Tonia Reyes-Uranga spoke one last time as 7th District City Councilwoman at the Wrigley Association monthly meeting at Veterans Park last Monday. Before Reyes-Uranga spoke, Annie Greenfeld, former Wrigley Association president, praised her for all she had done for the Wrigley District during the last eight years. “When we needed help the most at Wrigley, she was there,” Greenfeld said. “There is nobody more special to me on this city council than Tonia Reyes-Uranga.”
When Reyes-Uranga took the microphone, she commended the Wrigley Association for all its efforts over many years to improve the quality of life in the area. “In spite of everything that has gone on, you have been dignified, you have been professional, and you have moved forward in ways of helping this community that have just been incredible,” she said.
Reyes-Uranga said she will continue to live in the area and plans to stay active in the community. She noted that, prior to coming to the Wrigley Association meeting, she had participated in a fundraising event for the Long Beach Conservation Corps.
Reyes-Uranga, who was unseated by James Johnson in the June 8 election, finished her second four-year term on the council on Tuesday, July 13.

James Johnson on election night

Taking 52.9 percent of the votes, James Johnson won the race for Long Beach’s 7th District, unseating Councilwoman Tonia Reyes-Uranga, who was running for her third term as a write-in candidate. The victory marked the end of a campaign that started April 13, 2009.
Johnson, who is Long Beach assistant city auditor, and his campaign supporters, including Mayor Bob Foster, celebrated their success at Arashi, a sushi restaurant at 3550 Long Beach Blvd., which neighbors his campaign headquarters.
After the victory was announced at 10:43 with 3,408 votes tallied in his favor, Johnson delivered a speech thanking the voters. “At the end of the day it is the voters who determine who governs,” Johnson said. Out of 25,281 registered voters, 25.8 percent cast their ballots.
The vote counts did not include 398 provisional ballots and 353 vote-by-mail ballots, which are counted separately.
Reyes-Uranga garnered 47.1 percent of the vote– 374 votes fewer than Johnson. “Without a system of competition you cannot have the government that we enjoy,” Johnson said. In acknowledging his competitor, he said democracy deserves competition.
A host of significant endorsements supported Johnson’s camp, including Foster and the Port of Long Beach’s longshoremen union. “I had several councilmembers’ endorsements,” Johnson said. “That is very unusual.” Councilmembers Robert Garcia, Gary DeLong, Suja Lowenthal and Val Lerch made appearances at the new councilmember’s party.
Johnson was raised in the 7th District, which includes Wrigley, Bixby Highlands, California Heights, and the Westside, before earning an economics degree from Harvard University.
The assistant auditor’s campaign was based on fiscal responsibility and solving the city’s budget deficit, which is estimated at $18.5 million.

