Long Beach
HERALD Also serving Point Lookout & East Atlantic Beach
l.B. ‘kingpin’ raises funds
Don’t put your health on hold
Your hometown heroes
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Vol. 31 No. 20
MAY 14 - 20, 2020
City businesses ponder options for reopening many times a day. “When this pandemic first happened and we started to lock When the City of Long Beach down, we talked to restaurants,” finally reopens, it will look pret- said Ian Danby, the chamber’s ty much the same, but it won’t chairman, who hosted the Zoom feel that way. meeting. He noted that the chamThe Chamber of Commerce ber had come up held a Zoom meeting with the idea of Tuesday night, in placing grab-and-go which it announced signs outside some the results of a restaurants to help recent survey of them by speeding up small businesses: customer traf fic, what they believe and that there had would be the best been other meetings way for the city to with business ownreopen, and how ers over the past few they will conduct weeks. businesses when it Interim City does. Manager Donna Customers may Gayden’s executive be required to wear assistant, John masks for a long leAh tozer McNally, who also time; social distanc- Chamber took part in the ing may be routine vice president Zoom session, said well into the future; the city was formugrab-and-go will conlating plans to retinue at a number of establish- open. City officials, McNally ments; bars where people like to said, have been talking to State socialize may be forced to allow Sen. Todd Kaminsky, a Long only a cer tain number of Beach Democrat, and U.S. Rep. patrons inside; sanitizers may be Kathleen Rice about those plans. everywhere; food servers may The opening, he said, would take wear gloves; plastic throw-away place in phases, with essential menus might become standard; businesses opening first. and workers will no doubt be “There are a lot of known required to wash their hands Continued on page 7
By JAMes BerNsteiN jbernstein@liherald.com
Courtesy Long Beach Public Schools
essential, and well-fed Long Beach fifth-graders baked treats and packaged fruits for first responders at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn. Story, more photos, Page 8.
School board adopts budget
Budget vote and elections to take place June 9 By DArwiN YANes dyanes@liherald.com
The Long Beach Board of Education approved a $145 million budget on Tuesday, about $3 million more than the current spending plan, and a tax levy of $106 million. With the coronavirus pandemic affecting the economy, Michael DeVito, the district’s assistant superintendent of finance and operations, reduced an earlier spending plan by about $40,000, which included limiting travel to conferences by
school board and administration members. “Within the context of the pandemic that we’re in the midst of, knowing that things are going to be different this summer, [and] probably in the fall,” DeVito said, “we took another look to see how we could tinker with the budget, so we could reduce it even further.” No student activities were cut, and a new junior varsity field hockey team, which was in danger of being eliminated, will remain in the spending plan. Additionally, the district will not
look to outsource its food services, which was a heated topic at a budget meeting in January. Funds that were set aside for projects but not used will account for about $1.4 million of the budget increase, DeVito said. “Everything that’s in our overall budget is only going up less than 1 percent,” he said. “It’s about a 0.9 percent increase, which is a very small increase. This really presents to the community an extremely low and responsible budget, and I think this is something that we worked Continued on page 9
w
e tell people, just try and follow the CDC guidelines. That’s all we can do right now.