Top Story: Economy

Pushing jobs, not condos, at Universal

NBC/Universal should drop plans to build nearly 3,000 housing units on its backlot, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said this week in a strongly-worded letter to studio chief Ron Meyer.

While Yaroslavsky has previously criticized the scale of the Evolution Plan, this is the first time he has pushed the studio to drop the housing component altogether. Doing so, he said, would better position Universal for a future in which it remains a strong entertainment industry contributor to the L.A. economy.

“Abandoning that portion of your plan would make long-term economic sense for this region by ensuring that Universal will remain a full-service motion picture and television production campus and a major contributor to our regional economy,” Yaroslavsky said in his letter.

Building some 2,900 condos, lofts, townhouses and apartments on 124 acres of Universal’s property would cut into the studio’s backlot and require relocation of its famed “Psycho” house.  It also would mean uprooting Wisteria Lane, the setting for “Desperate Housewives,” now in its final season, and Falls Lake, where movies including “Jaws” were shot.

Even without the housing element, the 20-year Evolution Plan remains a large-scale blueprint for how the studio proposes to grow on its 391-acre Universal City site.

The Entertainment Evolution portion of the plan calls for an improved studio tour, a 500-room hotel for CityWalk, upgraded movie theaters, restaurants and stores, and new theme park attractions. (Even as the Evolution Plan has been moving through the system, at least one big new attraction, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, has been announced, although it is not expected to open for several years.)

Meanwhile, the Studio District Evolution component of the plan includes more than 308,000 square feet of new production space, 437,000 square feet devoted to new production support facilities and nearly 500,000 square feet of new office space.

In his letter, Yaroslavsky said that those new elements, along with current operations, would create more than 34,000 permanent new jobs, whereas just building homes would yield only 2,600. And construction and construction-related jobs, he said, would still number about 15,000 without the housing component.

“In short, the expansion of the studio’s production facilities and related entertainment uses will produce far more economic benefit to our region than the apartments and condominiums that are proposed to be built under the Evolution Plan,” Yaroslavsky said.

In fact, he said, establishing a large new residential neighborhood just feet from an active entertainment studio and theme park would only worsen complaints about noise, and, in time, could force the studio to cut back on production. That, in turn, could lead to a loss of entertainment industry jobs: “None of us could possibly want such a result,” Yaroslavsky said.

The company said in a statement it would consider Yaroslavsky’s comments, along with those of community members, as part of the ongoing environmental review process. A final environmental impact report is now being prepared. That report, along with other permits, must be approved at multiple levels of city and county government before the Evolution Plan can move into action.

Richard Bogy, executive vice president of Communities United for Smart Growth, a coalition of neighborhood and business groups affected by the Universal plan, said Yaroslavsky’s letter to Meyer “really says everything that we agree with.”

Using Universal’s land to grow its entertainment businesses makes more sense than allowing it to be used for housing, Bogy said: “It’s valuable land to the entertainment industry.”

While questions remain about the overall project’s impact on infrastructure, transportation and traffic, Bogy said, dropping the home-building plan would go a long way toward assuaging his group’s concerns.

“The one really big stumbling block in the plan,” he said, “has been the housing.”

Posted 2/1/12

Resolve to check out these freebies

Whether you overspent this holiday season or just made a New Year’s resolution to be thriftier, have we got some deals for you.

Looking for a free supply of nicotine patches?

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has you covered, as part of its L.A. Quits program to help smokers kick the habit. (Call 1-800 NO BUTTS to get a one-month supply, gratis.)

Public Health also offers a wealth of other freebies, ranging from “Germbuster Activity Books” for kids to in-home tests for sexually transmitted diseases. HIV tests are free, too. And so is a remarkably comprehensive library of downloadable educational brochures, on topics from antibiotics and bed bugs to West Nile virus and whooping cough.

Cultural bargain-seekers are in luck as well. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is offering free admission on Monday, January 16, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. LACMA’s “Andell Family Sundays” program resumes on January 8, with a free-with-admission art-making project called “Circle of Animals.”

More free art-making and performances are offered through “World City at the Music Center.” Next up: Khac Chi Ensemble & Korean Classical Music and Dance Company on Saturday, January 15.

Another source of potential giveaways is the Department of Public Works, which has been known to hand out free sandbags at fire stations during the rainy season as well as other freebies ranging from free oil filters to reusable shopping bags (every shopper’s must-have accessory to keep up with the county’s plastic bag ban.) Check the department’s Clean LA website to learn about upcoming events featuring giveaways in your area—as well as recycling programs for tires and motor oil and hazardous waste and electronics roundups.

