From the Long Beach Post: Man stabbed outside beachside restaurant in Long Beach; suspect arrested

Only in Long Beach does the City spend $10 MILLION of your tax dollars to get into the beach restaurant development business, on a beach where—because City Hall apparently can’t handle basic functions like dealing with the homelessness crisis—you can watch homeless people stab each other… all while enjoying your pan-roasted salmon with salsa criolla or filet mignon lomo saltado.

According to the Long Beach Post, the altercation happened just outside the restaurant’s pickup window on the west side of the building.

Blood stains were reportedly still visible on the concrete hours later.

The victim was reported to be in stable condition.

Bon appétit, Long Beach.

When we talk about the Homelessness Industrial Complex—of which Long Beach is one of the great fountains of hundreds of millions in blood-soaked (figuratively speaking) cash, behind only places like LA and Seattle—THIS is what we’re talking about.

From the Los Angeles Times: L.A. shelter provider has paid CEO who lives in Hawaii $1.6 million in salary, vacation over two years

Billions of dollars pour into the homelessness system while people continue to sleep and die on the streets. Money that could be going toward lifesaving emergency shelter and getting people drug addiction and mental health treatment instead goes to... paying a “nonprofit” CEO roughly $400,000 a year while she remotely “works” from her home in Hawaii.

According to the L.A. Times, her compensation and paid vacation totaled $1.6 million over two years.

Let them eat poke!

I’m not the first to say this, but, duh: The very first cuts should be to the novel new “deputy mayor” positions Mayor Rex Richardson created upon taking office — additions to his personal mayoral staff that seem designed largely to aggrandize his position, as if Long Beach had an executive mayor like Los Angeles does.

From the Long Beach Post: Firefighters warn of worse response times, overburdened stations as city debates cuts to LBFD

But has there been one mention of cutting those positions from Rex? Or from the politically subservient city mismanager?

Of course not.

The Fire Department is warning that the proposed cuts could mean slower emergency response times and increasingly overburdened stations. Yet somehow, the mayor’s expanded personal staff remains untouchable.

Apparently, Rex would sooner ask residents to die than give up his deputy mayors.

Downtown continues its decline under the reins of Long Beach’s succession of man-child, stepping-stone mayors...

From the Long Beach Post: Broadway Pizza closes after 20 years, another sign of Long Beach’s changing downtown

After 20 years in Downtown Long Beach, Broadway Pizza is calling it quits.

Five break-ins in its final 18 months. A SWAT standoff that cost the business a full day of sales and left tear-gas residue in the kitchen — while the suspect apparently just sauntered out unnoticed. And even the folks hired (by the city-established business district, which imposes significant assessments) to clean the neighborhood managed to push filthy sidewalk water underneath the restaurant’s door.

None of these things, individually, killed the business.

It was the accumulation of what owner Mike Rosetti called the “headaches” of doing business Downtown.

And where is he going? Los Alamitos. Just across the city line to a more rational local governance.

Twenty years in Long Beach and gone.

It’s a common theme among both longtime small business owners and longtime residents: In what should be the greatest place on earth, almost every other pasture is beginning to look greener.

There are many potential causes of urban decay, from macroeconomic dislocation to natural disasters. But we have the greatest natural and economic positioning conceivable.

And we are still managing to squander it all.

The bill is increasingly coming due for poor electoral choices manifesting in an ever deepening crisis of corrupt and inept municipal mismanagement.

The speech did not in fact specifically allege any miscounted votes in 2020 or other elections, albeit the general implication was there. It did make a number of questionable suggestions, thoroughly reviewed in this annotated transcript by CNN.

While Trump’s history of rhetoric on the topic undermines his personal credibility on the subject (the subject being that of taking a serious lens to election integrity and voting system security and auditability, something neither party seems interested in at the moment), the fact is that embedded in the speech were a few basic legitimate and important points, summarized in this excerpt:

“Every American deserves to know that, when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure.

One where cheating and interference are not just difficult, but virtually impossible. Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard.”

Sentence structure aside, few would disagree with these words as a general statement.

Later in the speech, Trump also said:

“This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes, like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.”

While hyperbolic, there is truth to that statement, as well.

Many modern electronic voting systems are built on cheap software stacks, where security was an afterthought if considered at all.

Rather than treating election systems as critical infrastructure, they have been treated as profit centers by the for-profit companies which have been contracted by states and counties for provision of hardware and software.

Technology experts for years have, for example, raised concerns about the vulnerabilities of the Dominion voting system used in Georgia and other states.

To raise vulnerability concerns is not to allege any particular rigged election. Simply because no direct evidence of a stolen election has emerged heretofore does not mean that these systems should simply be accepted without very serious scrutiny.

The basic dilemma is this: Digital voting systems, by their very nature, are far less transparent to the public than analogue voting systems.

The unwillingness to accept and reckon with that fact by election administrators is what fundamentally opens the floodgates to election denialism in certain specific instances and the slow erosion of confidence in the electoral system in general.

LA County and Smartmatic

As part of Trump’s speech, he announced the declassification of a large trove of documents regarding many aspects of election integrity. Many of these documents are quite old while others are more recent.

What interested me was a particular, recently drafted CIA Note summarizing what is known about the long history of vote rigging in Venezuela and its relationship to Smartmatic, a voting systems vendor founded by three Venezuelan engineers working together in Caracas in the late ‘90s. Smartmatic has served as the vendor/servicer for LA County’s bespoke (designed to our own particular specifications) voting system, VSAP (an acronym for Voting Solutions for All People), for the last eight years.

This CIA Note, while not breaking any major news regarding Smartmatic, is indeed fascinating.

It adds some color regarding underlying Intelligence Community assessments regarding Smartmatic’s potential role in vote manipulation in Venezuela during the Chavez era beyond what was already known.

The known part being that CFIUS (the federal interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) pressured the company out of the US voting systems market back in ‘06-’07. The late Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney was the public face of that pressure, but there was unsurprisingly more going on behind the scenes at CIA.

