One familiar face, two newcomers

LSeasoned Long Beach political observers tried to recall the last time they had seen such a large turnout at an inauguration ceremony for the 87-year-old City Council.

At last Sunday’s event, every seat was taken, and scores of spectators stood in the sixth-floor council chambers at City Hall as second-term Republican council member John McLaughlin, first-term Democrats Mike Fagen and Len Torres and the new City Court judge, Frank Dikranis, were sworn in.

“It was incredible, just wild,” said Larry Elovich, the city’s Democratic leader during the 1960s, who has attended 25 previous City Council ceremonies. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

Elovich, an attorney and the chairman of the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce, swore in Dikranis, while McLaughlin took his oath from former Long Beach Republican leader James Moriarty, Fagen from City Court Judge Roy Tepper and Torres from Nassau County Supreme Court Judge Joel Asarch.

McLaughlin and Fagen, who had the two highest vote totals in the at-large November election, captured four-year terms, while Torres won a two-year seat. Issues ranging from taxes to parking to boardwalk rehabilitation took center stage during the campaign.

Three candidates from each party ran as teams, but the Democrats, especially, emphasized unity because they needed all three to win to recapture control of the council majority, which they lost in 2007, when McLaughlin was first elected to a two-year term. Fagen and Torres ran with Fran Adelson, and McLaughlin ran with Maureen Doherty and Marvin Weiss.

After the ceremony, McLaughlin told the Herald that his only regret was that his running mates didn’t join him in victory. With his re-election, Republicans retained a 3-2 council majority, which includes President Thomas Sofield Jr. and Vice President Mona Goodman. Democrats Lenny Remo and Denise Tangney had stepped down.

“The majority is there, and the majority has to come to the table with compromise,” McLaughlin said. “In my first term we were in the same position, and Lenny Remo had set the tone and standard of really trying to work together in a bipartisan manner. I would hope that would happen again, but I can only say I can be cautiously optimistic.”

McLaughlin, a retired FDNY lieutenant and a West Bay resident who is working on his master’s degree in fine arts at Queens College, pledged in his campaign to reduce taxes, to continue moving part-time city employees to full-time status and to hire more storm management consultants. “I really want to continue doing what we’ve been doing to keep working on the infrastructure of the city,” he said.

Along with Nassau County Legislator Denise Ford and Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg, new Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano was in the audience. Both Fagen and Torres said they extended Mangano an invitation. “We thought it was a great idea, because a sense of cooperation is needed throughout all of New York, and we would hope that that sense of cooperation and bipartisanship can extend to the city administration,” Fagen said. “We thought it was a good place to start.”

Fagen, a West End resident who works in stadium TV networking, vowed to bring greater transparency to city government, and to end what he calls City Hall’s “friends-and-family program” charging that the city hires employees’ unqualified acquaintances and relatives. He also proposed adding non-tax revenue streams, including an Adopt-A-Highway program, in which businesses would sponsor sections of a newly constructed boardwalk, and naming-rights deals with corporations to finance the ice arena and Recreation Center.

“We’d like to bring some special events to the city, to the beach this summer,” Fagen said. “And Len is working on some lucrative grants, and all in all we’d like to bring some fair and open government back to the city.”

“Affordability” was Torres’s campaign mantra, as he promised to cut spending on city employees’ overtime and to consolidate and streamline services. Torres also highlighted the fact that he was the first Hispanic candidate to run for a City Council seat. “As a Latino, the Hispanic community was very supportive of me, but they didn’t get me into office — it was all of Long Beach,” said Torres, who is a project manager for the Long Beach Latino Civic Association. “Now, as a council member, I represent all of Long Beach.”

Torres was teacher and administrator in Long Beach and New York City for decades before he retired in 2003, after which he helped overhaul the Roosevelt School District. He also served on the city’s zoning board and is a Long Beach Housing Authority commissioner.

“As a grant writer,” Torres said, “I’m a person who will bring new concepts and new ways of handling money to the city — and for everyone, not just one community.”

After City Court Judge Stanley Smolkin decided to retire last year, Dikranis defeated Democrat Scott Nigro, earning a 10-year term. In a speech honoring Dikranis, Elovich pointed out that before he became an assistant county district attorney and opened his practice in the West End more than two decades ago, Dikranis was a New York City police officer and detective.

“Probably the most important thing in being a good judge is having street smarts,” Elovich said, “and his whole life required him to have those smarts. And this is basically a lifetime of hard work to reach his ultimate goal, and that was to become a judge.”

“Some great people supported me,” said Dikranis, who spent this week at a school for judges in White Plains, “and I can’t wait to be the best judge that I can be for everybody, whether or not they voted for me.”

In a meeting after the ceremonies concluded, the new City Council voted to retain Goodman as vice president and Sofield as president, in spite of an effort by Fagen to nominate Goodman as president.

Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.