Published: Thursday, August 29, 2002 Time for Taboada to leave his post   By Tom Hennessy, Staff columnist Unless you are an anarchist or other malcontent, calling for the dismissal of a public official is no pleasant experience. In 22 years of columnizing, I have done it only once. (Three times, if you count incompetent Notre Dame football coaches as public officials.) That one occasion occurred in 2000 when I suggested that Linda Howell DiMario should step down as head of the Long Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau. She later agreed to leave the post amid a storm of controversy. It is now time for another key Long Beach official to depart. And the City Council, which should have run out of patience with Henry Taboada long ago, should take steps to remove him as city manager. Or, in what would be a cleaner and classier resolution, Taboada should step down. In either case, he would not exactly be stranded at the poorhouse gate. Under an inflated pension scale, which he did much to advance, he and others in high city positions will, during their post-City Hall years, still be able to live the good life that is beyond the reach of most of the rest of us.The house sale To me, the final straw was Taboada's choice of Vice Mayor Frank Colonna, of all the real estate agents in the city, to represent him in the purchase of a new home in Naples. ("We can only hope it's a mobile home,' said one anti-Taboada wag.) The sale gave $14,000 to Colonna, whose vote Taboada needs in all manner of city business. The P-T's editorial pages have commented splendidly on that fiasco, and there is no need to belabor it save for the bottom line: It was legal, but unethical. And it was stupid. That both officials risked the antagonism of many citizens to execute the deal suggests arrogance, insensitivity, or both. (Colonna could take a step toward extricating himself from this unsavory situation by donating his profit to charity.) But final straws sometimes breed additional final straws. Just this week, another one emerged in the pages of the Long Beach Business Journal. Publisher George Economides, who keeps a watchful eye on the "$100,000 Club,' City Hallers whose salaries match or exceed that level, noted that a year ago it had 112 members. Since then, he reports, the number has swelled to 159. That's 47 new fat cats in a city with a $46 million deficit in its general fund. Taboada presides over all this. Oh, Henry! There is more. Taboada's follies have included his lethargic approach to the downtown parking shortage, his failure to protect residents from rising natural gas prices and withholding information from them a winter ago, his abysmal performance in overseeing the funding of street repairs, his insistence on promoting the mediocre Queensway Bay project in the face of overwhelming opposition by citizens, his use of a city newsletter as a propaganda piece against Measure J, Norm Ryan's successful utility tax-cut measure, and his cockamamie (and fortunately short-lived) plan to supplant Southern California Edison with a joint-venture partnership that included the now- disgraced Enron Corp. His is not a case of municipal corruption, but one of municipal incompetence. Simply put, the taxpayers of Long Beach can no longer afford Henry Taboada. (A copy of this column was faxed to Taboada's office mid-day Wednesday. A spokeswoman said he was having a busy day and would not be able to respond. I extended an opportunity for a response in Friday's column.) Tom Hennessy's viewpoint appears Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. He can be reached at (562) 499-1270, or via e-mail at Scribe17@aol.com