Belmont Shore businessmen want taxpayers to pay for improvements around their properties

PHOTO by JENNY STOCKDALE
A small group of wealthy Belmont Shore businessmen and landowners, some who hold quasi-governmental positions, are taking another run at a $5.8 million bond issue to pave alleys around their properties and pay one of them—former city councilman Frank Colonna—$1.5 million [...]

I’m still amazed at the meeting I went to last night in Belmont Shore. Amazed at how quickly nothing happened–and by nothing, I mean a whole lot. So much, in fact, that by the time Marine Bureau Manager Mark Sandoval said “I think we’re done here,” the meeting broke out into the kind of cheering [...]

Robert Garcia and Shaun Lumachi, important players in downtown Long Beach politics who have operated the for-profit website LBPost.com for about a year, finally have a Long Beach business license, according to a story posted today by Bill Pearl on LBReport.com
It was a week ago (Dec. 21) that Pearl broke the story that LBPost.com had been [...]

FROM LBREPORT.COM:Robert Garcia, who has been positioning himself for a likely run for the Long Beach City Council since he lost his job as an aide to former council member and failed mayoral candidate Frank Colonna in 2006, has been operating a local news website for nearly a year without a Long Beach business license, [...]

AND $1.5 MILLION FOR FRANK COLONNA!
Even as they downplayed the importance of their 7-0 vote Tuesday evening, the members of the Long Beach City Council nonetheless set in motion a process that could ultimately result in a $5.8-million bond issue to renovate the alleys behind the Belmont Shore business district–and pay that district’s former councilman, [...]

Former City Council member Frank Colonna may make as much as $1.5 million by selling the city a Belmont Shore parking lot he has for years maintained for the businesses that rent space in a building he owns on the corner of Second Street and Park Avenue.
Two items on the consent calendar of tonight’s City Council meeting set the stage for [...]

THURS AUG. 30: THE ENCROACHMENT GENIE–THANKS, P-T
Tues | Aug 28 It’s been a week since we ran Dave Wielenga’s story about 31 Alamitos Peninsula residents who’ve extended their homes onto the public beach. “Property Lines in the Sand” has inspired a sandstorm of positive e-mail—as well as a how-do-you-do from Jeremy Colonna, who called to [...]

Long Beach officials are aware many Peninsula residents have built out onto the public beach. They just don’t do anything about it.

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
The Alamitos Peninsula was lifted from ancient wetlands through the most exceptional kind of public-private partnership: the idle play of Mother Nature combined with some impressively focused works of human engineering [...]