It remains staggering that LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan chose to bring this company back into the US barely a decade (and several scandals, including in Belgium, Estonia, and the Philippines and some corporate reorganization) later.

However, more recent events perhaps shed some light on that decision:

• 2024: Biden Dept. of Justice (DoJ) brings Corrupt Foreign Practices Act (CFPA) charges against Smartmatic’s co-founder/president and a fellow company exec. for funneling $1 million in bribes to the head of the Philippine Election Commission, in order to win the voting systems contract, during the 2015-2018 period, with the bribes allegedly funded by means of a slush fund created by over-charging for the cost of each voting machine (AP)

• 2025: Trump DoJ adds to those charges, alleging the head of Venezuela’s election commission (National Electoral Council) was bribed by the same Smartmatic exec with a house (Miami Herald)

The need to prosecute Smartmatic executives would appear to be one of the few consistent themes between Biden and Trump departments of Justice.

That fact alone should pique one’s interest. Before I get a bit deeper into Smartmatic’s history, however, a proviso: Everything to do with Smartmatic is shadowy.

Let’s take that alleged house bribe in Venezuela, as a prime example.

It came in the wake of Smartmatic finally seeming to break with the Chavez-Maduro dictatorship in August 2017, with the company declaring that the government had inflated voter turnout figures, potentially corrupting the national Constituent Assembly elections.

It was just one month later, however, on Sept. 18, 2017, that LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan’s office issued the RFP (Request for Proposals) officially soliciting voting system vendors to bid on the massive contract for the final stage of development of VSAP.

The parameters and desired design elements of VSAP has already been developed by a committee of stakeholders first convened in 2011, and the goal of replacing the previous manual voting system (InkaVote Plus) had been a priority for Logan dating back nearly to his initial appointment as Registrar in 2008 (he formally began the process in 2009). So the need to hire a primary contractor to develop and/or assemble (from sub-contractors) the components and make them work together would have been well known in the small world of election tech vendors well before the issuance of the RFP.

Did Smartmatic have an inside track on this massive contract, their entrée back into the United States after a decade in the wilderness?

And… Was the break with the Venezuelan government an attempt to kick the muck off their boots before striding into Los Angeles County?

Those questions remain unanswered.

What is known is that, once Smartmatic’s bid was approved by the LA County Board of Supervisors in June 2018, the turnaround time was head-spinning, with delivery just two months later and a payday in the hundreds of millions:

“Both LA County and Secretary of State Alex Padilla made much of the fact that Smartmatic had developed the software for VSAP from open source code, but that very fact and the stunningly quick turnaround time for the multi-million dollar contract may leave taxpayers in the county wondering: How much of the software in the voting system Los Angeles just spent millions of dollars for was already available in the public domain– for free? Did Los Angeles County just pay Smartmatic $282 million to mostly copy and paste some public domain code?” (IVN)

Then, in 2019, US prosecutors allege, Smartmatic was right back in the tropical muck, per the Miami Herald last year:

The U.S. government plans to present photographs, witness testimony, and encrypted text messages to demonstrate that [Smartmatic co-founder] Piñate, 49, orchestrated the transfer of an upper-middle-class home with a pool to Lucena Ramírez between April and July 2019. Prosecutors claim the house was offered as a bribe to secure favorable treatment from Lucena, who, as president of Venezuela’s National Electoral Council wielded broad authority over the country’s controversial voting system and its private vendors. (Miami Herald)

Smartmatic had declared in 2017, along with the allegation regarding the Constituent Assembly elections, that they would not work in their home country anymore (after 13 long years of election systems contracting there).

DoJ says the alleged 2019 house bribe was intended to repair the rift and get them back into the game in Venezuela.

Unfortunately, subsequent to adding on the house bribe charges, the Trump DoJ has gone and potentially muddled things, issuing a superseding FCPA indictment against the entire Smartmatic corporation last October.

It did that just as it was pulling back on FCPA prosecutions of entire corporations in general, handing Smartmatic the opportunity to make a motion to dismiss the charges based on selective and vindictive prosecution.

That motion remains pending, with a trial (assuming there still is one) not until next year.

Meanwhile, more has come out regarding the relationship between, Dean Logan and Smartmatic execs in civil litigation.

Anyone who followed the fallout from the feverish period immediately after the November 2020 presidential election may recall a famous lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News in early 2021. It concerned the ‘Stop the Steal’ rhetoric of on air hosts and their allegations primarily regarding the Dominion systems used in Georgia. Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani also sought to draw a connection with Smartmatic, suggesting a nexus between stolen elections in Venezuelan and voting rigging in the US election.

The connection between Smartmatic and Dominion, two corporate rivals in the election systems business, was, however, always tenuous at best.

To explain it, such that it was, a further trip back into Smartmatic’s history is required.

Smartmatic’s first big contract came in 2004 in the home country of its co-founders. It was chosen to provide voting systems for the 2004 election to recall the late (then-president) Hugo Chavez from office, a $120 million contract.

While the company had been incorporated in Delaware, this was the published view regarding Smartmatic of the US Embassy in Caracas at the time:

“Smartmatic is a riddle. The company came out of nowhere to snatch a multi-million dollar contract in an electoral process that ultimately reaffirmed Chavez’s mandate and all but destroyed his political opposition. The perspective we have here, after several discussions with Smartmatic, is that the company is de facto Venezuelan and operated by Venezuelans. The identity of Smartmatic’s true owners remains a mystery.” (Manilla Times)

Flush with cash, Smartmatic then acquired California-based Sequoia Voting Systems in 2005, along with its US voting system contracts in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

This acquisition rang alarm bells with Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from New York, as well as the US Intel Community, particularly CFIUS (as we now know in greater detail, thanks to the declassified CIA Note).

Under pressure from CFIUS, Smartmatic exited the US voting systems market by divesting itself of the Sequoia acquisition, with its assets eventually being acquired by Dominion in 2010. Those included “inventory and all intellectual property, including software, firmware and hardware”.

Apparently this was the connection that led Powell to claim that Dominion’s 2020 voting systems were a “descendant” of Smartmatic and that Smartmatic had “exported” its systems to the United States (New York Times).

