Theofan's Take on 2010 City Affairs

“The city is starting to feel the effects of the recession,” Charles Theofan said during a brief state-of-the-city-style talk he gave at a Long Beach Chamber of Commerce meeting at the Allegria Hotel in January 2010.

At the time, the former city manager focused his talk on finances, infrastructure, policing and, of course, parking issues. Theofan had cautioned that Long Beach may have to pay the state as much as $170,000 in the form of a Metropolitan Transportation Authority tax imposed after the city finalized its 2009-10 budget the previous spring, and that sitting Gov. David Paterson would slash about 10 percent of the state funding the city receives each year — about $300,000.

“And even though they say that we’ll eventually get it back, that really doesn’t help when you have to pay the bills at the end of the month,” Theofan said then. “... So the city is down about $500,000 that we anticipated would be in our budget.”

However, Theofan was short on details that night about how the city planned to make up the shortfall, saying only that it must reduce unnecessary expenditures and seek different ways to expand revenue, and in the process try to stave off a tax increase.

The city then was in the midst of rehabilitating a sewage-pumping lift station on New York Avenue, part of the city’s focus on long-neglected infrastructure work, Theofan noted during his talk that night. Another project including rebuilding the West End firehouse, which he acknowledged “unfortunately will cost us approximately $5 million when it’s completed.” Critics who complained about mismanagement of the project had pointed out that an entirely new firehouse could have been built for $3.8 million.

A month before Theofan’s talk, in December 2009, the City Council approved a $6 million bond to fund repairs to the bulkheads in the northern Canals neighborhood as well as road reconstruction that included East Broadway between Long Beach and Edwards boulevards.

“It’s a tough endeavor because it costs so much money,” he said of the infrastructure projects. “We would have thought, with the recession, that the cost of major construction would go down, but it hasn’t. It continues to increase, so every project that you undertake is big, big, big dollars.”

Theofan pointed out areas where the city had expanded parking — a leased lot at Temple Zion, a municipal lot on Maryland Avenue in the West End, and two new rented lots, on Shore Road and East Broadway, and he highlighted to the city’s 10-year contract with the Town of Hempstead that allowed Long Beach to transport its waste to a transfer station in Merrick instead of a facility in Babylon, which he said saved on man-hours, wear and tear on trucks and disposal of refuse.

That January, the Police Department had hired six new officers. In a city where residents were questioning the overtime hours and pay of police officers and others in the department, particularly in a down economy, Theofan said: “You may ask the question, ‘If you’re having financial problems, how are we hiring police officers?’ Well, the reality is, by hiring young, new officers that are able to get out on the street, we could reduce overtime, which is a very significant factor in our police department.”

Theofan said one problem was that Nassau County Police Academy at the time had not graduated a class in more than two years “and we don’t know when the next time [is] they might have a class. So we have to take advantage of that opportunity.”