The Initiative Negates Los Angeles’ Welcome Sign

Even though the political maneuvering during the next couple of days will ultimately determine the fate of the Sports & Entertainment Arena and the area around the Convention Center, the damage to the city of Los Angeles has already begun and, if not immediately checked, could be far reaching.

A city that was making so much progress in becoming “business friendly” has taken giant steps backward, negating its efforts to simplify bureaucratic obstacles and become more competitive with other cities.

Now, in a rush to create a populist platform, one council member has single-handedly built a fence around Los Angeles with a sign that warns business and job creators: “Keep out.”

Ed Roski Jr. and Phil Anschutz were proceeding with their 250-events-a-year, world-class arena project in Inglewood when they were invited by a large and broad-based group to instead consider locating their facility in Los Angeles. We held up two signs; one said “L.A.: Open for Business” and the other simply said “Welcome.”

Neighboring cities and their redevelopment agencies, constantly competing with Los Angeles for job-creating economic engines, also have these types of welcome signs.

Certainly, after Roski and Anschutz agreed to invest their $300 million into a desolate and dormant area of downtown Los Angeles (currently being subsidized to the tune of $50 million a year by taxpayers) and after they also agreed to guarantee a 100% payback of the cost to the city for its share of the public/private partnership--a bond of $70 million to buy some land for the project--the Kings owners probably thought that they had done more than their share.

But not in the eyes of one councilman. Joel Wachs, in the eleventh hour, wants an initiative on the ballot that would require popular vote for this and other sports projects. Because of the delay caused by this surprise, the arena developers vow to abandon Los Angeles if the referendum proceeds.

Wachs uses selective and creative accounting to redefine the word “subsidy” in order to create grass-roots anger; the arena transaction has no subsidy. He portrays everyone else at City Hall as being opposed to the right to vote. He changes the rules every week, and all of a sudden he rejects the concept of representative democracy that he has been paid to be a part of for 25 years.

Yes, Roski and Anschutz are rich, and so are the rest of the Forbes 400. Logic would have it that our elected officials should strive to encourage the other 398 people listed in Forbes to invest in areas like Northridge, Van Nuys, San Pedro, Highland Park or downtown. Why sit by and watch them spend their billions creating jobs outside Los Angeles just to avoid our city’s unpredictable red tape and threats of initiatives?

What will stop Wachs’ current initiative on the sports arena from becoming the prototype process for another councilman’s threat against the entertainment industry? Then the computer industry, followed by the fashion industry and then the low-income housing industry?

As Pandora’s box opens wider and wider, competitors will be able finance petitions to place before the voters hundreds of business transactions a month. Wachs’ latest definition of “taxpayer subsidy” and referendum legalese has opened the door to put almost any project or business at risk.

Los Angeles’ “welcome” signs will only go back up when potential customers do not see one more daunting obstacle to doing business in Los Angeles.