All that was transparently goofy nonsense, an entire election stealing conspiracy spun from a single outdated thread.

But the Smartmatic connection, of course, was what allowed her and other commentators to bring in the foreign malign government aspect to their conspiracy theory, with many mentions of potential involvement by the ‘Chavez regime’ in ‘stealing’ our election.

We all know what the accumulation of so much reckless rhetoric following the November 2020 election led to on January 6, 2021.

It also, of course, led to a lot of litigation.

The first to go was Dominion, suing Fox News in March 2021, as well as other rightwing media outlets like Newsmax.

It took only a week after Dominion filed its defamation lawsuit against Fox for Smartmatic to follow suit.

It piggybacked with its own multi-billion dollar defamation suit against Fox News, presumably eying what it imagined would be an easy pay day as public sentiment turned, following the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot, ever more strongly against the Trump team’s defunct and fruitless campaign of election denial.

Yet Smartmatic’s path to a defamation payout has been far rockier than Dominion’s and led to many revelations about the Logan/Smartmatic relationship.

While Fox famously settled the Dominion suit for three quarters of a billion dollars, they have aggressively pursued their defense in the Smartmatic suit for over five years now (and were recently granted extended discovery in that case as a result of the criminal prosecution of Smartmatic).

Additionally, Fox launched it’s own quasi-counter suit to compel Los Angeles County to comply with Cal. Public Records Act (our state version of FOIA) in LA Superior Court.

Fox has asked for communications between Logan and Smartmatic execs and alleges major gaps in the documents disclosed thus far.

Nonetheless, what Fox has obtained in LA County has been pretty shocking.

Its opening trial brief outlines a spate of free luxury globe trotting trips and meals as Logan has continued to up LA County’s spend with Smartmatic, now to around $400 million.

One Smartmatic exec’s communication is quoted as follows, a message sent after some fine dining with Logan in the Republic of Georgia (during observation of the 2024 Georgian Primary Election):

“had a great day with Dean [Logan]” and thought Smartmatic had “secured $30.6 million for next year’s deployment in LA” as a result. Id. at 1. Murphy added, “The way to Dean’s heart is trips! Let’s keep them coming.” Id. at 7. Seven months later, Mr. Logan executed a $30.6 million work order for Smartmatic... (the bolding is mine, from trial brief p6)

Concluding Thoughts

My entry point into all this was simply being denied, effectively, by Dean Logan, a hand recount for our local Long Beach Measure A ballot measure in Spring 2020, despite a margin of 1/100th of one percent.

This was the first deployment of Smartmatic’s VSAP in LA County, following the RFP (which did not even include the word “recount”, auditability apparently not being a desired feature of the system).

To date, there have been zero (hand or machine) completed recounts under VSAP.

There are known security issues (including in an LA County Civil Grand Jury report on VSAP entitled “Maybe I Voted?”).

The only verification the ten million constituents of LA County have to rely on is a problematic 1% hand tally audit (randomly selected by precinct from only a portion of the overall ballots cast) under the Cal. Election Code.

All together, it’s a recipe for the erosion of confidence in the electoral system.

Ironically—and potentially catastrophically (some day, sooner or later)—Trump’s rhetoric has blinded the Democratic officials of California and LA County to the very danger they warn that it poses: the loss of faith in the mechanisms of our democracy.

Their own embrace of perhaps the world’s most questionable provider of election systems risks precisely the same outcome.

* And see the update below, including the disclosure of over $700k spent on this petition drive!

UPDATE (8/6/26):

First, the money!

Mayor Rex Richardson's allies running this campaign spent over $700,000 on this paid signature gathering effort!!

That includes $182,000 directly from the mayor’s own political action committee. Some of the city’s most well-healed unions ponied up this dough in checks of up to $50k a piece.

All for NOTHING! Thank goodness!

The Breakdown

I recently received a response to a Cal. Public Records Act request I made to the County Registrar’s office for the signature validations breakdown.

And here it is:

What this tells you is that the proposed parcel tax initiative failed due to its (paid, and very expensive) signature gathering campaign’s incompetence, rather than fraud.

In other words, the signature gathering campaign was its own victim, rather than the victim of paid signature gatherers rampantly defrauding it (or doing so in collusion with the campaign, which would have been quite stupid).

If the campaign or its paid gatherers had been fabricating signatures, the MISMATCH SIGNATURE total would have been far higher.

Instead, it failed—as one can see from the breakdown above—due primarily to duplicates, unregistered signers, and folks who put addresses not matching their registration address.

If the campaign had been processing the signatures each day, properly running them through voter data software to check as they were going along, they would’ve known that they were short of good unique signatures and needed to keep going before submitting.

But instead they just went until it looked like they had a big enough margin and decided they were done.

Big mistake in favor of the Long Beach taxpayer!

So you might as well grab the free snacks first.

On Saturday, the City of Long Beach is hosting an open house for its new “Everyone’s Coast” rezoning proposal—a plan that would allow even more housing density in many of the city’s already most crowded coastal neighborhoods.

The irony is hard to miss.

The city’s own parking impact map identifies much of the affected area as already suffering from severe parking shortages. Yet rather than addressing those problems first, City Hall’s solution is to increase the number of people competing for the same finite amount of space.

Supporters will argue that Long Beach needs more housing. I happen to disagree. Long Beach is built out. No vacancy. Period. (And, by the way, the stats behind the supposed critical need to max out housing construction, of any type, anywhere in California—leading to the notion that each city must ‘do its fair share’—are bogus.)

But if you are going to add density, it only makes sense in a city which also requires the infrastructure necessary to support it.

That would mean requiring developers to build enough parking for the additional units they create.

It would mean expanding parks and public open space rather than shrinking the amount available per resident.

It would mean rebuilding aging water and sewer infrastructure before pushing more demand onto decades-old systems (that is, if you don’t want the main breaks currently plaguing LA).

It would mean restoring a police department that remains historically understaffed, where response times frustrate residents and traffic enforcement has become increasingly rare despite rising concerns about roadway safety.

