NEWS
SEPTEMBER 13, 2013
SIGNAL TRIBUNE
15
No longer needed for inmate transport, underground Long Beach tunnel to be securely fenced off CJ Dablo Staff Writer
It’s just a slab of concrete sunk below downtown Long Beach, but it used to be a major convenience for the City’s police department. A tunnel that runs between the Long Beach Police Department headquarters and the former courthouse at 415 W. Ocean Blvd. will soon be fenced at the border between the two properties, a police official confirmed this week. The tunnel was a key passageway for the police department to safely ensure that their jail inmates would make it to their day before a judge. For years, jailers used the tunnel to escort inmates who walked from the police department for a few hundred feet along a passageway that led to an elevator to the court building. Now that a new building for the Los Angeles County Superior Court has opened on Magnolia Avenue, there isn’t much need for a tunnel that leads from the police department to the former courthouse, a largely vacated building. Last Tuesday, the tunnel stood empty, for the most part. Only a few items along the passage hinted at the stories the shiny concrete walls could tell. There was a small office cabinet that had been discarded along the path. A few blue rubber gloves had been dropped in random corners. Starting this week, detainees held at the Long Beach Police Department will have to be securely shuttled using two prisoner-transport vans to and from the new Gov. George Deukmejian Courthouse on Magnolia Avenue. It will still be a very short distance that the jail
Marijuana
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•Include a cap to two per Council District and no more than 18 citywide •Consider distances from schools •Describe the CUP process Second District Councilmember Suja Lowenthal acknowledged Tuesday that the Council has wrestled with the pot-dispensary issue for more than four years. In the meantime, dispensaries have popped up all over the city. Some dispensaries were forced to shut down. Still others continue to operate even after the Council decided to make the dispensaries illegal. The City Council voted to ban medical-marijuana dispensaries last year after a court ruled that parts of the city’s former ordinance that attempted to regulate the pot industry violated federal law. However, that ban did not deter medical-marijuana advocates who then launched a campaign to request that a ballot initiative regulating dispensaries should be voted upon by the people in a special election. Although proponents of medical marijuana claim that more than 43,000 registered voters signed their petition, the city clerk’s office invalidated a key number of the signatures. According to a staff report to the Council, the city clerk determined that only a little more than 31,000 signatures were valid, a number below the threshold needed to call for a special election. Earlier this week, a court did not side with the medical-marijuana advocates, who claimed that they had at least gathered enough signatures to get the issue on the ballot for a general election. Despite the court ruling, Lowenthal urged the Council to pay attention to the supporters who are pressing for safe access to medical marijuana. “As I have mentioned before,” Lowenthal told the Council, “expecting patients with painful conditions to get their medical-marijuana prescriptions through drug dealers and back alleys is not the solution.” Eighth District Councilmember Al Austin agreed, indicating he wasn’t comfortable with banning dispensaries altogether, explaining that an outright ban assumes that medical-marijuana dispensaries would just go away. “It’s going to be in our alleys. It’s going to be dealt out of apartments,” Austin said. “It’s going to serve an underground economy, and it’s not
inmates will have to travel. The new courthouse is only about a block away from the police department. Perhaps it’s as far as one and a half blocks away, depending on which side of the building an inmate had to enter. Either way, it’s not far. According to Deputy Chief Laura Farinella, who runs the police department’s support bureau, police used the tunnel to escort about 50 to as many as 70 inmates to the courthouse. In a telephone interview Monday, Farinella acknowledged that the change in jailinmate-transportation protocol won’t be much trouble for the department. “I don’t think it will be [an] inconvenience,” Farinella said. “But I do think the tunnel that we currently had in place was an extreme convenience, because you could usually run back if a security officer needed to get something. They could easily come back through the tunnel, not have to get into a car and drive over. But I wouldn’t call the van and transporting this way an inconvenience, by any stretch.” Farinella said that the annual cost to transport the inmates utilizing two additional security officers and two transport vans has been estimated to be about $250,000 a year. The decision to use vans instead of tunnels for transporting inmates will save the City of Long Beach a significant amount of money, at least in the immediate future. Fifth District Councilmember Gerrie Schipske says that it would have cost anywhere between $8 million to $10 million to build the tunnel. She acknowledged in a telephone interview
