Changes in Long Beach Met by a Wave of Protest

A former city councilman and former harbor commissioner are suing Long Beach to challenge the financing of the Aquarium of the Pacific.

Small-businesses owners on the city’s industrial west side are suing to block a $25-million bond issue.

An art gallery owner complains that the city condemned his property to make way for a new shopping center.

There are groups fighting a commercial development in El Dorado Regional Park, and others trying to stop the city’s plans to turn a historic naval shipyard into a container terminal.

On Thursday night, at an extraordinary town hall meeting, 150 diverse Long Beach residents got together to air their grievances and express anger over the changing nature of their city.

What surfaced was a remarkable parade of unhappy citizens sharing a belief that City Hall has grown distant and become insensitive to their concerns.

None of the grievances were new. But the causes they have spawned, when taken together, form a new critical mass of unhappy residents seeking to take back control of their community.

“These people haven’t gotten together to compare notes before, because most of us don’t know each other,” said former Long Beach harbor commissioner Joel Friedland. “But we realized we had so many common threads we could weave a blanket. We all feel we have been frozen out of the processes of government.”

The leaders of 20 business and community groups attended, but none of the city’s elected officials showed up for the nearly three-hour meeting held in an elementary school auditorium.

Mayor Beverly O’Neill was on vacation but sent her top aide to listen to the complaints.

“You have people here who are dissatisfied, but you have other people who aren’t here tonight, who are very supportive of a lot of these projects,” said Randal Hernandez, O’Neill’s chief of staff.

Also on vacation was City Manager James C. Hankla, chief architect of the city’s redevelopment program and the lightning rod for criticism by community activists. Each mention of Hankla’s name at the meeting was greeted with derision and there were several calls for his resignation.

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At the core of the protests are changes under the leadership of O’Neill and Hankla as Long Beach struggles to transform itself from an economy based on the Navy and the aerospace industry to one based on tourism, technology and international trade.

As part of the plan, the city negotiated a deal with the Navy to demolish the historic naval station being abandoned by the Pentagon, and replace it with a container terminal. Construction of the $150-million Aquarium of the Pacific is well underway on the downtown waterfront. Preliminary work is also underway for the Queensway Bay project, a development of shops, restaurants and boat landings in the downtown area. Redevelopment projects are underway in different parts of the city, stirring up passions because they subsidized newer businesses at the expense of older ones.

Some see the political fight as one that matches those who believe that the city must change to survive against those who want to hold onto the quiet image of Long Beach as “Iowa by the sea.”

“Obviously there is a segment of our community that believes that anything the city wants to do, that the port wants to do . . . is wrong,” said Sean Fitzgerald, a vice president of the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce. “They are saying, ‘We don’t want to move ahead. We like Iowa by the Sea.”’

As each of the nearly two dozen speakers took the stage to relate their mostly unsuccessful fights with City Hall, members of the audience expressed vocal sympathy.

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“There are a lot of unhappy people,” said Ann Cantrell, a retired schoolteacher and leader of the “Save the Park” group fighting to stop the development at El Dorado Park. “There is something wrong with a city government that doesn’t listen.”

The most dramatic commentary came from Tom Hutchings, who once owned an art gallery in the Los Altos Shopping Center, one of the local retail centers being redeveloped. Hutchings said he lost his gallery as a result of condemnation proceedings initiated by the city.

“I am without a gallery. I am without a job,” said Hutchings, who is battling the city in court. “I am almost without hope.”

Marc Wilder, a former city councilman, filed the suit challenging the aquarium financing. The owner of a home on a sandy peninsula at the east edge of Long Beach, Wilder said he fears that the financial burden of the aquarium will soak up city maintenance money and imperil the beaches and sea walls that protect waterfront homes.

“The project was and is a very large gamble,” Wilder said, expressing astonishment at the speed with which the project moved through City Hall.

Friedland said the group was likely to hold more meetings. “We connected all the dots and now know what the elephant looks like,” he said. “We just have to decide what to do with the elephant.”