But wait, there’s more! Some lucky gardeners will have a chance to win a free composting bin at one of Public Works’ upcoming Smart Gardening workshops. (Look for the green-starred events on this list.) And the county’s Waterworks Districts also give out conservation-minded freebies such as low-flow showerheads and high efficiency water nozzles; check here for more information, and download a colorful brochure on drought-tolerant plants while you’re at it.

There’s more than simple generosity behind all this county largess. The giveaways are intended to influence behavior—for the greater good.

As Public Works spokesman Michael Kaspar put it: “We’re encouraging people to integrate sustainable, environmental practices into their everyday lives.”

Posted 12/29/11

Business break for the little guys

Los Angeles County buys lots of stuff— everything from architectural services and badges to windshield wipers and welding goggles, according to this directory.

If you’re a local small business seeking a piece of the action, a new county ordinance is designed to give you a better shot at landing one of those contracts.

Los Angeles County Supervisors on Tuesday voted to increase from 5% to 8% the price preference given to small local businesses seeking county contracts. That means those businesses could come in with a price 8% higher than other bids and still seal the deal, all other variables being equal.

An analysis by the county’s Internal Services Division found that granting a price preference to small local firms has cost the county very little in the years since the initial policy was enacted in 2002. In the past three years, for example, it cost the county a total of $70,648.

“The preference is a small price to pay to help the local economy and keep jobs here,” said Internal Services director Tom Tindall. Raising it to 8% probably would cost very little more over the same period—likely $100,000 or less, he said. And it could pay rich dividends if it helped boost participation by small local firms.

“What we hope it will do is encourage more local small businesses to try” for a county contract, Tindall said.

As it stands now, local small businesses got just $184 million of the $14.9 billion in contracts and purchase orders put out by the county in the past three years. Interestingly, virtually all of them won their contracts as the low bidder, without needing any price preference at all.

Still, the hope is that sweetening the deal for the home team couldn’t hurt and might spur broader economic benefits.

“The City of Los Angeles recently implemented an 8% preference program after a USC analysis concluded that the heightened economic activity and jobs created by the program would generate new revenue that would offset any incremental costs,” Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky and Michael D. Antonovich said in their motion pushing for the county to make the change.

Tindall said the new ordinance, set to go into effect Nov. 1, is just one of the ways in which the county is trying to become friendlier to small local firms. He said the county has a prompt payment program in which vendors are paid within 15 days of submitting an approved invoice—a boon especially for smaller business in which cash flow is a constant concern. And he noted that certified local small businesses can land sole-source contracts of up to $5,000 from some county departments.

The Los Angeles County Office of Small Business has tips for getting certified, along with other information. It also has a toll-free phone number, (855) 230-6430.

Posted 9/13/11

Finding jobs is a work in progress

If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people who are out of work in L.A. County these days, this won’t come as a big surprise: It’s tough out there.

But as dispiriting as the economic news has been lately, the county has resources to help you get back to work. And, if you’re an employer, it can offer significant assistance as well—including recruiting, screening and training workers, and, in some cases, even helping to subsidize part of new hires’ salaries.

With Labor Day approaching, we took a look at some programs and initiatives aimed at making a dent in L.A. County’s high unemployment rate, currently 12.4%. Some are targeted at specific groups, such as veterans or workers 55 and older. Others focus exclusively on very low-income welfare and general relief recipients. And one upcoming program will turn its attention on those who’ve been laid off just in the past year or so.

“Everybody can use a hand. Everybody needs help,” said Richard Verches, executive director of the Los Angeles County Workforce Investment Board, one of a network of such board throughout the county. “The county has resources to help its residents.”

The Los Angeles County Workforce Investment Board recently released a report marking its 10 years of operation and spotlighting success stories over the past decade. But it was as much an occasion for “intense reflection” as for celebration, Chairman Dennis Neder said in a statement. “We are in a critical time of rebuilding our economy as L.A. County has over 600,000 unemployed, and businesses are still skeptical of hiring in this ‘wait and see’ economy.”

Some of the statistics in the report offer an unfiltered snapshot of a difficult decade, noting, for instance, that unemployment in the county more than doubled, from 5.7% in January, 2000, to 12.4% in December, 2009.

Even so, there have been some encouraging developments along the way. The county’s “Transitional Subsidized Employment Program,” geared to helping welfare-to-work clients, used federal stimulus funds to help place more than 11,000 people in subsidized jobs.

“It was the largest program in the country and probably the most successful,” said Jan Vogel, executive director of the South Bay Workforce Investment Board, which worked with the Department of Public Social Services on the initiative. “A lot of people were put to work.”

