Meeting Time: November 29, 2022 at 5:00pm PST
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Agenda Item

PUBLIC COMMENT ON THE CLOSED SESSION AGENDA

  • Default_avatar
    Howard L over 1 year ago

    Council,

    You have no business buying a commercial property on Pier Avenue (i.e., half of the American Junkie business location) which is listed at a sky high $5.555 Million.

    I cannot recall your ever having given direction properly in a City Council meeting, directing City Manager Suja Lowenthal (a 25 year Long Beach politician and unqualified in much of anything imv) to negotiate a multi-million property deal; never an agenda item that I can recall. Further what is the purpose? The listing indicates the present tenant “American Junkie” has 6.5 + 2.5 years of lease agreement, 9 total years. Is your agenda to change the land rights and buy out their lease of one of the two parcels that “American Junkie” occupies? What is the secret agenda? Why would you want to take the property off the property tax rolls? You’re not paving streets or focusing on PCH businesses, and now you are focused on spending millions on a tiny downtown bar property? Are you nuts?

    Is the city council interested in getting into the bar business?

    You just attempted to raise the sales tax for the residents and businesses in town by ¾%. That failed.

    The property, 30 x 90 foot, was originally listed at an absurd $7.449 Million and was lowered almost $2 Million last summer to the $5.555 Million which is still absolutely ridiculous and can only support the high rents on the Plaza for a bar with 2 AM closing hours. No non-bar can afford such rents.

    The real estate market totally collapsed about 2 months ago. And commercial properties have been a drug on the market since the Pandemic. Only fools would consider such a purchase at anything more than dirt cheap.

    What gives the City Council the expertise to be negotiating to buy commercial real estate in what is a de facto bar district? What kind of creative governess are you up to?

    If the item is for some other purpose it should have been a little better agendized, notwithstanding it’s a closed session item.

    This November 29 meeting is being utilized completely unethically given it was supposed to have been for installing the new officers. Having Mary and Stacey voting on all these items when they were de facto voted off the council, notwithstanding they thankfully did not run seems very strange.

    Your council has certainly done a good job of one thing, i.e., taking the word honorable out of the Hermosa City Council, and replacing it with the words sleazy, sneaky, slimy, the worst.

    Howard L.