That Sinking Feeling
By John McLaurin, President, Pacific Merchant Shipping Association
A lot has been written about the failure of the Queen Mary over the past fifty years. It is a story of unfulfilled promises, multiple bankruptcies, city auditor reports detailing unaccounted for public funds, multiple operators, and a vessel/hotel that has bounced between the City and the Port, back to the City and now a proposal to give it back to the Port. The Queen Mary is indeed “iconic.” It is also a failure and an example of poor public policy decision-making. And now its ongoing failure may become the responsibility, once again, of the Port of Long Beach, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.
When the City of Long Beach celebrated its 100th Anniversary, it commissioned a history of the Port. Published in 2015, the book (Port Town) detailed not only the history of the Port of Long Beach but also included the controversy surrounding the Queen Mary. Below are some excerpts from that book that look back fifty years ago – revealing a stunning consistency with the current situation of cost overruns, delays, controversy, and failure.
While the Port discusses the possible transfer of the Queen Mary from the City, the Port’s own history would indicate a need for due diligence, caution, and an honest assessment of such a transfer.
“The Queen Mary may have been greeted with wild acclamation when it arrived, but as the months drew on some began to see it as a larger-than-life symbol of what was wrong with Long Beach. The city bought the ship for $3.45 million in 1967 and estimated it would cost $5.5 million to convert it into a hotel-convention center-museum-tourist attraction. By 1970, the total cost had risen to $57 million. As the bills mounted and the opening date kept being pushed back, public frustration grew.”
“The problematic process of restoring the Queen Mary had become a political time bomb. The longer the process went on, the more vulnerable the city was to criticism.”
“Long Beach bought an old bucket, a rust bucket,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn declared in 1969. “It’s a monument to stupidity.”
“In 1971, State Legislative Analyst A. Alan Post called the project a ‘colossal mistake’ based on a ‘capricious decision.’ Post claimed the city had illegally spent $6.6 million of tidelands funds on the Queen Mary to that date.”
“The Queen Mary had fallen sadly short of what Long Beach had envisioned when she first arrived in the harbor in 1967. Despite all of the optimism and hoopla about the new role for the aging ship, she turned out to be more of a money pit than an asset. The ship had been expensive to retrofit and expensive to maintain. The millions of dollars spent to present her in her best light did not translate to the millions of visitors that had been expected to flock to her decks. In 1978, the city had turned the money-losing historic liner over to the port.”
“In the meantime, the city and port were stuck with the ship. The purchase of the Queen Mary had been made in haste, and undoing that impulse purchase was proving to be much more difficult and costly.”
“And then there was the Queen Mary – perhaps the biggest buildup with the biggest letdown of all, a floating money pit that had been turned over to the port in order to cover its losses.”
If the transfer of the vessel takes place, the Port of Long Beach will be burdened with a cost that will impact its future success which also risks the economic future of the City as the Port is the economic driver of the City and the region. At a minimum, the Queen Mary faces approximately $300 million in repairs, per a marine survey done seven years ago. Perhaps the Port will impose a Queen Mary container fee to pay the expenses of making the ill-fated vessel safe for tourists again.
The real discussion that needs to take place is to undertake a comprehensive and independent review of the Queen Mary and estimate the total amount for the cost to repair, restore, and make the vessel and adjacent property into an attraction or hotel that brings visitors in sufficient numbers to pay for its ongoing operation and maintenance. If that estimate is an amount that is not reasonable or achievable, then those parts of the vessel that can be salvaged should be saved and the rest disposed of.
The Queen Mary has been operated and controlled by the City of Long Beach for over 50 years and has been directly operated by the City (twice), the Port of Long Beach, for-profit companies, and non-profit organizations. The one thing that has been consistent through the years has been failure, mismanagement, cost overruns, unaccounted for public funds, repairs that cannot be documented, bankruptcies, and the promise of success which has never materialized.
It is time for an honest assessment and to make difficult decisions. Simply transferring this failed project from one city department to another is not the solution.