Dear ER:
Five bond measures were on Beach Cities ballots during the recent election. All but one won. School bonds in the three Beach Cities, which required 55 percent approval, won handily. A bond to support the building of new police and fire facilities in Redondo Beach, which required a two-thirds vote, surpassed that mark easily.
The only bond that lost was the smallest one. It was for the Beach Cities Health District’s. It also required a two-thirds vote, but did not even achieve a majority vote. On the most recent voter update, it had only a 47 percent approval.
Why would the voters say yes to much larger bonds and reject just one? As H. L. Mencken is quoted, “every complex problem has an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
For most of its existence, BCHD has toiled in obscurity. Established in the middle of the last century, and provided a constantly increasing stream of taxpayer dollars which don’t appear itemized on our property tax bills, no one should be surprised if much of the populace of the three beach cities didn’t even know it existed.
Scrutiny arrived when a grandiose scheme to expand the District’s services into residential care for the elderly came into existence. This irked the people who live near the District’s property, some of whom live in Torrance just down the hill, because of the impact that development would have on their quality of life.
That scrutiny expanded past the project itself to the unsettling management of the District, including its squandering of a nest egg left to them by the last tenant of the old hospital that was its genesis. Those millions of dollars have disappeared, through a variety of means, to leave BCHD in financial jeopardy should no new source of revenue arrive.
For years, some have warned the District of its tendency to “mission creep,” the expanding of services provided beyond not only its financial means, but also to areas that are only peripherally associated with serving the residents of our three cities. Those warnings provided the core resonance to the defeat of the bond issue.
It is time for dramatic introspection by the elected BCHD Board. This loss was not just about providing a relatively small amount of money to the District. It was a referendum on the District itself. The public is telling them to get their act together before they have the audacity to attempt to expand their services beyond their core mission. It is also a warning to never again ask for additional revenue until that retrenchment is done.
Bob Pinzler
Redondo Beach
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