Back in March of 2019, when we were still a year away from when things would begin to crumble in Long Beach and the rest of the country, and Pat West was still the city manager, the city council asked him and his staff to work with Urban Commons and a consortium of aerial tram builders and developers called “The Wave Team,” along with key waterfront business people (OK, I’ll say it: “stakeholders”) to explore the idea of building an aerial tram connecting Downtown with the Queen Mary Island.
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Now, the city is seriously considering the feasibility of a feasibility study, which would cost about $500,000 to determine whether to build the aerial gondola system. The city hopes to spend little if any money on the study and the project and is merely facilitating hooking up investors with the developers. Still, there’s no such thing as a free gondola—or even a free feasibility study—and it’s not difficult to imagine the city ending up with a stack of bills from all of this.