New
director to improve Long Beach
By
Joseph Serna
Contributing Writer
Online Forty-Niner
Patrick West, current city manager of Paramount, is preparing to take the reins
of Long Beach and turn the city into the jewel of Southern California.
“It’s a bigger canvas, it’s a world class city,” said
West, 51, who will leave Paramount and become the Long Beach community development
director next week.
“It’s not fair, but people judge a city by what they see through
their windshield,” he said.
As community development director, he will have the responsibility of changing
what people see from behind that windshield, ultimately improving the quality
of life for Long Beach residents.
The director of community development oversees and guides the direction of
the nine bureaus of the department: administration and finance, economic development,
the housing authority, housing services, neighborhood services, project development,
property services, redevelopment and workforce development. With almost 30
meetings a week, ranging in subjects from local housing rehab programs, fixing
up dilapidated or otherwise damaged housing, to working with local businesses
to find the financial means to improve the community, West will ultimately
be responsible for all community development.
Through loans and grants with small and large business leaders alike, West’s
department can work with locals to fund changes to businesses across the city
in an effort to improve them from the outside in, which hopefully in turn will
lead others to follow suit.
“A lot of this is one on one conversations, it’s building that trust,” West
said.
He hopes the improvement and trust gained from one success will have a ripple
effect on its neighbors. As the area flourishes, he hopes the quality of life
will improve — which is his utmost priority.
“My tip to him is to work with his team,” said Interim Community
Development Director Craig Beck. Beck has the position until Aug. 22, when West
takes over.
“It all depends on your approach,” Beck said.
As of now, West’s approach is to not have one.
“I plan to simply be myself, to fit in and learn the corporate culture,” he
said.
West has his work cut out for him, according to Beck.
“[Community development] is a broad brush stroke of different services,” Beck
said.
With all bureaus working together for one of the most diverse cities in the
country, the director of community development cannot be pigeonholed into having
just one responsibility.
Fortunately, West is familiar with most facets of local government. He was
director of recreation and human services for Paramount before directing the
city’s redevelopment agency for eight years. West took over as city manager
for his mentor, Bill Holt, in 1994 and set out to work with Holt’s infrastructure
for future development.
West has become known for changing the direction of Paramount, which was touted
in 1982 as being one of “the worst cities in the nation” by RAND
Corp.
He has been working for Paramount for the past 25 years — the last 11
as city manager — but he still does not expect to walk into his Long
Beach office his first day and know everything.
“There’s going to be a learning curve for me,” West said. “I’m
coming in with a blank slate.”
“Paramount and Long Beach are two drastically different cities,” he
said. “I don’t know if anything we do in Paramount is totally transferable.”
One change may be the potential for expansion, Beck said.
“We are a built-out city,” he said. Though it is possible to improve
things already in place, Beck said almost all of Long Beach is occupied in some
way, and there isn’t much empty space to start something new. Anything
new will probably have to be created over something old, he said.
Though the change in size may be intimidating — Paramount is five square
miles to Long Beach’s 50 — the task of managing community development
is not that overwhelming for West because, according to him, “there’s
nothing broken” in Long Beach that needs to be fixed.
“The idea is not to reinvent the wheel,” West said. His main objective
is to maintain the already successful direction his predecessor Melanie Fallon
has left behind.
“This just looked like too good an opportunity to pass up,” he said.
“I wanted to try [my] luck at the big city.”
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