TITLE
Recommendation to direct City Manager to work with all appropriate departments to review and report back within 90 days parks roadway and parking lot maintenance and bring back to Council what proposals are necessary to streamline and fund such maintenance on an equal basis with our non-park roadways and parking lots.
DISCUSSION
When residents use the Go Long Beach app to report a pothole on any given Long Beach street, it gets filled in pretty quickly. However, when a resident reports a pothole while driving or parking within a Long Beach park, it doesn’t get filled in for months, if not years.
In the first instance, Public Works is notified and they fill in the pothole with money set aside just for that purpose. In the second instance, if the user reports a pothole in a park to Public Works, the Go Long Beach app kicks the request back to the user, telling them to direct their request to Park Maintenance. If the user takes that extra step to send it to Park Maintenance, it gets kicked back again telling the user that there’s no budget to fix it, given the minimal maintenance funds allocated for the entire park system.
This tale of two potholes results in a double standard and a second-class system of maintenance. There’s a budget to fix potholes on streets adjacent to parks, but no budget to fix potholes on the park roadways next to those same streets.
Our residents deserve better. While this is a budget issue, it’s also a policy issue about which department is best equipped to address these issues-it really makes no sense to have two different departments doing the same thing in different ways with different budgets. Does that mean that Public Works should take over the maintenance of the drivable portions of our parks? Maybe they should.
Therefore, I move that the City Manager work with all appropriate departments to review parks roadway and parking lot maintenance and bring back to Council what proposals are necessary to streamline and fund su...
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