Jack Smith
Former 7th District candidate
Long Beach

Assistant Long Beach City Auditor James Johnson is hoping the voters will elect him to the 7th District Long Beach City Council Office in the June 8 election. “I am running for office because I want Long Beach to be the greatest possible city that it can be,” he said. “I was born in Long Beach 32 years ago. I’ve had a lot of great breaks in this town.” He noted that he graduated from Long Beach Poly High School, studied economics in the city’s main library and always felt safe on the streets. “So I want to give back,” he said. “I want to make sure this city continues to grow and that people can have the same experiences that I had.”
Johnson came in first place in Long Beach’s April 13 nominating election. He received 2,443 votes, or 44.8 percent of the votes cast. Incumbent 7th District City Councilwoman Tonia Reyes-Uranga came in second. She received 1,685 votes, or 30.9 percent of the votes cast in the 7th District race. The three other candidates (Jill Hill, Jack Smith and Fernando Bernabe) received the remainder of the votes. Because neither Johnson nor Uranga received more than 50 percent of the votes, those two candidates are running against each other in the June 8 election.
Johnson said he hopes to work with the city council to take actions that will increase employment opportunities in Long Beach’s private sector. “I also want to make sure that the city has a balanced budget and safer streets,” he said.
According to Johnson, one of the city’s priorities must be increasing the number of jobs in Long Beach. He stressed that the council needs to do more in the arenas of business retention and attraction. “We need to make Long Beach a place that fosters businesses,” he said, adding that the City of Signal Hill seems to be doing a much better job of that than Long Beach. “There is a reason why Signal Hill has two Home Depots and Long Beach has none,” he said. “There is a reason why Long Beach Boulevard is no longer the avenue of cars and everyone in Long Beach goes to Signal Hill or Cerritos to buy their new vehicles.”
Johnson said that, if elected, he would sit down with Long Beach’s current business people and ask them what the city can do to keep them in town. “There could be a range of things. We need to make sure that our fees are not so onerous that we drive businesses out of town,” he said. “We also need to ask business owners, ‘How can we help you succeed because we see your success as our success as a city?’”
Johnson explained that, after getting input from the business community, he would sit down with the city manager and explore ways to implement ideas to make the city more business friendly, which would help increase its sales-tax revenues, putting more money into the city’s General Fund.
The candidate also stressed that other factors like pension plans for city employees need to be brought under control in order to reduce the city’s expenditures. “We need to work with the employee groups to come up with a sustainable pension plan over the long term,” he said. “The current pension plan is not sustainable. I want to work with the employee groups to develop a system that retains and attracts great employees to the city of Long Beach, but that also allows us to balance the budget.” He noted that, as assistant city auditor working with CALPERS, he saved the city $3.5 million in pension costs recently and voters should take his understanding of the pension system into account.
“In these tough times, we also have to make sure there is absolutely no waste of taxpayer dollars,” he said. “I want to make sure, for example, that we are repairing streets more often than we are replacing them. You can slurry-seal an asphalt street for 30 cents a square foot, but if you let it go without repair too long, that same street will cost $6 a square foot to replace.”
Johnson said that his background as assistant city auditor would bring a lot of value to the council. “We have audited city programs, and we have offered suggestions to use dollars more efficiently,” he said.
Turning to the issue of public safety, he insisted that having a balanced budget is key to being able to make the streets safer. “We need to make sure we have a long-term, fiscally responsible budget so that in the future, we are not faced with Draconian situations like reducing our police force,” he said.
The candidate explained that better budget management would enable the city to afford more of the tools the police department needs to keep the city safe. “We need to find ways to do more with the same amount of money,” he said. “We also need to work more with the city’s residents so that they understand that they need to be partners with the police department in fighting crime.” He explained that, as a councilmember, he would put a lot of effort into increasing the number of neighborhood watch groups in the 7th District.
Johnson dismissed Reyes-Uranga’s assertion that her experience on the council has enabled her to learn how to get things done in the city’s governmental structure and consequently that she would be a more effective leader than Johnson would be. “I don’t think Long Beach is moving in the right direction right now,” he said. “We need someone on the council who can steady the ship. We need some real leadership, and I think my financial experience will be tremendously valuable in making sure that Long Beach balances its budget and continues to provide core services.”
Johnson was hired as assistant city auditor for the city a little more than two years ago. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics degree from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of California at Berkley, and he was accepted into the California Bar in 2004.
“This is a critical juncture for the city, and it’s time to put Long Beach on the right path,” he said. “I want to ensure that Long Beach has more jobs, that our streets are getting safer, that our streets and sidewalks are improving. To do that, we need to bring someone on the city council who knows how to be fiscally responsible to get the job done for the long term.”

About 200 people gathered for the official opening of Chrissy Strong-Marshall Plaza in Somerset Park last Saturday, March 20. Strong-Marshall was a longtime employee of the Long Beach parks department who died after a long battle with cancer. A few months ago, the Long Beach City Council voted to rename Somerset Park in her honor, but many people in the neighborhoods surrounding the park asked city officials to preserve the park’s original name.
In response, 7th District Councilwoman Tonia Reyes-Uranga (pictured far right) arranged for the park to keep its original name and to renovate the park plaza and name it in honor of Strong-Marshall.