But that’s not Long Beach, the developa-gangsta’s paradise of SoCal.

The result is a planning philosophy that increasingly resembles a tragedy of the commons. Every individual project may appear manageable on its own, but together they place mounting pressure on roads, parking, parks, utilities, and public safety.

Residents in Bixby Knolls recently saw a version of this debate play out during the city’s Bixby Zone In proposal. Now the focus has shifted south.

Now, under the banner of “Everyone’s Coast,” City Hall is proposing significant zoning changes for neighborhoods stretching across much of coastal Long Beach. The name suggests broader public access, but the practical effect is straightforward: more housing units in areas that are already among the city’s most densely populated (and to anyone circling for 30 minutes in search of a parking spot after work, clearly overcrowded).

Whether you support that vision or oppose it, Saturday’s meeting is an opportunity to see exactly what the city is proposing and to make your voice heard before decisions are finalized.

Everyone’s Coast Open House

Date: Saturday, July 25

Time: 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Location: MacArthur Park, 1321 E. Anaheim St.

The city’s parking impact map can be viewed here.

More information about the Everyone’s Coast initiative is available here.

From the Signal Tribune: Signal Hill faces possible lawsuit unless it establishes voting districts

I think the attorneys at the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) may be overlooking one thing in their litigation-itchy demands of Signal Hill: Signal Hill.

The shining enclave on the hill incorporated a century ago purely as an oil town (preempting annexation by an expanding Long Beach, three years after a hundred-foot gusher signaled the discovery of one of the world’s richest oil fields).

Today, Signal Hill has fewer than 12,000 residents—roughly 1/38^th the population of surrounding Long Beach. To put that in perspective, just one Long Beach city council member represents more than four times that many, at 50,000 residents each on average. The average LA County supervisor represents 2 million residents1.

Put another way, winning vote totals for a member of Signal Hill’s five person city council (where the position of mayor simply rotates annually among the council members) is in the hundreds, not the thousands.

I have long thought of Signal Hill as a glorified HOA2, with an oil operation and more recently a tax competition business viz-a-viz Long Beach (the lower tax rates sucking in big box stores and auto dealerships).

But SVREP is not interested in scale or the practical needs of a very small city.

They are looking at towns medium and small across California as rows in a table, with figures they can plug into a formula.

The result is that a city is either vulnerable or not vulnerable to a lawsuit under the California Voting Rights Act, based on whether it has an at large or district-based system for electing council members combined with its history of electing council members whose races are representative (or not) of the city’s racial makeup.

Thus, as the latest city to appear in the sights of SVREP, Signal Hill will almost certainly end up adopting district-based elections for its city council.

Is that a big deal, one way or the other? Probably not.

That is except for one big deal, the total billable hours that will no doubt accrue to SVREP’s attorneys, as they twist the screws and force adoption of council districts, with racially-conscious boundaries.

Whether that is achieved via settlement negotiations or a (likely but not guaranteed) courtroom victory, the taxpayers of Signal Hill will be footing that bill… for a change which—I imagine most SH’ers of all races likely would agree—amounts to little more than a hill of beans.

The most confusing aspect of local elections in recent years is the apparent disconnect between what voters say they want, which we know from the city’s own commissioned polling, and what they vote for.

They say that the City is headed in the wrong direction (47% ‘wrong track’ versus 36% ‘right track’). Yet they reelect the incumbents responsible for that direction.

Lacking exit polling data for our elections (which wouldn’t even work, since most folks vote by mail and don’t exit a polling place), we can surmise the following explanations:

1. National politics dominates right now.

Whether it’s the City Council re-declaring Long Beach’s sanctuary city status or the mayor hanging an “ICE OUT OF LONG BEACH” banner from his top floor office balcony at city hall (just long enough for the viral photo op), local politicians have learned that in an overwhelmingly “blue” (majority Democratic registration) city, casting themselves as the resistance to the national administration is a much safer course of action than the alternative. The alternative being, of course, defending the performance of local tax dollars in generating local public safety, quality streets and parks, thriving small businesses, and progress toward an attainable roof over everyone’s head, especially the unhoused.

The first year of the Trump administration brought the federal government visibly to the streets of blue cities in the form of ICE raids that no one could ignore. That and all the other dramatic federal actions also brought massive No Kings rallies to the streets of those cities. National partisan politics became inescapable and hyper-partisan balkanization, depending on the party-filter with which one views politics, became ever-more universal.

In such a political context, the kind of mental bandwidth which existed in the past for separating national from state from local politics, often leading to cross-party voting (for example, for a local candidate registered to one party or no party on the local level and for another party on a state or federal level), has almost disappeared.

Given that the incumbents are generally backed by a local political machine, financed by both corporate and big labor (there’s hardly a difference between the two anymore, at least in our area) special interests, which is entwined with control over the Democratic Party official endorsement mechanisms, they have one easy task in their campaigns: Just let voters know who the official Democrat in the race is (if the challenger is also a registered Democrat, all the more reason to emphasize who the ‘officially endorsed’ Democrat on the ballot is).

They receive the state, county, local Dem club, and fellow local Dem elected official endorsements essentially automatically (with zero scrutiny of or interest in their actual record in office, other than the fact that the record is undistinguished enough that there are no known instances of voting on legislative matters independent of city hall expectations), and they need only let the voters know that they have them.

Similarly, their allied big money PACs need only do the same.

In a world where the only thing that matters is team blue or red, that makes things exceedingly simple for those with a monopoly on the hometown jerseys (in Long Beach just as blue as they are red just over the line in OC beach towns).

2. The aforementioned big money.

The incumbents always, of course, have the money on their side. In Long Beach, they claim to be “progressive” yet haven’t the slightest interest in campaign finance reform to take money out of politics.

The increasing role of corrupt cash—not illegal, as the bar set by the US Supreme Court for proving political bribery is absurdly high; rather, a wink and a nod, for labor contracts, for corporate developer approvals or tax abatements, or for a big, juicy city outsourcing contract—is obvious.

