Al Austin II has delivered results for our community in the areas of mobility, economic development, sustainable planning and community building.  A former aerospace worker, legislative staffer, and representative for public service employees throughout California, Al earned the trust of the Eighth District residents and was elected to the City Council in 2012.  Al and his wife, Daysha have been active in the Bixby Knolls community while raising their sons. Al has brought together working families, community partners, and local small businesses to get things done that improve livability for residents across the district while exercising balanced and responsible leadership.  

The American Dream in Long Beach

Juan Ovalle’s story is a tale of the American Dream fully realized for him and his family right here in our western Long Beach community. The son of émigrés, who left Guatemala in order to breathe free in America, he immigrated with his parents and four brothers at the age of two. As immigrants, despite his father’s advanced technical training, his parents had to work hard to make ends meet. Nonetheless, they persevered, and all five kids went on to college and greater opportunity in life.

Juan graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in political science/public administration, and went on to work for fifteen years at the Long Beach Water Dept. as an administrative analyst, before transitioning to work in finance at Lehman Brothers and eventually to his current career as, along with his wife, a full-time housing provider, owning and managing a portfolio of rental housing properties in the region.

“I still remember helping my mother clean houses in the neighborhoods of Long Beach and watching how hard my parents struggled. Through their hard work, and the opportunities provided by this country and this city, we were eventually able to live the lives we dreamt of.”

“But now the hard-won nest eggs of so many, like ourselves, are under threat from irresponsible budgeting, forcing us to pay some of the highest local taxes in America. And all the while, we lack sufficient public investment and services, from our parks to public safety, while failing to address our massive liabilities. This is the clear result of the negligence and neglect of unresponsive, callous officials, like the incumbent councilmember.”

“I made the decision to run for office not just to help protect those who have invested their life savings in Long Beach, but also to help improve the great inequality we see all around us. We must address public safety, housing affordability, homelessness, and lack of community investment, for us all to achieve the Long Beach we dream of. It’s time we had the energetic representation we truly deserve.”

• PUBLIC SAFETY INVESTMENT: We must IMMEDIATELY AND FULLY restore the 200 SWORN OFFICERS deficit, cut from our LBPD budget during the recession, including the FIELD ANTI-GANG UNIT, to protect our residents from GANG VIOLENCE, VANDALISM, and RISING BURGLARIES. We need to help the homeless get off the street and into the care of service providers, instead of simply brushing the issue to the side. 

• FIRE STATION 9:  We must make its immediate reopening our HIGHEST PRIORITY. 
• halt any plans to tear down Fire Station 9 (and spend $20 million on a new station which may open years from now).
• actually follow, rather than ignore, the recommendations of the mold expert hired by the City to do additional work studying the water intrusion issue at FS9.  Outside experts on facility environmental safety say that FS9, like almost any building suffering from mold, is 100% remediable.  All focus should be put on remediation and saving our historic community fire station, FS9.
• never again allow extraordinarily irresponsible deferred maintenance to rot away essential public safety infrastructure!

• HOMELESSNESS CRISIS:  We must stop pretending like this is anything less than a crisis.  To address this we need to:
• stop wasting a massive amount of money on vanity projects, like the proposed City-run facility near the 91 Freeway—that was nothing more than a photo op for politicians, and it wasted over $10 million in grant money.  We bought it for literally $8 million dollars more than the last buyer of that property, and now we can't even fully utilize it because it has a preexisting cannabis lease the city claims it didn't know about.  That isn't just an incredibly egregious lack of due diligence by Councilman Austin and City Hall, and it smells like something far worse.  We should sell that property back and immediately start taking logical action on homelessness
• adding enough shelter beds where the homeless actually are, starting downtown.
• adding social workers to guide the homeless along the incredibly difficult journey back to sustaining themselves and reintegrating.
• conducting an honest homeless count.  Experts say our homeless count is false because we require the homeless to self-identify as such, we have other oddities when it comes to our questionnaire, and we do not have an independent third party handling the tabulations.
• treating this as a regional issue, because that's exactly what it is.  We need to work in partnership with federal, state, and especially county authorities like LAHSA, the county homelessness agency, rather than allowing local politicians to use this issue to grandstand.

• ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH & SAFETY: We must MAKE THE AIR SAFER along the 710 corridor (a.k.a. the “Diesel Death Zone”) by addressing port, freeway, and refinery-related emissions. Residents along this entire corridor, including the 8th District, suffer disproportionately from asthma and other lung problems, heart disease, and various forms of cancer. Our highest priorities for addressing this public health crisis must include:
• accelerating the LA/Long Beach ports’ Clean Air Action Plan (CAAP) to clean up ship and diesel truck emissions,
• implementing a far more robust air quality monitoring system in our communities, run by the City of Long Beach
• by lobbying AQMD to discontinue dangerous refinery practices, such as the storage of deadly MHF (modified hydrofluoric acid).

• LAND USE & DENSITY: We must support the rights of property owners and homeowners to have stable neighborhoods.  One doesn't just buy a house, one invests in a block, a neighborhood, and a community.  To have those neighborhoods destroyed by unchecked development by greedy developers, looking to drop in, make a buck, and sell on their way out, is an outrage.

• TREES & THE CITYWIDE MAGNOLIA TREE THREAT: Long Beach is home to many Magnolia trees; many of them are in trouble because of a tree scale infestation. As part of the People of Long Beach, Juan worked with others to form the Magnolia Tree Scale Task Force. Juan spoke at a City Council meeting last year and sent a letter to the Long Beach Mayor and City Councilmembers about this important issue and recommendations needed to minimize this threat to our urban forest. View more info in this PDF.  In addition to these recommendations we should:
• add and maintain thousands more trees throughout the city.
• hire a top expert to be our City Arborist and greatly expand the budget for tree maintenance and care, in order not only to address the magnolia tree scale threat, but help our trees recover from the drought and prevent future threats from killing them.
• hire a City Urban Forest Manager to oversee the expansion and management of our urban forest, from our parks to residential streets to our median strips.

• FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY:  We must reform our City Budget top to bottom.  Currently it is shot through with special interests-driven (i.e. those big money organized interest groups who 'buy' politicians) wasteful spending. 
• An outside financial performance review
• Line-item budgeting, so that our City Council, and especially its Budget Oversight Committee (of which Councilman Austin is a member), can actually do its job and scrutinize every aspect of how our tax dollars are being spent.
• Zero-based budgeting.

• GOVERNMENTAL REFORM & ACCOUNTABILITY: We must END SPECIAL INTEREST INFLUENCE and make city government less arrogant, more accountable, and more transparent. The influence of special interest power brokers is apparent in all aspects of City government when one looks beneath the surface, and it has resulted in gross inefficiency and wasted resources. We must always remind ourselves of our most basic civic declaration, that GOVERNMENT IS OF, BY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE! Our highest reform priorities should include:
• enacting the Long Beach Reform Pledge, which I have signed
• adopting on a local level the principles of the national political reform organization Represent.Us, as elaborated in its proposed American Anti-Corruption Act (which "sets a standard for local, state, and federal laws that fix our broken elections, stop political bribery, and end secret money")