We asked MB residents to respond to the question “what do YOU want?”
“Dear MBStrong,
This is an amazing question!!! I heard Frank Chiella ask this of a group when he spoke one evening!!! So here is what I want:
I want the outsourcing of services to stop. Did anyone else notice that our MB elections were given to the county? The city council did this and we didn’t know it until a couple of election cycles ago when we showed up to vote and knew absolutely no one. Voting used to include an ID and one of our neighbors running the polling place. Without our trusted neighbors running things, I believe election integrity becomes more of an issue.
I do not want the Fire Department to go to County. Way back when, our city worked hard to afford to have its own private fire service.
The police should be fully funded and the number of officers on the street should be increased. Stop dictating to the department to stand down so we are not perceived as a racist community and then use the media to bury the crimes that are committed here.
I want City Council to not only push back on the state overreach, I want to see us SUE for the protection of our city laws. As a first act, I would like the City Council to overturn ordinance 13-0006!
I want to eliminate the attention on Bruce’s Beach by naming it Freedom Park and stop all the shaming of our city for something that occurred 100 years ago under different circumstances.
Finally, I would like the vaccine mandates for Covid 19 for our city employees to be rescinded.
Thank you MBStrong for literally teaching our city how to take it back!!
~A 60-year resident”
“Dear MBStrong,
Thank you for your continued work to keep our residents informed!
The definition of insanity!
Why do we keep electing the same politicians and expecting different results? My wake-up call to this insanity was reading the full-page ad last week paid for by sitting Council members Napolitano and Montgomery who most people thought were moderates. These “good old local boys” asked us to vote for 2 Far Left politicians, David Lesser and Amy Howorth, and 3 Far Left candidates for School Board.
I learned in your newsletter that Lesser and Howorth relinquished control of our zoning to the state in 2013, and in 2018 they launched a study to contract with the County for our fire and paramedic services along with Napolitano and Montgomery.
The ad also had the audacity to say Lesser and Howorth were “moderates” and said to vote for them and the Far Left school board candidates because of their many years of experience. In this case, highly experienced means a political machine working hard to satisfy the state’s mission to consolidate everything into sameness.
And then I read your recent Newsletter about the City being $91 million in debt. How can it be that all these politicians, year after year, including incumbent Suzanne Hadley, did not ring the alarm bell that our City’s debt to pay retired City workers steadily grew by about $4 million a year to reach $91 million in 2021?
To boot, Council sits in silence every year as the City Manager brags about our surplus. And now, your article reported that we are paying $34 million in interest and bond fees to pay off this old debt. I am shocked every Council member for the last 20 years has gone along with this dirty secret.
They also went along with a terrible policy of running our police and fire departments at understaffed levels that put our public safety at risk to avoid increasing our debt for
retirement payments and the understaffing would have remained a secret had you not
revealed our police department is routinely paid over $2 million a year in OT.
If our past City Council members now running for re-election, Lesser, Howorth, Hadley, and Burton really believed Public Safety was the #1 priority as they now claim in political ads, they would have kept staffing at safe levels and done the hard work of cutting back expenses in other departments, like Public Works at 37% of the budget.
I noticed that after candidate Frank Chiella said he would hire more police officers with savings in overtime and by replacing the unarmed “green vest” crew walking around downtown with Police Officers, Council rushed to amend the budget to hire more Police during election season.
We residents are to blame if we keep using this insanity of voting for the same old political machine and they continue on the current path and completely turn our city over to the County and State. They already turned zoning and planning over to the State. It’s not hard to see the writing on the wall for the fire department that only got a contract through June of next year.
What’s Next – Police and Public Works? Our beach town will soon look and feel like any other town in LA County.
Sincerely,
-B.W.”
The author of this letter has referenced our article below. Click to read.
OUR VOTER GUIDE
Our RECOMMENDATIONS go to the Highest Star Ranking Candidates:
Frank Chiella and Suzanne Hadley for Council, and Johnny U, Mike Welsh, and Christy Barnes for School Board.
Issued by MBStrong. Not authorized by a candidate or a committee controlled by a candidate.
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