Images of Texas being battered by Hurricane Harvey struck a chord with many Long Beach residents, and brought back memories of the days immediately after Superstorm Sandy.
We’ve seen the best of how people come together after such disasters — five years after Sandy, we’ve again seen the tremendous outpouring of care, support and needed supplies that our residents collected for those in Texas.
Unfortunately, we’re also still experiencing the worst: government programs that continue to fail residents and invest in infrastructure that will better safeguard our communities in the future.
We’re now told that due to a serious engineering error, the project would cost double the amount of the state’s initial estimate. When was this discovered? Has the engineering firm been held accountable? Have they been forced to return some of the taxpayer money they were paid for this work? No one will give us these answers.
Even worse, the committee is now being told that the state and city are proceeding with a $12.4 million plan that would only bulkhead parts of the city’s north shore, not one that is uniform and contiguous. In effect, $12.4 million in taxpayer funds is going to be spent to erect a picket fence in the hopes that it will somehow keep floodwaters out. It won’t.
The state and city should have asked the CRP committee and residents to rethink the smartest use of the limited resources provided. There were plenty of worthy projects the money could have been spent on to increase resiliency. Instead, information was kept from the committee and public until they devised their own alternative plan.
I hope we can all agree that spending $12.4 million on so-called flood protection measures that we know won’t protect us from a flood is a waste of tax dollars. The last thing we need is a $12.4 million political photo op.
Five years after Sandy, it’s once again clear that our residents are Long Beach’s greatest asset. What will it take to get government leadership to match?
John Bendo is a member of the CRP committee and an Independent who is running for City Council this year on a Democratic ticket.