With the hectic holiday season behind us all, I wanted to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy new year. The start of a new year inevitably leads you to reflect on the past year as well as look with optimism toward the coming year and what plans you make. For me, there are a lot of accomplishments I am proud to have made progress on for our community. 

 

A few of the highlights include big investments in Alamitos Bay with new docks, a new lifeguard station, the revamped Leeway Sailing Center facility, and concession stands, as well as the amazing inflatable kids play dock. If you spent any time at Bay Shore this summer I am sure you saw how popular this was.

My team and I have also been able to make some exciting progress in Marina Vista Park. This includes new bathrooms, installation of pathway lighting through the park, a beautiful dedication ceremony for the Luke Tatsu Johnson Sport Court and memorial bench for Stefanie Yates that was a touching reminder of how caring and strong the Third District community really is.

This past year I worked hard to make sure we saw the approval of absolutely amazing plans to restore the Los Cerritos Wetlands and remove much of the current oil operations in order to consolidate them to a new location. This is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity to rehabilitate so me of the last remaining wetlands in the state and preserve them for future generations.

 

I am also very proud of the progress we have made in terms of walking paths and beautification at both the Colorado Lagoon and Red Car Greenbelt Park. I personally walk these two areas on a daily basis and love to see the spaces

activated with people throughout the day.

In terms of policy I am glad to see that my proposal to ban RV parking on residential streets has been implemented throughout the City. I have put a big focus on stopping bike thefts by initiating a new free, online, voluntary bike registration program to help give police officers more information on who owns a bike when they come across them. I am proud that my team and I have been able to host several bike registration events to register bikes in the system. We have inputted hundreds of bikes so far! Additionally, I brought an item to council which created a new ordinance to allow better enforcement tools and provide criminal sanctions for the existence of bike chop shops in public spaces.  

I have also been able to initiate a neighborhood specific prosecutor that works directly with police officers and judges to advocate for appropriate consequences to better address crimes occurring in the district. Public Safety is always my primary focus, so this year's budget was good news not only because it was a balanced budget, but it funded our efforts to continue growing our police department, hiring more quality of life officers, and creating additional homeless outreach teams. The budget also included funding for a program I am very optimistic about that I developed to offer paid work on a day-to-day basis to homeless individuals for working with our Public Works teams for routine maintenance and clean up projects. This will certainly not solve homelessness but for those newly homeless or close to getting out of homelessness a program like this could help get someone's life back on track. Other cities have run similar programs and seen great results so I m expecting the same here in Long Beach and I am anxious to get the program started.

This year I led on a number of programs that confront issues ranging from illegal fireworks, to wire blight from utility wires, to improving the safety of our open spaces, to bringing the community together on addressing concerns around hate incidents, a fantastic program encouraging leadership in young girls, an anti-bullying event for middle school students, programs to provide tsunami preparedness, an annual event to help get pets spayed and neutered, and of course, my regular small business workshop. And all these came on top of the work my office and I do to organize monthly community meetings, regular free concerts, and other events, while also responding to requests for curb repairs, and tree trimmings, traffic studies and crosswalk installations, help getting large items picked up by trash collection, and the thousands of other phone calls, emails and other requests we work to take care of every year.

As you can tell last year was a busy year full of great progress for the Third District, and I am very excited to begin another new year seeing our community move forward together.

Thank you all for an amazing 2018, and I look forward to working in collaboration with you in 2019 as well.  

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Alamitos Bay Yacht  Club