While speaking to a room of over 100 business leaders for the Chamber of Commerce’s State of the City event, Mayor Wayne Powell began by showing selfies of him in various places around the White House—in the press conference room, the Oval Office, outside the gates—which he recently visited for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
“Manhattan Beach was the envy” of the mayors, he said.
“They all want to be like Manhattan Beach,” he said. “I told them they can’t—because we’re here.”
Powell spent about 40 minutes outlining the city’s achievements last year and plans for this year, beginning with the state of the city’s finances, at the Jan. 29 event.
He used the anecdote about his trip to underscore the city’s financial responsibility.
“Unlike the state and federal government, we treat the money like it’s coming out of our pockets,” he said. He pointed to an auditor’s assessment that the city’s finances were in order and a $2.1 million surplus as proof.
“A lot of cities are envious that we have enough money to weather another recession,” he said while showing pie charts of the city’s latest revenues, including $24 million in property taxes.
Later, he said he wanted to “address the 800-pound gorilla in the room.”
“A lot of cities have large, unfunded pensions—a large, ticking time bomb,” he said.
Most cities fund their pensions at zero to 50 percent, he said, but Manhattan Beach funds its at 80 percent.
While at the mayor’s conference, he said he made a personal plea to the president for more money for Manhattan Beach’s infrastructure. The president put him in touch with someone on his staff, he said.
Before Obama left the group, Powell said that he shouted, “Mr. President, I love Manhattan Beach!”
“He either said, ‘Me too,’ or something that rhymes with that,” said Powell.
He also took the opportunity of speaking to the chamber members to respond to what he saw as unfair criticism, especially around the council’s recent approval of plans to update the Manhattan Village Mall.
“The city council was accused of being sneaky and slimy” by having the final vote on the matter during the week after Thanksgiving, he said. It was hard finding a date near the end of the year that pleased everybody and he didn’t want to postpone the meeting, he explained.
“We had a number of residents, so obviously it didn’t affect” attendance, he said. After a brief pause, he added, “I get very emotional about that, so please forgive me,” before finishing his speech and inviting questions from the audience. ER
