Huntington Beach looks ahead to 2022 at State of the City event
Huntington Beach Mayor Kim Carr opened her speech at Monday morning’s State of the City address to laughs.
“I don’t know about you, but I hate watching myself on video,” she said at the Senior Center in Central Park.
Videos featuring various City Council members were spliced into the speeches at the event hosted by the Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce. Not that the speakers, including Carr, Mayor Pro Tem Barbara Delgleize, outgoing City Manager Oliver Chi and Visit Huntington Beach chief executive Kelly Miller had a lack of things to say.
Plenty has happened in Huntington Beach in 2021, from the continuing coronavirus pandemic to controversy around former Mayor Pro Tem Tito Ortiz before he resigned in June, to the oil spill off the coast in early October.
“Somebody said to me that this past year has been sort of like an advent calendar,” Carr said. “Each month, you didn’t know what you were going to get. The first month, we started off with an interesting mayor pro tem, the next month we had COVID vaccine shortages, then the next month we had protests at the pier. Oliver and I would literally look at each other and go, ‘What next?’ What a year, but I think through all of it, it really showed me how resilient this community is, how we really do come together.”
Perhaps illustrating the point of the year’s chaos, the emcee of the event was Chamber of Commerce interim chief executive and chair-elect John Villa, who was in the news after the oil spill as he’s also the executive director of the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy.
Yet, the theme of Monday’s event was “Riding a New Wave into 2022.” City officials believe the city is in a good position to do so, with a budget surplus and a larger-than-usual capital improvement budget of nearly $40 million for the 2021-22 fiscal year.
Carr said the city will launch Surf City Break, a new community website for information for residents and visitors, on Nov. 29. The city will also launch a new website in 2022.
“We are making H.B. an incredible place to raise families and invest in the long term,” Carr said. “It comes down to us truly being one H.B., a small phrase that the city created as part of COVID-19 that has taken on a broader and deeper meaning. The ‘One H.B.’ spirit means we are all welcomed, appreciated and respected. It’s lifting up our community and being proud of where we live, a beautiful, beachside coastal town known as Surf City.”
The attendees also laughed as Delgleize, set to take over as mayor at the Dec. 7 City Council meeting, said frankly in one of the videos that “for the first time in a zillion years, I’m very excited about our budget.”
“Over the last three years, we’ve worked real hard to figure out a way that we can reinvest back in our city,” she said. “Honestly, since I’ve been serving, we haven’t had any money.”
Delgleize, in her speech, noted that the city in the past year opened its Homeless Navigation Center and became the first Orange County city to partner with Be Well for mental health services.
In 2022, she said, Huntington Beach will be able make myriad improvements to many of its parks and has set aside $10 million for street improvements.
Chi, who will leave to take over as Irvine’s city manager next month, said the city has been blessed to have the leadership of Carr and Delgleize during this time.
“I just want to tell everyone this is an amazing community,” Chi said. “As we move forward in the future, let’s always try to remember that here in Huntington, our strength really is the fact that so often we don’t see the world the same way. That’s OK. That’s a good thing. But let’s always try to remember that this is a friendly, safe community. We can be, and we are, but there’s elements in our community that seek to divide us constantly. It’s up to the folks in this room, the community leaders, to continue to drive the conversation away from the divisiveness that we consistently see. We are more than the protests that happen every week down at the pier.”
Miller, the Visit HB CEO, closed his speech by looking even further into the future. He mentioned the City Council has stated its intent to bid for hosting the surfing, skateboarding and BMX events for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.
“If we do this right, I think the day after that torch is done in 2028, we can look back and say we did a great job in Huntington Beach,” Miller said. “We made our city proud. We took this place to a whole other level, and the foundation is good for the next growth that we’re going to have in Huntington Beach.”
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