Long Beach council to consider hoverboard ban on commercial sidewalks

Long Beach’s City Council has a relatively light meeting on Tuesday following a three-month flurry of decisions that will affect city govement and taxpayers for years — even decades — to come.

Since December, the council has committed to a 40-year contract with Plenary Edgemoor Civic Partners to build and maintain a new Civic Center complex, enact a minimum wage increase most recently, put a proposal for a 10-year sales tax increase on the June 7 agenda.

The council’s relatively short to-do list for its Tuesday meeting calls for decisions on hoverboards, an Alamitos Beach library branch’s status as a historic landmark and separate studies on gender equity issues and senior meals programs.

Tuesday’s agenda calls for the council to vote on a new ordinance that would prohibit “hoverboards,” more accurately referred to in the proposed law as “electrically motorized boards” from commercial sidewalks. In practical terms that means hoverboards would be barred from places including most of the East Second Street corridor in Belmont Shore and Naples Island, nearby Belmont Pier Plaza, Retro Row, The Promenade in downtown Long Beach, the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center and the Civic Center complex.

The council voted earlier this month to ask the City Attoey’s office to write the law. Councilwoman Suzie Price said at the time that she wants hoverboard riders to follow existing rules for bicyclists and skaters.

The council is also scheduled to vote on declaring Alamitos Neighborhood Library, an example of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture built in 1928, to be a Long Beach Historical Landmark.

Another item on Tuesday’s agenda calls for the council to decide whether to assign the city’s Human Relations Commission or some other body to partner with Cal State Long Beach persoel to conduct a gender analysis study that would examine the effectiveness of legislation related to promoting gender equity in Long Beach. The council would also adopt a resolution in support of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

The council is also set to ask the city’s Senior Citizen Advisory Commission to look at the potential cost of reversing past reductions in the nonprofit Human Services Association’s senior meals program. Chavez Senior Center and Silverado Senior Center lost the meals program in 2012 due federal budget cuts that financed the charity’s work.

Seniors can still obtain meals on weekdays in Long Beach at Califoia Recreation Center, 1550 Martin Luther King Blvd.; El Dorado Park West, 2800 Studebaker Road; Houghton Park, 6301 Myrtle Ave. and Long Beach City Senior Center, 1150 E. 4th St.

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Human Services Association asks for a $2.25 donation. For more information, call 562-806-5400.

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