Luther Evans, DPSS division chief in charge of welfare-to-work policy, said that since the stimulus funding ran out, a new, much smaller scale initiative has been crafted in which employers soon will be offered stipends between $350 and $500 a month to offset their costs of hiring new workers from very low income families.

Another glimmer of hope is on the horizon for recently laid-off workers. Officials soon will launch a $5.7 million on-the-job training program in one or more local industries that have experienced layoffs, Verches said; a similar $2 million grant to the city of Los Angeles is expected to help laid-off teachers and other employees of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Military veterans, meanwhile, can take advantage of a new county-funded veterans employment project, coordinated by Goodwill Industries. The program has served 380 clients since April, with 20 completing training and 17 being placed in jobs so far.

Information on all these specialized programs—and more—is available through the county’s network of “WorkSource” centers, where job-seekers of every background and experience level can get training, resume-writing help, interview coaching and other services.

“These are services that are available for job-seekers and employers,” Verches said. And, given the state of the economy, the price is right: free.

Posted 8/30/11

The sheriff vs. the probation chief

Two of Los Angeles’ most powerful criminal justice agencies faced off Tuesday during an extraordinary meeting of the Board of Supervisors, each arguing that they’d be better equipped to handle the surge of parolees who’ll soon be flowing into the county as a result of the state’s budget crisis.

Under Gov. Brown’s “realignment” spending plan, California’s counties are being given responsibility for overseeing thousands of low-level state prison inmates who will be released to ease prison overcrowding and to save money. Although the state has agreed to provide funding to the counties for the first year, there are no guarantees beyond that.

Virtually everywhere else in the state, county probation departments have been tasked with these new duties, which are similar to those they already perform. But in Los Angeles, Sheriff Lee Baca has offered a novel and controversial proposal, contending that the public safety mandate of his department should be broadened to include the rehabilitative work of parole supervision.

On Tuesday, Baca took on Los Angeles County’s Chief Probation Officer Donald Blevins, who argued that his agency is not only more qualified to oversee the new parolees but that it can do so at a better price for taxpayers. The Board of Supervisors’ hearing room was crowded largely with Probation Department supporters.

The supervisors, who had strongly opposed Brown’s realignment proposal, challenged the two agency leaders to defend the content and cost of their proposals. Some expressed concerns that neither department—both of which have come under federal scrutiny for facets of their operations—could deliver on its promises. Several supervisors suggested that a hybrid of the two agencies should be considered. In the end, the board asked the Chief Executive Office to report back with an analysis of the competing proposals.

Critics of Baca’s bid contend that the Sheriff’s Department has no institutional expertise in overseeing parolees, a job more akin to social work because of its emphasis on reintegrating ex-prisoners into society. But the sheriff pointed to his record as a leading advocate for inmate rehabilitation and his department’s success in working with community-based re-entry programs.

“My department has the largest education-based incarceration program in the nation,” he said.

At the same time, Baca argued that the reach of his department could help protect the public from problems that might arise from such a large number of former inmates suddenly returning to live in Los Angeles County.

“This is a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day problem, and therefore resources must be dedicated to ensure that felons in the system understand we have the capacity to supervise them any time, any place, any time relative to the week,” Baca said.

Chief Probation Officer Blevins, for his part, acknowledged that his department has been plagued by problems in its juvenile camps. But he emphasized that it has an excellent record in supervising adults, many of whom are ex-felons and account for more than 70% of the department’s workload.

“We have a proven track record of working with this population,” Blevins said. Moreover, he said, the Probation Department could better comply with a legal mandate encompassed in the state legislation requiring the county to use “evidence-based” practices to reduce recidivism among state parolees. One probation program for probationers aged 18-25 at a county day reporting center has cut recidivism from 39% to less than 22%, he said.

The Probation Department’s plan, he said, “does not focus on suppression and incarceration over rehabilitation…It does not complicate and confuse the clients in terms of the roles and responsibilities of officers. It does not require building, learning and training to a brand new infrastructure that potentially can take years to implement and operate efficiently.”

Although the supervisors did not vote on the matter, several seemed openly wary of Baca’s plan, especially given its higher one-year cost estimate–$37 million versus $28 million for the Probation Department.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, for one, suggested that the board might not even be considering Baca’s proposal were it not for his reputation as one of law enforcement’s most forward-thinking figures.

“You’re unique, Lee,” the supervisor said told the sheriff. “The only reason this has been given the time of day is because you’re proposing it. If this had come from just about anybody else in law enforcement, I don’t think it would have been given serious consideration.”

Posted 7/12/11

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