Long Beach Mayor-Elect Wants a Safer City, More Good Jobs

Bob Foster, the newly elected mayor of Long Beach, said Wednesday he would work to make the state’s fifth-largest city safer, cleaner and more inviting to the sorts of new business that could provide well-paying jobs.

The morning after he won the race to lead this city of about half a million, Foster said his immediate goal after he is sworn in next month would be to work with city employees to figure out how they could treat the public like coveted customers.

The former president of Southern California Edison said that he thought the best ideas tended to come from within the workforce, and that he believed city workers would embrace “a change in city culture” intended to simplify and fast-track everything from home remodeling to business licensing.

He also said he would make cleaning up air pollution caused by the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles a top priority. He said he already has spoken to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa about ways in which they could work together to reduce the pollution that particularly plagues poor residents along freeways leading in and out of the shipping basin.

“We’re committed to making these two ports the cleanest in the world,” Foster said Wednesday morning as shop owners and dog walkers stopped by his table at a coffee bar to congratulate him on his victory.

“They got your best side,” one man said, waving the front page of a newspaper with a smiling Foster celebrating victory.

Foster, 59, beat real estate broker and two-time City Councilman Frank Colonna, 62, in the citywide election to replace Mayor Beverly O’Neill, who is stepping down after three terms. Foster got 57% of the vote to Colonna’s 42%, according to unofficial results.

The mayor’s race was one of several city runoffs that drew a lot of campaign money and generated increasingly charged campaign mail as Tuesday’s election approached.

In the city’s 3rd District, telecommunications business owner Gary DeLong handily won the City Council seat being vacated by Colonna, who was termed out. DeLong defeated lawyer Audrey Stephanie Loftin.

Gerrie Schipske, a lawyer for the Teachers Assn. of Long Beach who has run for several other offices, appeared to have narrowly beaten termed-out incumbent Jackie Kell to represent the 5th District on the City Council, but provisional ballots and some absentee ballots might not be counted until next week.

Kell ran as a write-in, and unofficial results showed her losing by fewer than 300 votes.

In the 2nd District, Long Beach Unified School District board member Suja Lowenthal won an 11-person race to replace former City Councilman Dan Baker, who resigned amid questions about a land deal with the president of the police union.

It was the mayor’s race, however, that dominated public interest in a city where library hours have been cut and the police force hasn’t grown to serve a ballooning population.