When voters, stoked into highs of outrage and excitement due to national politics, have limited time and capacity to absorb complex election-related information, a big voter education project is a big hill to climb.

It puts challengers in the position of drawing voters attention down from the heights of high dudgeon down to the lows of mundane municipal dysfunction. Of course, it’s not mundane when you are personally the one waking up to a stolen catalytic converter in the morning or the small business owner sweeping up the broken glass. But all the other mornings, the functions of local government are equally essential and banal. Even the disastrous state of pavement quality feels normal to most, since one cannot help but become accustomed to the streets one drives every day.

Even if the challengers had the funds to purvey that level of information to voters, through mailers or online ads, could or would the voters absorb it to a degree that outweighs the simple reflex to vote in line with their national political orientation during times like these?

3. The consolidated ballot is another hurdle.

In the past, we bifurcated our local elections from the state and federal, holding the primary for city officials separately, in April of the election year. If there was a runoff, it was held at the same time as the statewide primary in June. But even then, the city ballot was administered separately by the City Clerk’s office, and voters would go to separate tables at the polling place to pick up unrelated city and state/federal ballots (the later administered by the County Registrar). This manner of voting last occurred in Long Beach in 2018.

Consolidating local matters onto the state and federal ballot is, in theory, more efficient (in fact, the County charges us quite a lot for this service, perhaps more than if we still conducted our elections independently, over the long run).

But we lose something important: We lose the clear separation between partisan politics, which is the nature of state and federal elections, and nonpartisan local politics, which is supposed to be the nature of our local elections, enshrined in our city charter (and indeed county elections, as well). That separation existed for a reason. Local politics should not be dictated by party or ideology because potholes and public safety are universal commodities of daily life we all deal with or depend on.

We are all in the same boat as local taxpayers needing a city government to perform well. Issues like abortion, or the value of a welfare state, or immigration policy have always been something for the national and state parties to battle over. Having a safe city that spends our money efficiently and uncorruptly should not be so divisive.

But our local incumbents and the machine behind them understand quite well that division is their career gold and political salvation, and so they will never bring this system back (something we could do, as a charter city).

4. Election fraud?

Notice that among election outcome explanations and surmises, I did not include voter fraud. Many go straight there, without tangible proof, while I do not.

Let me just say this: The lack of proof is the lack of proof. That seeming truistic tautology is my way of saying that I cannot disprove those who believe in mass, rampant voter fraud by pointing to a lack of proof.

I can only point out that allegations require proof to be useful, and major allegations require major proof, regardless of whether that proof is obtainable.

I can also say that there are many questionable aspects to the way elections are administered in recent years. They include the lack of diligence, by the County Registrar, toward updating voter rolls (so that someone doesn’t get five ballots, one for themselves and four for people who used to live at that address, who may not even be alive or in the same state anymore) and the opaque nature of the automated vote count.

The more technological the voting system, the less transparent to the public. Therefore, the uselessness of the paper trail for audits and hand recounts (a creature of the design for the technology cluster for LA County’s relatively new VSAP voting system) is very disturbing.

That said, again, no proof, is no proof. And if the California Republican Party or its nominee for governor, Steve Hilton, or the Trump-appointed US Attorney for the Los Angeles region, Bill Essayli, had any concrete proof of significant voter fraud in the last election… do you really think they wouldn’t have filed charges and trumpeted it by now? Even a serious investigation short of an indictment would probably be known by now.

Again, that doesn’t mean voter fraud doesn’t ever happen.

But to carry it out, each instance a felony in and of itself if committed at the initial point in the process, i.e. casting a ballot, or at the final point, tampering with the results totals in the Registrar’s office computerized systems, is something that carries massive personal legal jeopardy for any individual(s) involved. All to help, presumably, someone else get the electoral outcome they want. And if the beneficiary is in any way involved, you have a lot of mutual backscratching going on at the risk of producing a massive scandal with serious prison sentences.

All of which was not enough to prevent voter fraud in some elections in certain parts of the country at various points in our national history (LBJ’s first election to the US Senate in 1948, for example, described by his most famous biographer, Robert Caro, as the result of Johnson receiving the votes of “the dead, the halt, the missing and those who were unaware that an election was going on”).

If the above analysis feels terribly unsatisfying, that unfortunately is all one can say with what hard evidence actually publicly exists (which is none).

Personally, I don’t need to ‘go there’ to explain an exasperating electoral outcome. Given that the entire system is in a sense manifestly ‘rigged,’ in that contests are held on an absurdly uneven playing field, as already described above, the outcome is unfortunately not surprising.

It is in fact not the expectation of victory which fuels the challengers who are quite literally the flesh and blood of our democracy, the sine qua non of our democracy.

It is something deeper. It’s the hope and the dream of actually demonstrating that democracy still does mean something and still can improve the lives of our communities—friends, neighbors, and strangers, alike—which drives them forward.

As Gatsby told us: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Long Beach Reform Coalition is urging lawmakers to reject SB 922, arguing the bill would weaken protections California voters approved under Proposition 111 more than 30 years ago.

At issue is a state law that largely prohibits local governments from imposing road-use charges on top of state fuel taxes and truck fees. Opponents say SB 922 would carve out new exceptions, allowing cities and other agencies to shift street maintenance costs onto service providers such as trash haulers.

Those costs, they argue, won’t stay with the providers for long. They’ll ultimately be passed on to residents through higher trash, utility, and service bills, under the justification that the trucks utilized by these utilities put wear and tear on the roads.

In other words, SB 922 appears to be yet another deceptive means of implementing what’s known as a utility transfer tax.

That is, because Prop. 13 requires a vote on new taxes, local governments seek any means possible to jack up utility rates and transfer the money to their general funds. Even if that means charging a fee for their own trash hauling trucks using their own roads, just as Long Beach once (invalidated by the court) attempted to charge its publicly owned city water utility customers for the use of the City’s own pipes.

Supporters say the bill simply clarifies existing law. Critics say it’s a direct response to a recent court ruling that blocked a city from recovering street repair costs through garbage collection fees.