Roberto Uranga is no longer seeking to be elected as Long Beach City Councilman for the 7th District. On Thursday morning, his wife, incumbent 7th District Councilwoman Tonia Reyes-Uranga, announced that she will seek reelection as a write-in candidate.
Uranga, who is a member of the Long Beach Community College District Board of Trustees, announced his withdrawal from the council race about two weeks ago. His decision to pull out came after his election as vice chair of the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT), a national organization that lobbies for federal legislation that will benefit community colleges. “I became a member of the board of directors (of ACCT) in 2007,” he said. “A vacancy was created this past summer when the vice chair did not get reappointed to her position as a local trustee.” (Only trustees of community colleges are allowed membership in ACCT.)
When the woman, who lives in Mississippi, had to resign as ACCT’s vice chair, other board members asked Uranga to run for that position. He did, and he won.
As vice chair of ACCT, Uranga is now next in line to be chair of that organization, and he could rise to the position in 2011.
“It is important to me to be in the leadership of the national association because I want to help take it to a higher level,” he said. “We have initiatives to get involved with colleges in other countries, and we want to make a college education more affordable to students from low-income households right here in the United States.”
Uranga also noted that one of the things ACCT is currently supporting is a proposed immigration-reform law that would allow foreigners to pay in-state college tuition fees and offer them the chance to apply for citizenship after graduation. “It’s a pathway to citizenship through education,” he said.
Uranga added that, while pushing for federal legislation that is beneficial to college students is his primary motivation for remaining with ACCT, he has another reason as well. “As chair, I would be the first Hispanic to head a mainstream organization of that nature,” he said. “When I got elected vice chair, there were a lot of wet eyes because it was a historic occasion.”
Reyes-Uranga said even before her husband told her, she knew he would be dropping out of the 7th District race. “When he was elected as vice chair of the national college trustee association, I could see that was where his passion was,” she said. “He was very excited about it.”
After he told her he would be withdrawing from the council race, Reyes-Uranga began contemplating another bid for the 7th District seat. “I had not thought about running for reelection, because I had assumed that Roberto was going to run,” she said. “But, soon after he made his announcement that he was no longer running, people in the community began asking me to run for reelection.”
Reyes-Uranga was first elected in 2002 and reelected to her second four-year term on the city council in 2006. Her current term will expire next spring. The city’s term-limits law prohibits her name from being placed on the ballot for a third term, but she is allowed to run as a write-in candidate.
“I am passionate about serving on the city council and there are a few things I want to see completed,” she said. The proposed sports park in the vicinity of Orange Avenue and Spring Street is high on her list of projects she would like to bring to fruition. Converting the oil operators’ property on the city’s west side into parkland is also a top priority. “These are two huge patches of land in my district that are extremely complex, and we have gotten so close to doing something productive with them,” she said. “I think that now, with the federal stimulus dollars, some plans under our belt and the support of the community, these are two undertakings that I would love to see completed.”
Reyes-Uranga, noted, however, that strong support from her constituents was the deciding factor in her decision to run again. “I have been getting input from community leaders ever since Roberto announced his change of plans, and it has been extremely positive,” she said.
In the history of Long Beach, no council member has ever won a reelection through a write-in campaign. “The only one who ever tried it was Jackie Kell, and she came pretty darn close,” Reyes-Uranga said. “Of course, former Mayor Beverly O’Neill proved that it could be done.” (O’Neill ran as a write-in candidate and was elected to her third term as mayor of Long Beach in 2002.)
Uranga said he hopes his wife is reelected. “She has a passion for service to her community,” he said. “There is much more that she can do, and there is no one that knows the district’s needs better than she does.”
Currently there are three other candidates running for the 7th District seat: Jill Hill, James Johnson and Jack Smith.