The City of Long Beach has passed an ordinance authorizing financing for over 50 capital projects. The ordinance, passed at the city council meeting on Aug. 4, will allow officials to procure bonds not to exceed the value of $26,467,000.
A Long Beach resident for nearly a decade, City Manager Dan Creighton, who has held the position since 2024, said many of the projects address years of underinvestment and neglect. Creighton said more than $9 million in grants would offset the cost of some of the projects and, once bonding is approved, most of the projects will be brought before city officials for approval.
“These are necessary projects that help us work towards the goal of ensuring our city’s infrastructure and facilities are in a state of good repair,” Creighton said. “As I’ve said a lot over the last couple of years, our state of good repair in the city has been very poor. We really need to do a lot of these projects so we can depend on them to work properly.”
The city made a request for $16 million in general bond funding as well as $10 million in sewer bond funding. Major projects include $3.5 million for bus replacements, which the city will pay 10 percent of as part of grant stipulations; $2.9 million for road reconstruction; $1.16 million for rehabilitation of the Long Beach Municipal Ice Arena; and $4 million for hazard mitigation at the water purification plant, of which the city will pay 32.4 percent as part of grant stipulations.
At the meeting, several community members voiced their opinion.
Nancy Flemming, an East Bay Drive resident, questioned the scope of work at the water purification plant on West Pine Street, noting the infrastructure was redone by FEMA.
“The water plant was put back together after [hurricane] Sandy using federal money, but it was not mitigated for future disasters,” Ken Arnold, the city’s public works commissioner said. “This project protects the facility from future flooding. [The plant’s] influent meter — how we measure water that we pump out of the ground — is also past its usage of life.”
Steven Friedman, the deputy commissioner of public works, said the ice arena has old switchgear — a centralized combination of electrical disconnect switches, fuses, or circuit breakers used to control, protect and isolate electrical equipment — from nearly 70 years ago.
“We need to get our utilities and our roads, or buildings, to a place where we know they are reliable and we don’t have to keep fixing things repeatedly,” Creighton said. “Instead, we can replace it and get it to where it needs to be and then maintain it correctly.”