The wood framing and caution tape boxed in by orange traffic barriers on Cartagena Street outside Lola’s Mexican Cuisine in Bixby Knolls marks off what’s expected to be the first permanent parklet added in Long Beach after the City Council announced an end date to the city’s temporary, pandemic-inspired outdoor dining program earlier this year.
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Luis Navarro, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Brenda, said it’s special that Lola’s location on Fourth Street installed the city’s first permanent outdoor-dinning parklet nearly a decade ago, and now the location at Atlantic Avenue and Cartagena appears to be the first post-pandemic addition of permanent outdoor dining spaces.
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Since the pandemic began, Long Beach has issued a total of 124 citations for violations of the city’s health orders but just 11 were for people not abiding by the city’s mask mandate, according to a City Council memo released Tuesday.
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All of the mask citations went to businesses where employees were spotted by city officials not wearing masks, according to the memo authored by Long Beach Development Services Director Oscar Orci.
In Long Beach, mask citations include fines that start at $100 but can escalate to $500 depending on how many citations have been issued to an individual business, according to Rick De La Torre, a spokesperson for the city’s Development Services department, which includes code enforcement.
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Federal authorities are considering using the Long Beach Convention Center as a facility to provide temporary shelter for the overwhelming number of migrants, many of them children, arriving in the United States from Mexico, sources told the Post.
Convention centers in San Diego and Dallas have already been converted to shelters to help house the thousands of migrants packing facilities at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent weeks.
If the plan goes forward, the children in Long Beach could be housed in the Convention Center’s 45,000-square-foot Arena until being transported to safe housing elsewhere in the U.S., according to sources, who weren’t authorized to speak on the record.
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Garcia said that $15 million of this new money is restricted to be spent at the Long Beach Airport, but the remaining $12 million would add to the large pool of largely unrestricted federal money the city is set to receive as part of the American Rescue Plan.
The bill was signed into law by President Joe Biden Thursday.
The mayor announced the new funds during a meeting of the city’s Federal Legislative Committee, the body’s first look at the $151 million Long Beach Recovery Act Garcia unveiled Monday morning. The full council will consider the proposed plan Tuesday and could vote to approve it.