Once a year the Harbor Department has a dinner for all the former commissioners—we just had it four or five weeks ago. They give us general updates about what’s going on. But they don’t get into where that money goes, and I don’t ask. Jim Hankla and I are still cordial, but it’ll never be the same. You can’t take it too personally . . . although, it’s very personal.”

Tags: Aquarium of the Pacific, harbor commission, jim hankla, joel friedland, Long Beach, Port of Long Beach, Tidelands Fund