With Californians already facing some of the highest living costs in the country, opponents say lawmakers should be protecting taxpayers from new fees—not creating new ways to impose them.

Explainer: Long Beach City Council is Seeking to Limit Public Comment FOREVER

Long Beach City Hall is trying to fundamentally change how residents participate in City Council meetings.

And they’re doing it under the guise of expanding public access.

On Tuesday, the City Council will consider Agenda Item 49, a proposal ostensibly intended to comply with SB 707, a new state law requiring local governments to allow remote public comment.

On its face, that’s a reasonable goal.

But buried within the proposed changes is something far more significant: a dramatic restructuring of public comment that could make it harder—not easier—for residents to be heard.

Under the proposal, speakers would no longer be able to provide public comment on agenda items when those items come before the Council.

Instead, all agenda-item comments would be consolidated into a single 60-minute period before the regular agenda begins, with speakers limited to 90 seconds each.

Think about the practical effect.

Even for those who do get to speak, their comments could occur hours before the Council actually considers the item.

Public comment is most effective when elected officials hear it while they’re discussing the issue—not after they’ve spent hours working through unrelated agenda items.

That’s why this proposal raises more than just policy concerns, it may raise legal ones as well.

California’s Ralph M. Brown Act requires local legislative bodies to provide an opportunity for members of the public to address the body on agenda items “before or during” consideration of those items.

The City appears to be relying on the word “before” to justify moving all agenda-item comments to the beginning of the meeting.

But that interpretation is far from settled.

In Olson v. Hornbrook Community Services District, the Court of Appeal recognized the value of keeping public comment closely connected to the consideration of the item itself, noting that doing so helps ensure decision-makers have a “clear and complete understanding” of public concerns at the time the matter is discussed.

In other words, the purpose of public comment is not merely to let people speak. The purpose is to allow elected officials to hear those comments when they are making decisions. That is why all local governments this writer is aware of have always taken agenda-item comments immediately before each item is heard.

The proposal before the Council on Tuesday moves in the opposite direction.

City Hall will say the change will streamline meetings. And that’s literally true. It’s also possible to streamline meetings to the point where they are rendered meaningless exercises in what is supposed to be an open democracy.

Maybe officials actually believe it will improve efficiency while accommodating remote participation. But residents should carefully consider what is being gained—and what may be lost. Because once procedural rights are reduced, they are rarely restored.

If you have concerns about these changes, Tuesday’s meeting is the time to speak up. The Council is scheduled to consider Agenda Item 49 at its 5 p.m. meeting.

Whatever your view, the public deserves a meaningful opportunity to participate in the decisions that affect their city. A handful of controversial agenda items could easily consume the entire hour.

Once the clock runs out, residents hoping to speak on less prominent items may never get the opportunity at all.

A recent commentary by economist Adam Summers and Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association President Jon Coupal argues that California’s homelessness response has been marked by rising spending but disappointing results. California accounts for a disproportionately large share of the nation’s homeless population despite years of increased public investment, yet policymakers have too often responded to poor outcomes by allocating additional funding rather than evaluating whether existing programs are working.

The commentary points to a 2024 state audit that found California could not adequately track $24 billion spent on homelessness programs over a five-year period. Summers and Coupal also cite audits of Los Angeles homelessness programs, including cost overruns on supportive housing projects and management concerns involving LAHSA. They argue that the state’s homelessness crisis is being driven not only by the scale of the challenge, but by a lack of accountability, performance measurement, and oversight of taxpayer-funded programs.

Must read!

State and local governments have failed Californians on homelessness funding

Gosh, do you think there might be an election around the corner?

From ABC 7: Long Beach police increase traffic enforcement amid rise in fatal collisions

Because suddenly we’re getting the familiar rhetoric again about “traffic safety,” “enforcement,” and “taking action.”

Of course, no commitment to actual numbers of motorcycle officers. No staffing targets. No acknowledgment of how we got here.

Just rhetoric. Just more bullshit.

If you grew up driving in Long Beach in the 90s or early 2000s, you remember what traffic enforcement used to feel like.

I know I do.

After I got my license as a teenager, you absolutely could get tickets here. There were motorcycle officers everywhere. People watched their speed because they knew there was a real chance an officer with a radar gun was nearby.

We once had around 30 motorcycle traffic cops; we have essentially none now.

People drive however they want because the odds of getting stopped are incredibly low. You regularly see people flying down major streets at 80, 90 miles an hour.

Long Beach once budgeted for more than 1,000 sworn officers. Today, the department sits at roughly 528.

Our police force got not defunded, but de-personneled, roughly in half over the Garcia and Rex Richardson years, despite PD spending continuing to increase (even if one adjusts for inflation, albeit modestly), and somehow we’re supposed to act confused about rising disorder, property crime, reckless driving, and slower response times?

My street has been dark for weeks. Everyone assumes it’s the copper theft epidemic, and of course the city’s inability to respond to it effectively.

And honestly? Catching these people should not be impossible.

A guy wandering around carrying straggly bundles of stolen cable in the middle of the night is not exactly a criminal mastermind. There are Ring cameras on half the houses in America now.

But property crime investigations require detectives, follow-up, proactive policing, and enough staffing to pursue cases instead of simply triaging emergencies.

And what makes this so infuriating is that none of this was inevitable.

This police force was not “defunded.” That would at least imply somebody involved believed in some ideological principle.

They don’t.

What we are dealing with is pure political opportunism and the altar of quid pro quo.

The pension, pay, and overtime deals negotiated over the years enriched a relatively small number of people while failing to maintain a functional staffing structure for the city as a whole.

And in exchange? Massive campaign PAC money, endorsements, and election-year photo ops flanked by smiling police and firefighters.

That was the trade.

The Richardson-Garcia machine got political power and career advancement while Long Beach lost the enforcement capacity necessary to function safely.

I wrote about this years ago in a Beachcomber piece titled “LBPD Compensation Misinformation” after Measure A first passed. Everything has only gotten worse since then.

