TITLE
Recommendation to request City Manager to identify opportunities to expand the City’s role as a leading municipality by exploring additional options to contract to provide services to other local cities and agencies in areas such as public safety, health, animal care services and public works.
DISCUSSION
BACKGROUND:
Long Beach is a full-service independent city and is one of only a few municipalities in the region able to provide quality, targeted services with its own dedicated employees in several areas. Many of Long Beach’s departments and employees have been recognized at the state and national levels for the quality of service and innovative programs that we provide.
Smaller, neighboring cities contract for many services with the county or other entities, due to the inefficiencies of providing those services on a smaller scale. Several nearby cities utilize the professional services of Long Beach departments as contract services for their own cities, due to the value and effectiveness of our City’s service delivery model.
For example, the cities of Signal Hill, Cerritos, Seal Beach and Los Alamitos all contract with Long Beach to utilize our Animal Care Services. In the Fiscal Year 2021 budget, the City Council approved providing street sweeping services for the Rossmoor Community Services District. Previously, Long Beach has provided fire services to the City of Signal Hill.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Long Beach’s Health Department has worked with our neighboring partner cities to provide testing and services to their residents. Long Beach is now bringing additional services in-house that other nearby cities may be interested in contracting with, such as street light repair.
As we look to identify additional budget offsets in the coming years, including economies of scale, and other cities are also evaluating their service delivery models, it would be prudent to pro-actively explore and identify additional opportunities to contract with other nearby cities to provide services currently offered by the City of Long Beach, that would be attractive to other cities due to the quality and value that partnering with Long Beach would provide.
FISCAL IMPACT
A fiscal impact analysis was not able to be completed.
SUGGESTED ACTION
Approve recommendation.
Respectfully Submitted,
AL AUSTIN
COUNCILMAN, EIGHTH DISTRICT
STACY MUNGO
COUNCILWOMAN, FIFTH DISTRICT
SUELY SARO
COUNCILWOMAN, SIXTH DISTRICT
REX RICHARDSON
VICE MAYOR, NINTH DISTRICT