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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Keep Economic Focus, Leaders Tell Villaraigosa

Valley business leaders are expecting big things from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Los Angeles’ mayor, after only one month in office, has received national media attention for bringing together a coalition of voters to trounce James Hahn and becoming the first Latino mayor in the modern history of Los Angeles. Local businesspeople are now hoping he doesn’t lose sight of improving his own backyard, they want him to focus on the economy, schools and traffic. When asked what they were hoping the new mayor would accomplish, respondents to the recent Business Journal Quarterly Leadership Survey of several dozen Valley business leaders, conducted for the Business Journal by Cooper Beavers Inc., showed that 60 percent of them voted against Villaraigosa in May, but now that he’s in office, 71 percent expect conditions in the city to improve overall under his watch. Dr. Tyree Wieder, president of Los Angeles Valley College in Valley Glen, was a supporter of Villaraigosa during his campaign, and said he needs to work hard to keep more businesses from leaving the area. “Most of our students are local, and our first concern is making sure that they will have a place to work when they leave Valley College,” Wieder said. “My personal feeling is that losing employers from the San Fernando Valley is making it much tougher for our students to basically join the middle class population.” Wieder said that in order to keep business in Los Angeles, Villaraigosa has to make sure to keep reducing Los Angeles’ business tax, an effort begun during the Hahn administration by Councilmembers Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti. “I’m also very concerned about supporting a lot of retail businesses, it’s a solid sales tax base, but at the same time they only provide a lot of service jobs. We need other types of jobs that aren’t related to sales,” Wieder said. “We need to diversify our industries and monitor more what our sister cities are doing, especially the ones that are claiming our businesses.” Roberto Barragan, president of the Valley Economic Development Center, said Villaraigosa also needs to work harder at cutting back on the bureaucracy business owners are required to wade through. “Beyond state issues, the biggest issue facing small, medium and large businesses is the city’s own process for establishing businesses, dealing with the Building and Safety Department, the Planning Department and the Department of Transportation,” Barragan said. “If you had one person supervising (all of those departments), you as a business owner could go to one place to get all of your issues resolved, as opposed to three different offices.” I.Donald Weissman, an attorney with Wasserman, Comden, Casselman & Pearson LLP in Encino, said that he did not vote for Villaraigosa, but remains optimistic that some of the city’s problems can be treated. “I was a supporter of Villaraigosa for a while, but during the last week of the campaign I decided not to vote for him,” Weissman said. “He scared me. I got the impression the Valley wasn’t necessarily going to benefit, and with Hahn I already knew what we had.” Something Villaraigosa said during a speech about traffic, although Weissman can’t remember the exact phrase, seemed to contradict his earlier position on transportation. Weissman said that transportation issues are among his chief concerns about the city. Weissman said that the Orange Line rapid bus system currently under construction in the Valley will probably not be too successful since it requires people to transfer between trains and buses. A much better tactic, he said, would be to build a system of monorails along freeways. “If you put a train on the I-5, the I-405, the 101 you are going to dramatically decrease traffic,” he said. “I don’t sit in one place at work; I’m driving to court or to clients’ offices, but I had a day that I knew I could spend in the office and I was walking distance to a train station, I would take it.” Barragan said that Villaraigosa, in assuming the chairmanship of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, had made the best start he could have in order to address the city’s transportation crises. Wieder and Barragan are both anxious, however, to see Villaraigosa resume the tough stance he took on education during his campaign. Last month, the mayor took a step back from his original plan to take control of the Los Angeles Unified School District and decided to push forward with a more modest reform plan. “I’m disappointed in the setback on the issue of the LAUSD, he had a very strong opinion on fixing things, now we have three different commissions talking about making changes,” said Barragan. “Come on guys, we have a 55 percent high school dropout rate, everyone knew that for years but no one acknowledged it until Harvard said so.” Wieder agreed, saying that Villaraigosa shouldn’t be afraid to use the bully pulpit to force change in the school district. “I’m a big admirer of Peter Ueberroth, I worked with him when he brought the Olympics here,” said Wieder. “He once told me that authority is 80 percent taken. There are times when you need to take the authority to do something.”

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