Businesses quietly deal with burglaries and thefts they often don’t even want publicized anymore. Residents adapt to break-ins, vandalism, catalytic converter thefts, and reckless driving as a normal part of life. Stores lock basic items behind glass because theft is assumed.

And perhaps most horrifyingly, traffic fatalities are surging.

Eventually, when enforcement disappears long enough, people stop believing there are consequences.

And once enough people believe that, people die.

There are people quite literally no longer alive in this city because political leaders prioritized machine politics, insider dealing, and career advancement over maintaining a functioning public safety system.

That is why the sudden election-season concern about “safety” feels so insulting.

The same people and institutions that oversaw this decline now want to present themselves as the solution to the crisis they helped create.

But residents remember.

They remember when Long Beach had visible traffic enforcement.

They remember when public safety felt proactive instead of reactive.

And that’s why the rhetoric no longer works the way it used to.

Everyone needs to watch this NBC4 piece: Second homeless contractor under scrutiny in Long Beach as city navigates missteps

Look at the excruciating pain in City Auditor Laura Doud’s eyes as she is forced to do her real job: expose fraud.

Not the job she has mostly done for the last 20 years, which has been to look away while fraud, waste and self-dealing continue unabated with little meaningful accountability.

That has always been the pattern with Doud. She only audits when forced to audit. Forced by media attention. Forced by whistleblowers. Forced by political pressure. Forced when the scandal becomes too big to hide and likely headed for a courtroom anyway.

That is exactly what appears to be happening now with Long Beach homelessness spending.

NBC4’s report lays out serious failures in the city’s oversight of homelessness contractors: poor documentation, weak accountability and millions in taxpayer money moving through programs with questionable tracking and results. (nbclosangeles.com)

But none of this is new.

Anybody paying even the slightest attention to homelessness spending in Long Beach already knew the system was a disaster. There have been years of stories involving whistleblowers, failed shelter operations, questionable contractors, people dying inside city-funded programs and employees retaliated against for speaking up.

Doud was not first to discover this. She was among the last people forced to publicly acknowledge it.

As one local observer put it, Doud acts only after “the pressure builds” to the point where inaction becomes politically impossible.

We have seen this exact pattern before.

Take street maintenance. Long Beach streets have been crumbling for decades. Residents have complained endlessly about potholes, damaged sidewalks and deteriorating infrastructure. Yet only recently did Doud’s office quietly release findings showing the city lacked even basic centralized tracking and coordination for infrastructure projects.

Again, everybody already knew there was a problem. The auditor arrived after years of visible failure.

Same thing with the Queen Mary fiasco. Years of reporting, deferred maintenance, whistleblower complaints and financial chaos piled up before serious scrutiny materialized.

That is what makes this homelessness audit so revealing. It is not evidence the system works. It is evidence the system failed for years before oversight finally kicked in.

And that gets to the deeper issue: Laura Doud is not outside the Long Beach political machine. She is central to its functioning.

The City Auditor is supposed to serve as an independent watchdog. Instead, the office increasingly feels like part of the apparatus designed to stabilize City Hall when scandals become unavoidable. Oversight arrives not at the beginning of dysfunction, but at the point where public anger makes silence dangerous.

She is, in fact, the damage control, not the damage prevention.

And there are obvious political reasons this is happening now.

Los Angeles officials are already under intense federal scrutiny over homelessness spending and external audits have exposed massive waste throughout the regional homelessness system. Long Beach officials know the political climate is shifting fast. They know public patience is evaporating.

Residents should ask themselves a simple question: If the City Auditor only acts once disaster becomes impossible to conceal, how many other disasters inside Long Beach City Hall are currently being ignored right now?

Because Laura Doud has been one of the key figures allowing this multi-billion-dollar racket known as Long Beach City Hall to operate with minimal accountability for decades. And

This NBC4 piece exposes an oversight system that only moves once the cover-up can no longer hold.

It’s pretty dramatic when a marquee property worth tens of millions gets cut in half over roughly the Garcia–Rex mayoralties period (2014–2026), which should perhaps be dubbed the ‘great era of irresponsibility’ in Long Beach.

From the Press-Telegram: Business Beat: Long Beach Westin sold for $42M

It would strain credulity to say that this massive hospitality property devaluation has nothing to do with the broader downward spiral downtown—homelessness, crime, assaults in plain sight, including some sexual assaults, feces on the sidewalk. People can see with their own eyes what’s going on.

City Hall physically can clean things up—just look at what they did right before the Grand Prix. They cleaned out encampments, tidied things up, tightened public safety. But they don’t have the resources to do that year-round because of waste and corruption in the city budget. The question is why the version of downtown we trot out to tourists a few times a year isn’t the version that exists year-round.

It’s just a façade for outsiders who come for these events, and no doubt they’ll do the same for the Olympics in 2028. But the rest of the year, we’re screwed. When the police force is down from 1,100 sworn-officers (many years ago) to 600-something (or possibly less, depending on how one interprets the rarely-provided figures for LBPD sworn-officer levels and the lack of clarity regarding budgeted versus actually currently filled positions—for more, see p.4 of the Christmas Eve memo published by the City, second paragraph under “Feasibility of Walking Beat”), you just don’t have the levels for proactive public safety or community policing—you’re just responding to citywide 911 calls.

And there definitely isn’t the shelter capacity to take people off the street, because that money has been wasted in profligate, abusive ways on projects like the tiny homes spectacularly imploded fiasco—a total loss of millions.

Part of the problem is the nature of the local mainstream media coverage, as well. The headline of the Press-Telegram piece should’ve led with the bombshell of a 50% drop in the value of a major downtown Long Beach property. Instead, the lede is buried in a nonchalant remark before pivoting straight into how great the new owners are going to be. These pieces read like copy from the new owner’s PR department.

But that tone is typical of publications like the PT or the Long Beach Post. Their goal is ad revenue tied to boosterism for the established interests and the new entries into the establishment. The City has a massive ad budget and so do the new hotel owners, at least compared to the small businesses downtown. The small businesses can’t just suffer a 50% financial haircut, they just disappear.

