City manager says Long Beach is moving toward stability

When Donna Gayden arrived from the Midwest in late February to take over as interim city manager, she was prepared to deal with Long Beach’s nagging — and worsening — financial crises.

Gayden has now held the post for over six months, was just awarded a new, one-year contract with a 6 percent raise, to $190,000, and “interim” is gone from her title. She has been trying to restore fiscal stability to the city, while facing another challenge no one expected: the coronavirus pandemic.

“We had to adapt” quickly, Gayden said in an interview earlier this week. “There were no protocols and no procedures” for the challenges she faced.

About 140 city workers were laid off, in departments including recreation, because the Recreation Center had to close. City Hall was shut down, and administrative employees had to work from home. Even the boardwalk, one of Long Beach’s most popular attractions, had to close.

Gayden, a municipal finance expert, rolled up her sleeves, because there was a budget to prepare for the next fiscal year. The spending plan for 2020-21 has a tax increase of 1.81 percent — the lowest in years — achieved with layoffs and spending cuts, but it also contains a hallmark of the new city manager’s administration: a five-year plan to restore Long Beach to fiscal stability.

The task will not be easy. Long Beach’s long-term debt is about $80 million — down about$9 million from last year — and its short-term debt is about $20 million. The new $83.2 million budget makes a start, cutting spending by nearly $3 million.

Gayden pointed out that in the past few months, the boardwalk and other facilities have reopened, and the city has rehired 54 people, hired 42 special police for the summer, and put 158 lifeguards to work. Some of those who were laid off amid the pandemic chose to retire.

But restoring the city’s financial health will require more work. Wall Street bond rating agencies have cut Long Beach’s ratings, with more downgrades still to come. The city plans to institute more modern methods of keeping track of employees’ time, and is awaiting state funding for a computerized system instead of the time cards it currently uses.

Gayden has also recovered $4 million to $5 million in grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government agencies that had gone uncollected.

Gayden, who has masters degrees in accounting and tax law, was the interim finance director for two small cities in Illinois when she was hired to clean up “years of mismanagement and scandal,” as several City Council members put it when she was sworn in over six months ago. She is the first woman, and the first African-American, to hold the post.

The scandal to which council members referred took the form of “separation payments” of about $750,000 to a dozen former city employees, including Jack Schnirman, the city manager who left Long Beach in January 2018 to become Nassau County comptroller. Schnirman has returned about $52,000 of the more than $100,000 he was paid when he left, but the payouts remain under investigation by the Nassau County district attorney’s office and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Gayden gets high marks from Long Beach residents who keep track of city operations. “To be honest, she’s done a fairly good job,” said Roy Lester, a former president of the Board of Education and a regular at council meetings. “Look what she came into. She got a sow’s ear and she’s trying to make a silk purse.”

Lester and others complain that the city continues to borrow by issuing bonds. But Gayden said at the outset that borrowing would be necessary.

Some are unhappy that she has accepted the pay increase. “She’s obviously a professional,” said Jim Hennessy, who in the early 2000s was a member of the City Council, and its president for several years. “I think as a manager, she’s the best we’ve ever had. But I don’t know about the pay raise. It doesn’t make the administration look good.”

Gayden responded that a number of those who were laid off have been hired back, and there have been other new hirings. She said the city would press hard to stick to its five-year plan for economic recovery, and that she hoped to settle contract negotiations with the police and fire unions, which have dragged on for years.

“This city is moving forward,” she said.