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STAFF REPORT
The Lakewood City Council completed its annual reorganization on March 26, selecting Todd Rogers to serve as Lakewood’s mayor and naming Jeff Wood as vice mayor.
The tradition in Lakewood and many cities of its size is for mayoral duties to rotate annually among the five members of the city council. The mayor has the same vote as any other council member in meetings, but chairs the meetings and serves as the city’s main spokesperson at public events.
This will be the fourth term as mayor for Todd Rogers, who was originally elected to the city council in 2001. He is serving his fifth term as a council member, after being re-elected in March 2017.
The council’s annual reorganization night started with a “Lakewood Celebrates” community gathering where expressions of thanks and appreciation were made to Steve Croft for his 2018-2019 mayoral term. Croft will continue to serve as a council member for the rest of his term, which runs through March 2022.
After being selected as the new mayor, Rogers presented remarks to about 150 people gathered in the City Council chambers.
Mayor Rogers talked about the fiscal challenges Lakewood is facing, as the city works to resolve a budget deficit caused by a state takeaway of local funds, increased fees from the state-run employee retirement system, and flattening sales tax revenues as more shoppers go online instead of to Lakewood merchants.
Rogers noted that cities across California are facing the same sort of budget difficulty, and that while the causes for the deficit may not lie with Lakewood, the responsibility for solving it in Lakewood falls on the City Council.
“This is not the first time that Lakewood has faced financially challenging times,” said Rogers. “And just like City Councils and city residents before us made tough decisions and met those challenges, so will we. I’m confident of it.”
On a celebratory note, Rogers mentioned that the city’s 65th anniversary would be recognized in the weeks ahead.
“I look forward,” said Rogers, “to working with my City Council colleagues, our city staff and all our residents in the year ahead to meet the challenges we face and to keep Lakewood the great community that got started 65 years ago and that has many many great years ahead of it.”
Todd
The area around your home at Lakewood Country Club always looks good, except I will say the golf course is not in its prime anymore. Why can’t the rest of Lakewood look as good, compared to Lakewood Country Club and Lakewood Village. East Lakewood needs money digested in to the area, to curb urban menopause.
Many sections of East Lakewood do not look good anymore, and some of the sections between Lakewood / Long Beach boundaries, are also not at their Prime anymore.
City of Lakewood needs to reach out to all neighborhoods for improvements. Regardless of the budget. Neighborhood real estate prices will Decline and the heart of the neighborhoods will further diminish…..
Lakewood Mall definitely need help. How come Lakewood hasn’t been proactive and having a cannabis store? How come Lakewood Mall does not have Fry’s Electronics / IKEA store. Just look and examine Lakewood Blvd, it is not the beautiful Blvd it once was, yet we have the best technology on board, to keep this major street a winning project.
Personally, not real happy of having a sheriff employee running the city, as a council person, it could create a lot of conflict of interest and a huge lawsuit just waiting to bloom. Many residents are not happy with the illegal radar being used to trap cars in your city and the sheriffs look the other way, when complaints are filed over misuse of radar guns.
Lakewood needs to be more proactive and work with increasing number of seniors in surrounding cities: Cerritos, Bellflower, Long Beach, Paramount, etc. Lakewood and Cerritos, both have great facilities but are lacking senior programs to get seniors from all cities to inner react.
Glad to read, Lakewood has returned the home beautification awards.
If Mercedes / UPS startup at the Boeing facility in Long Beach, Lakewood and many cities in Dairy Valley, will be blessed with increased job markets.
https://www.loscerritosnews.net/2019/03/27/todd-rogers-named-lakewood-mayor-in-council-reorganization/