Tuesday, June 27, 2000 QB vote tonight a risk; beware:   By Tom Hennessy, Staff columnist The Long Beach City Council votes tonight on giving a green light to the risky Queensway Bay development. Approving QB, which the council likely will do, may be the most troublesome decision I have seen a Long Beach council make in 20 years of writing this column. Listen to Alan Coles, who served on the Queen Mary Area Development Advisory Committee (1992-93) and attended meetings of the subsequent Queensway Bay Citizens Advisory Committee. Once a fan: At first, Coles backed the development. "I felt the city was doing the right thing. I was eager to see the project completed, and hoped that it would turn out to be a nice place to take my family." But his outlook vanished, he says, after Oliver-McMillan became the developer. "Slowly things began to change. First, (Dene Oliver) said the project had to have a multiplex theater - which no one wanted. I thought, 'Nothing gets older faster than a new multiplex theater.' " He notes, "The committee was told that major tenants - franchise stores and restaurants - would be needed in order to support unique shops and attractions. Now it seems (the former) is all we are going to get. I'm not sure if any of the committee's ideas are part of the project anymore." Coles has a proposal: "Why not call back as many members as possible and ask them to comment on it? If they feel it is still a good project, then fine, go ahead and build it. But if they don't, maybe it's time to dump it and start over." That's the kind of idea that rings of democracy and drives City Hall crazy. It doesn't have a prayer of being approved. Meanwhile, says Coles, "I fear we are seeing the rebirth of the Long Beach Plaza here. If you compare both projects, the similarities are startling." Swell - movies Short of installing, say, a coal tipple, it is hard to imagine a more inappropriate Queensway Bay linchpin than Oliver's IMAX theater and 15-screen cineplex. Hurting from overexpansion, theater operators are having financial trouble. Organizations like the Edwards Theater chain, the key QB tenant, are paring payrolls, closing old theaters, and, where possible, renegotiating expensive leases. Edwards has closed a dozen units in the past year and plans to close 20 more. The insistence on a theater complex places additional risk to what already is a development that is rife with risk. If the theater goes belly up, as many theaters are, what happens to the rest of QB? "It's absolute death for a center to have a big space like a movie theater go dark," Gregory Stoffel, owner of an Irvine consulting firm, was quoted as saying last week. Kicking Pine Ave. Meanwhile, there is the question of what impact the development will have on Pine Avenue merchants a few blocks away; people who, in the opinion of many, made investments that saved part or all of downtown Long Beach. "They may as well start their going-out-of-business sales now," one reader has told me in anticipation of QB's approval by ungrateful officials. Those officials deny the Pine Avenue merchants will be in trouble, but that is the sort of blather one can expect from people willing to risk other people's money. The message being sent to Pine Avenue merchants and perhaps those beyond is quite clear. And quite chilling. Don't trust City Hall. 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