L.A., Hahn Try to Make Secession Look Complicated COMMENTARY: From The Newsroom by Michael Hart Bundling products and services to make it too complicated for customers to leave you is a good trick. It’s such a good trick that the city of Los Angeles is trying to pull it on the San Fernando Valley with Proposition Q. If you believe secession is a good possibility, it might have made sense to put off for a while a bond election for projects that wouldn’t even end up being in the city that eventually would do the work. One of the most attractive carrots that Prop. Q advocates had to offer was that the woefully overcrowded Northwest Valley Police Station would be replaced. And it probably worked. I’m sure L.A. city officials are prepared to say “Who knows?” if asked what made the difference in their razor-thin victory on the $600 million bond issue. However, I’ve got to believe those pictures of a cramped police station changed a few minds and, given the tight election race, they might have made the difference. Regardless of how and why the bond issue passed, you can now look to Business Journal reporter Jacqueline Fox’s story elsewhere in this issue to learn how complicated this gets if secession is successful and, consequently, what kind of trick’s been pulled on Valley voters. First, there are the what-if-secession-passes questions: Will that not-yet-built police station belong to L.A. or a new Valley city? If it’s the former, will Valley taxpayers still buy it for a city they’re not citizens of? If it ends up somehow in the hands of a new city, wouldn’t citizens want the chance to take another look at whether it’s needed and how it fits into the rest of their plans? It could be that these are all questions Mayor Jim Hahn and secession foes are hoping we’ll ask right before we say, “This is just too complicated,” and vote no in November to secession. It’s a strategy that my insurance company uses successfully when it manages to sell me policies to protect a couple different cars with different values, my house and my health all at the same time. Pulling any one of those policies out to see how it stacks up in the marketplace changes everything else in the package so much it’s just not worth trying. And in a day and age when municipal governments at least say they’re interested in improving customer service, there’s nothing wrong with them taking a lesson or two from businesses who say the same thing and then implement a strategy designed to make it hard for customers to go anywhere else. Just as companies are out there telling customers, “We’re going to do everything we can to make you happy,” Hahn is telling the Valley, “I’m going to do everything I can to convince you that sticking with us is a good idea.” Apparently, he feels like the promise of a new police station in the Northwest Valley is a good idea. So too, I guess, are those cops who now wander rather aimlessly around busy Ventura Boulevard intersections during rush hours. Perhaps it’s not fair to criticize Hahn too much for this strategy of trying to make L.A. city government appear indispensable. You can be sure Antonio Villaraigosa would have tried the same thing if he’d won the last election. It’s incumbent on us all to be aware that many of the stratagems applied by those opposed to a breakup like, for instance, a very complex Prop. Q scenario are intentionally confusing and part of a strategy that will be successful if we finally all just throw our hands up and say, “Never mind.” Michael Hart is editor of the San Fernando Valley Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
