Lee Goldin, Long Beach mayor candidate, 2026 primary election questionnaire – Press Telegram

Ahead of the June primary election, the Southern California News Group compiled a list of questions to pose to the candidates who wish to represent you. You can find the full questionnaire below. Questionnaires may have been edited for spelling, grammar, length and, in some instances, to remove hate speech and offensive language.

Name: Lee Goldin

Current job title: Senior Product Manager

Age: 41

Incumbent: No

Other political positions held: None

City where you reside: Long Beach

Campaign website or social media: goldinformayor.com

One of the main issues local leaders are grappling with is Long Beach’s current and long-term fiscal position. With major budgetary concerns on the horizon, explain your top priorities for Long Beach’s financial future and the mayor’s role in achieving those goals. (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

My top priority is to ensure that our citizenry and services receive their fair share of the hundreds of billions of dollars passing through our port. The mayor of Long Beach does not run this city; the Port of Long Beach does, and we need a leader who stands up against the outside business interests siphoning wealth out of our community while our children lose their teachers and their parents lose their homes.

We need to ensure that the billions of dollars we spend on government salaries and benefits go to those who live in Long Beach to ensure our wealth stays in this community, increasing tax and local business revenue. The millions of dollars spent on police drones and cameras should be used to serve our citizens, not surveil them. Instead of paying millions to outside technology contractors, we can recruit top computer science graduates from Jordan, Millikan, Woodrow Wilson, Poly and Lakewood to create a technology infrastructure that we build, own and maintain rather than be just another line item on the revenue stream of outside business interests. The money to serve our citizens is within our grasp; we need leadership strong enough to take it.

Explain your plan to bolster local economic development, increase jobs and support both local and large businesses in Long Beach. (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

We need to support local businesses by ensuring storefronts and sidewalks are safe and accessible, and start turning red tape into red ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Because of endemic crime and homelessness, our local businesses are forced to act as social service providers and law enforcement deputies just to make sure they can safely hang a shingle.

Rather than spending millions demolishing abandoned city-owned buildings that the city cannot keep safe, we need to provide aspiring local entrepreneurs with low-to-no-cost lease-to-buy opportunities. Large businesses don’t need more support; they need to be held to account. The outside businesses we incentivize to set up shop in Long Beach aren’t creating jobs; they’re automating our citizenry out of jobs using our own tax dollars. If our citizens are suffering in the streets while outside interests rake in billions, we are getting a raw deal.

Furthermore, by rolling out the red carpet for shadowy government military contractors whose technologies are being used to spread violence and terror across the planet, our leaders have made us unwitting pawns in the military-industrial complex. We need to ensure the aerospace industry in Long Beach is shooting for the stars, not our fellow human beings.

Homelessness and affordable housing continue to be a top issue for Long Beach residents. What is your position on the city’s current efforts to reduce homelessness and increase affordable housing availability, and how do you plan to improve these efforts? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

The city of Long Beach’s efforts to solve the humanitarian crisis of homelessness have been an utter disaster. The hundreds of millions of dollars we spend to solve this problem end up lining the pockets of well-meaning ivory tower technocrats and the very housing developers who created this crisis to begin with.

We can divert these funds into transforming the abandoned Atlantic Corridor into a road to recovery with acute addiction treatment, urban farms, community markets, transitional housing and permanent homes. We need coordinated, integrated services that bridge the gap between the various direct service providers involved in the process of recovery and rehousing.

There are approximately 3,500 people suffering on the streets in Long Beach. I started this journey because one of those people was living in his car right outside my window. My wife and I worked with our neighbors, councilmembers, local businesses and health and human services to help him off the streets and into permanent housing. I want to work together with you to do the same thing 3,499 more times. We can solve this problem and serve as a model and inspiration for the world.

Long Beach residents have been sounding the alarm about the presence of federal immigration enforcement agents and operations in the city. Where do you stand on ICE/CBP actions, and how to plan to address residents’ concerns about this issue? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

If it were up to me, I’d have LBPD arrest these agents as domestic terrorists and personally drop them off on the front porch of the local FBI office. When ICE and the National Guard came into town, I walked right up to the front lines and personally told them to high-tail it out of California while our current mayor did nothing. Like many others, I was tear-gassed, struck with batons and shot with less-lethal rounds while our city displayed ICE recruitment ads on public buses.

As mayor, I would ensure any non-local business offering goods or services to these “officers” would receive heavy fines and penalties up to and including revocation of their business licenses. No person is illegal, but kidnapping and terrorizing people is a crime. Local leaders like to blame the Trump administration for the rise of the police state in our country, but unless they do something to stand up against the erosion of our freedom, they are ultimately complicit.

Many cities in the region have struggled hiring and retaining police officers, with some implementing hiring bonuses and other incentives to bolster their ranks. What would you like to see the city do to ensure sufficient law enforcement capacity? (Please limit your answer to 200 words or less.)

Those salaries, bonuses and incentives should go to direct service providers offering acute addiction treatment, mental health care, housing subsidies and support for abused and trafficked women and children. Other cities with comparable populations in the U.S. spend less on police funding and see far better outcomes by spending money solving social problems rather than punishing the victims of these issues. If we allow our police to actually fight crime rather than serve as social workers and mental health interventionists, we have a chance to safely walk the streets at night in this city.

It’s not about defunding the police; it’s about refunding the people. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on police salaries, but only 18% of those officers live in the city they are sworn to protect. They’re paying property taxes somewhere else and supporting local businesses somewhere else, further siphoning wealth out of our community. We need to pay our citizenry to protect ourselves, not pay others to punish us.

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