And what’s this about a two-year “gap in service”?

Time to leave work early today, for this afternoon’s budget study session, at 3:30 at City Hall, 333 W. Ocean Blvd.
Among the hot topics, of course, will be what to do with the city’s leaky 32-year-old Main Library

Giving us one more reason to consider remembering the November election for the rest of our natural lives, Long Beach City Council voted 8-1 last night to put Mayor Bob Foster’s $571 million infrastructure improvement plan on the ballot in about three and a half months.
In other words, it’s now known as the Long Beach [...]

 The Long Beach City Council unanimously took another step Tuesday night toward giving a small group of Belmont Shore landowner/businessmen/kinda-sorta-government officials another shot at a bond issue election that would pave the alleys around their properties and pay former city councilman Frank Colonna $1.5 million for a parking lot that serves his tenants.
But the 8-0 [...]

Some of Belmont Shore’s biggest landowners and businessmen, operating under the authority of two quasi-governmental agencies in the quaint seaside district, are taking another run at a bond issue that would pave the alleys around their properties and pay a former city councilman $1.5 million for a parking lot. Good deal if you can get [...]

Mayor Bob Foster gets the profile treatment from Paul Eakins in this morning’s Press-Telegram, and his $571 million plan to rebuild the city’s infrastructure gets a separate examination.
Foster’s own take on his plan–which according to the P-T will require Long Beach City Council to “unanimously approve a declaration of fiscal emergency”? He doesn’t think it [...]

Mayor Bob Foster is expected to say more this morning about his $570 million plans to rebuild streets, sidewalks and alleys–plus the more bureaucratic-sounding storm water management systems–but already we know more than we did about what’s in store.
In this morning’s Press-Telegram, Paul Eakins reports on a 102-page streets audit City Auditor Laura Doud released [...]

Another year, another city budget–this one made perhaps more interesting by what they’re now calling a projected $16.9 structural deficit in the 2009 Fiscal Year.
Otherwise, this afternoon’s Long Beach City Council budget workshop in Council Chambers veered from dry (four words: “Successful Refuse Nexus Study”) to, in Vice Mayor Bonnie Lowenthal’s words, “draconian”

In memory of George Carlin, in tribute to perhaps his best-remembered bit—The Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV—and in utter amazement at the level of discourse from a mayorally appointed Long Beach community officer, we now present the “Seven Words and Phrases that Belmont Shore Parking Commissioner Kurt Schneiter Used to Insult Belmont Shore [...]

Somehow, we missed Press-Telegram reporter Kris Hanson’s latest port report yesterday–which is too bad, because it kinda reads like a script for the TV series The Fabulous Life of … .
The “of” in this case is Port of Long Beach harbor commissioners, Mayor Bob Foster and Second District Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal, who have flown many [...]

Chanting slogans and carrying signs — most of them critical of Mayor Bob Foster – an assortment of public health organizations and community activists  marched for an hour outside Long Beach City Hall Tuesday afternoon, complaining that a new Port of Long Beach (POLB) policy unfairly places the burden of reducing air pollution on the low-incomes of independent truckers.
When they [...]