3:20pm | On Tuesday the city council decided how to allocate the $18.4 million in Uplands Oil Fund, earmarking it primarily for public safety and infrastructure projects.

By a 6-3 vote, the council passed a plan diverting nearly $8 million of the Fund into issues generally grouped under the heading of “public safety,” including costs related to police overtime, pension reform (such as the agreement recently struck with the Long Beach Police Officers Association), the initial construction stages of a prisoner-transfer tunnel between the city jail and the new courthouse, and septic-tank replacement on police property.

Roughly $7.5 million will go mostly toward infrastructure projects, including tree trimming and sidewalk repairs. Also covered by this portion is funding to keep three library branches at their current service levels, as well as upgrading the City’s Website.

Additionally, $3 million will be applied to the City’s 2012 budget: $2 million allocated for emergency reserves, and $1 for deficit reduction.

Councilmembers Gerrie Schipske, Rae Gabelich, and Steven Neal — who in late August put forward their own plan for how to allocate the Uplands Oil Fund — were the dissenting votes, although Neal says his “no” vote had more to do with the process and the substitute-substitute motion put forward by Vice Mayor Suja Lowenthal than with the original motion put forward by Councilmember Robert Garcia.

“I would have voted ‘yes’ on what they proposed,” Neal says, “but I think that the way that it came about was a bit disingenuous. When Rae, Gerrie, and myself put [their plan] forward, the kind of dialog that went forth last night was actually what we were looking for. There’s differing opinions on what ‘one-time money’ or ‘one-time use’ is. … I wish we would have gotten this kind of dialog three or four weeks ago. … But when certain individuals are talking, it seems like [in the eyes of some other councilmembers] what they have to say has no value at all. Personally, I feel that’s kind of like what happened with the original plan. The fact that it was me, Gerrie, and Rae that put it forth, I wonder if it didn’t get any traction just because of the kind of people that were involved.”

Gabelich echoes this sentiment — “I guess it’s all about the numbers, whether that’s the numbers we have in the budget or the number that we have for the vote” — but she has greater qualms than Neal about the resolution.

“I still feel they shortchanged public safety,” she says. “Most of the [money allocated] for police and fire is going toward new technology, cleaning up … police property. That’s not a police obligation. The analogy I still stand by is, if you’ve got a house and the roof’s leaking, you fix the roof before you build an addition. And I know the mayor doesn’t agree with that. I think it’s a stretch for people to say that this is one-time money, because with many of those projects that are being initiated, next year they’ll need more money. But out of all of this, the part that really disturbs me the most is that we are still short $1.2 million in fire. They need $3.2 million to make sure that they have four men on every truck, and we’re only recognizing $2 million. … We took it away, and we should have given it back.”
 
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