A group of long-time City Hall observers, fed up with the direction of Long Beach government over the last decade, have organized the Stop the Tax on Long Beach Working Families campaign to oppose the corrupt bargain between mayors Foster/Garcia and the measure’s union boss backers.

A consultant advising the late-entry campaign, Ian Patton, said, “These folks have watched how the last mayor hand-picked the current mayor by funneling boat-loads of special interest contributions primarily through unlimited independent expenditure committees, and now we get the predictable result: government that’s bought and paid for by developers, port interests, and the most powerful union boss in town, to the detriment even of the rest of the labor community, let alone the community at large. It’s basically a corrupt system, because it means that Mayor Garcia and fearful council members are not really policy actors. They’re just smiling political faces, but their arms and legs are pulled by strings largely invisible to the public.”

Patton went on to say, “Measure A is a case in point. They claim to defend average folks with a minimum wage hike, but then they take that money right back out of working families’ pockets, and everyone’s pockets, but especially working families. Not that you’d realize it’s even a tax at all from their campaign literature. Their claim that they will hire more officers is… I’ll just say it’s baloney. Look for pay raises if this passes, and back-filling fiscal holes they’ve already created with projects like the big developer boondoggle they call the new civic center.”