that the new courthouse was designed with the tunnel in mind, but building the tunnel wasn’t pursued early enough by the City. She added that cost wasn’t the only factor, indicating that the tunnel would have to be built under the water table, which would have caused flooding, and she said there were numerous oil and utility lines. “Had it been…kept in the design, pushed a little earlier by the City of Long Beach, there would have been a tunnel because it was designed that way,” Schipske said. “But, you know, for some reason, the ball was dropped, and it wasn’t pursued until it was so late that it [was] just financially impossible to do it.” The future of the area’s former courthouse on Ocean Boulevard is uncertain now that the State of California has dissolved the redevelopment program last year. The City owns the tunnel, Jacqueline Medina, a spokesperson for the City of Long Beach’s Development Services, confirmed this week. However, since the City of Long Beach must comply with the State’s mandate to dissolve the redevelopment program, there are a lot of questions that have no answers about the future of the vacant courthouse and its tunnel. Medina confirmed that the City’s former redevelopment agency owned the building, and this piece of real estate is part of a long-range property management plan that will be submitted to the State’s Department of Finance in October. It’s unknown how long the State’s Department of Finance will take to
going to serve the best interests of the city.” Austin concluded that he could support an ordinance from the City Council since it could give officials “optimal control” of the issue. The Council ultimately agreed with Lowenthal and Austin. They voted 8-0 in favor of requesting the city attorney to initiate the process of developing an ordinance that would address regulating dispensaries through zoning codes. About 10 members of the public spoke out in favor of allowing safe access to medical marijuana and for some regulation of dispensaries. No one in the public spoke out against marijuana dispensaries. One advocate said that he had suffered from a back injury and damaged nerve endings in his leg. “Cannabis actually allows me to function,” he said. At times, the discussion grew heated and wandered off topic. Some speakers yelled insults at the Council if the speakers’ allotted three minutes of public comment were interrupted. Other public-comment participants enjoyed an
approve the overall property-management plan in order for anyone to really know the final fate of the old courthouse. Michael Conway, who serves as the director of business and property development for the City of Long Beach, suggests there is a new possibility for the old courthouse. That building is considered part of the “Mega Block,” a 15-acre site in downtown Long Beach that may be a part of a new vision for the civic center. “We are at the very early stages of identifying a partner to create concept alternatives for developing a new civic center,” Conway said. He confirmed that once the court has completely moved out of the former building, the property will be secured with life-safety systems in place. The building won’t be used. Conway added that the City is not anticipating any uses for the tunnel that led from the former courthouse building elevator into a hundred or so feet of concrete passageway. Since the police plan to fence off the tunnel at the border between the two properties, the former courthouse’s side of the tunnel will lead to a dead end. Farinella suggested that the portion of the tunnel that belongs to the police department may eventually be used for storage. “We will have to gate it up,” Farinella said, “because I don’t know what will be built on the other side of it, and obviously we can’t compromise our safety and security to have access to that tunnel from the opposite side.” ß
easy dialogue with the council members. Adam Hijaya, a board member with the Long Beach Collectives Association, urged the Council to still put the issue to a vote in an election so that residents could determine whether the City would regulate marijuana dispensaries. Fourth District Councilmember Patrick O’Donnell asked Hijaya a pointed question. “If we could, in fact, craft another [ordinance],” O’Donnell began, “–and I don’t know if we can, wouldn’t that be a better route to go than waiting for another initiative? Would you agree?“ “I would agree, but I would love the opportunity to sit and talk,” Hijaya replied. After the Council meeting, Hijaya said he was grateful to the Council for its leadership. “I think ultimately, at the end of the day, they always knew that this was the right thing to do,” Hijaya said. “They were just finding the best way to do it.” Lowenthal also said after the meeting that she was pleased with the outcome.
CJ Dablo/Signal Tribune
A downtown Long Beach prisoner-transport tunnel runs between the Long Beach Police Department and the building on Ocean Boulevard that served for many years as the Los Angeles County Superior Courthouse until the Gov. George Deukmejian Courthouse opened earlier this week. A police department spokesman said that the City will soon install a fence in the tunnel on the border between the two properties in order to block access to the former courthouse.
CJ Dablo/Signal Tribune
A court determined earlier this week that medical marijuana advocates in Long Beach did not gather enough petition signatures that would require a city election for pot-dispensary regulations. Despite the court ruling, 2nd District Councilmember Suja Lowenthal (left) urged the Council to pay attention to the supporters who are pressing for safe access to medical marijuana. The Council ultimately agreed with Lowenthal, voting 8-0 in favor of requesting the city attorney to initiate the process of developing an ordinance that would address regulating dispensaries through zoning codes. Sixth District Councilmember Dee Andrews was not present for the vote. “I do think in our heart of hearts,” Lowenthal said, “this Council wants to be sure that there is safe access for people who need medical marijuana.” The 2nd-district councilmember seemed confident that city officials would be
able to navigate through the legal hurdles ahead of them. “We are a very sophisticated city,” Lowenthal concluded. “We have a very sophisticated city attorney’s office. We can figure it out.” ß
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