If the new owners really wanted to increase the value of their new acquisition, they would support the political changes in this city necessary to end the downward spiral of corruption and dishonesty killing our seaside would-be gem of a downtown and city as a whole.

April Parker Foundation’s lawsuit against the City of Long Beach will be something to follow very closely…

From Long Beach Watchdog: City replaces April Parker Foundation with LA nonprofit to run Long Beach Youth Shelter

I accepted an invitation to meet with APF last year. Among other things, they told me they got tired of waiting for the city to open this project—the city youth shelter (and let's be honest and call it a mini-shelter!.. if not a micro-shelter!)—and went ahead and created their own youth shelter independent of the city for a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time.

That’s according to them. But we know that, in fact, the Long Beach Rescue Mission created a very similar youth shelter, compared to the city project, for a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time.

And how could anyone do worse than a city project costing $6 million, taking years to complete, and consisting of a dozen cots in a row?!?

Meanwhile, APF was still supposed to have the contract to manage the city’s youth shelter, which still isn’t open (despite the BS ribbon-cutting last year). A contract which has now suddenly been revoked.

I cannot verify APF’s claims, which include suggestions about the way many other homelessness contracts in the city are being awarded improperly.

All I can say is that—with Rex’s re-election primary just weeks away—the City suddenly appears to be in full-on scapegoat mode for the unending homelessness catastrophe in this city.

In the case of First to Serve, that nonprofit was a disaster and a million miles from being blameless, but the City was an active collaborator in the non-oversight and cover-up for YEARS.

I can’t say exactly what’s going on in the City versus APF relationship, but lawsuits can have a great effect in terms of forcing tangible evidence into plain view and getting down to the actual facts of the situation.

Let’s keep an eye on it!

Some might wonder why our City Attorney—who has opposed residents’ interests on, among other things, their own sales tax rate (and lost big in court), and who is supposed to be elected by the people—would find herself “appointed” to another four years.

From the Press-Telegram: Long Beach city attorney, prosecutor appointed to next four-year term

The answer is not as obvious as you might think.

Yes, very unfortunately, no one—no qualified attorney—stepped up to run and give the people a choice before the deadline. Most unfortunate.

But this “appointment” by the City Council was a choice under the City Charter. In other words, they could have let her name appear on the ballot as the lone choice, affording you the opportunity to cast a ballot and choose not to vote for her—leaving that selection blank as a protest vote.

Instead, there simply will be no line for City Attorney on the ballot at all.

No doubt this will be justified as a cost-saving measure—avoiding the minor expense of producing an extra section in the sample ballot and an extra line on Long Beach ballots, which must be paid to the County Registrar. But protest votes are a valuable expression of voter dissatisfaction.

In other, more autocratic countries, folks often protest by spoiling their ballots when they have no meaningful choice.

I happen to think the few cents per resident would have been worth it to afford us all at least a protest vote option here in Long Beach.

The general public is finally learning about something that people inside this space have known for years: First To Serve has been a disastrous operator.

From the Long Beach Post: Long Beach abruptly cuts ties with its largest homeless shelter operator after concerns over billing practices

This isn’t new or surprising. And it’s not something that suddenly came to light.

Many homelessness advocates in Long Beach have known, for years, that these shelters were being run poorly—negligently. I’m talking about everything: the food people are given, the way facilities are managed, the overall lack of care and oversight. This wasn’t hidden. It was well known among people who are involved in this.

And yet, the city kept going back to them.

Why?

Because they had a cozy relationship with city staff. Because they were the favored operator. Because, instead of bringing in providers with stronger reputations, City Hall stuck with what was comfortable.

We’ve seen this before. The city didn’t cut ties with Illumination Foundation until things became impossible to ignore—after whistleblowers, after media coverage, after deaths. Only then did anything change.

More from NBC 4 Los Angeles: Case workers say they’re haunted by deaths at Long Beach homeless transition center

So when the city suddenly decides to switch providers now, the obvious question is: what forced their hand?

Because this doesn’t read like proactive leadership. It reads like reaction.

And let’s be clear about something else: this is not about a lack of resources. The homelessness system here is funded largely through outside money—federal, state, and county dollars. We’re talking about hundreds of millions flowing into Long Beach. The problem isn’t that the city “can’t afford” to do better.

It’s that it hasn’t.

At some point, this comes back to leadership. In practice, Rex Richardson runs the show. He may not have sweeping formal powers on paper, but politically, he controls the council, influences the city manager, and sets the direction. Nothing significant happens without his say.

Nothing.

So when bad operators are kept in place for years, when warnings are ignored, when change only happens after pressure builds, that’s not a system failure. That’s a choice.

And the question that still hasn’t been answered is the simplest one:

Why does the city keep choosing operators that everyone already knows aren’t working?

Chris Sweeney jumped into the mayor’s race late, but he’s already doing something City Hall won’t—going straight to the sites, talking to people, and showing what’s actually happening.

He’s posting videos on his social media interviewing the homeless and visiting service sites, and as a downtown business owner, he deals with the reality every day—not the polished version coming out of Rex Richardson’s office. What it shows is pretty clear: hundreds of millions have been spent, and the problem is only getting worse.

This isn’t just a homelessness issue — it’s a system problem. Same pattern, same optics, same results.

At some point, voters are going to have to decide if they’re okay with that continuing.

Check it out for yourself: https://www.facebook.com/1361807071/videos/2442043369590268/

You will have to prove to Mayor Rex Richardson and City Manager Tom Modica that your household income is under $250,000 to be exempt.

If you live in a multi-generational household, exceeding the threshold, you’re screwed.

If you’re just upper income, you’re screwed. And Long Beach will drive you elsewhere, becoming known as an anti-higher income earner bastion of self-destructive policy.

That’s if this hybrid income/property tax is even legal.

You can almost smell the flop sweat desperation from City Hall motivating this proposal, as they cannot solve the massive deficit by cutting the public money flows to their corrupt backers.

Details here, from Long Beach Reform Coalition: bit.ly/40LJrgg

(Thanks for the “LB IRS” formulation to Dan Miles, who should be our City Auditor.)

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