Entrepreneurs Getting Keys to Southland Cities

At the groundbreaking ceremony last year for Mercedes-Benz of Valencia, co-owner Kevin Malone told the crowd he wanted the dealership to be open by Christmas, prime shopping season for the luxury brand.

The next speaker, a Mercedes executive, said an opening before Thanksgiving would be even better. Santa Clarita’s city manager then mentioned the Fourth of July.

They were kidding, but Malone wasn’t. And with the city’s help, the dealership -- Southern California’s first new Mercedes store in more than 20 years -- opened in mid-December, several weeks ahead of schedule.

Some cities are rolling out the red carpet for small businesses, trying new approaches to attracting entrepreneurs.

“Those cities that get it realize that businesses are not an enemy -- they’re the future,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. “You need to find ways to generate jobs and tax revenue, or you can end up in decline -- that’s the curse of older metro areas like Detroit and St. Louis.”

Along with the option of quicker building plan checks, Santa Clarita is courting businesses with an interactive website featuring demographic information and market research on prospective locations. In Anaheim, creative zoning is luring new projects to the so-called Platinum Triangle area surrounding the city’s baseball stadium. And in Oxnard, the city’s private economic development corporation is seeing the permit process through for industrial and office projects, so entrepreneurs need not hassle with City Hall.

Make life easier, and they will come. That’s the strategy behind these and other new efforts to attract businesses in Southern California cities.

“The folks in City Hall went out of their way for us,” said Malone, former general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose partners in the $15-million project are businessman Lenny Sage and Hall of Fame first baseman Eddie Murray. “They knew the kind of tax revenue we would generate.”

That February, the car dealers had gotten a jump-start from the city: an expedited review of their building plans, which cost them a $19,000 premium but saved them three to four weeks in the approval process. The expense was a no-brainer for a business that is on track to generate $95 million in first-year revenue, Sage said.

A separate car dealership project that Sage was pursuing in the Universal City area “has not met with the same kind of cooperation” from the city of Los Angeles, where the City Council is considering restrictions on such development.

“In L.A., the people making the decisions don’t always connect the dots to the economic impact,” Sage said. “Maybe that’s the advantage of doing business in a smaller town.”

Frank discussions with Santa Clarita’s business leaders in recent years led to the fast-track plan reviews, said Carrie Rogers, the city’s marketing and economic development manager.

In March, the city launched the website www.LocateSantaClarita.com, which lets entrepreneurs scout potential business locations.

Users can search for property by size, zoning type and lease or sale availability. They can check average household incomes and spending habits within their selected radius, or view aerial and street-level photos.

“It really helps someone decide: ‘Do I want to go a step further and pursue a location here?’ ” Rogers said. “In today’s busy world, anything you can do to streamline the decision-making process for people only makes sense.”

When Anaheim updated its general plan a couple of years ago, it focused on spurring development in “underutilized” commercial areas such as the Platinum Triangle around Angels Stadium, Planning Director Sheri Vander Dussen said.

“A lot of cities these days are putting in ballparks as they redevelop their downtowns,” she said. “We already had the ballpark, so it was a matter of capitalizing on that asset.”

The city added a zoning overlay that encourages mixed-use developments, or projects combining commercial and residential spaces.

Property owners can follow the existing zoning patterns underneath the overlay, so a neighborhood business such as a print shop can stay in compliance, Vander Dussen said. Or they can develop the kind of mixed projects that create a dynamic urban area, with supermarkets, restaurants, coffeehouses and dry cleaners next to lofts, condos and town houses.

City officials envision as many as 9,500 dwelling units, 5 million square feet of office space and 2 million square feet of commercial uses when the area is fully redeveloped in the coming years.

Anaheim has taken other steps to spark business activity.

Last year, the city lowered license fees for many types of smaller businesses and eliminated the fees for home-based businesses that gross less than $25,000 a year.

The city issued 5,864 new business licenses in 2005, up 19% from 2004. By comparison, in Santa Ana, a city of similar size, 3,761 new licenses were issued last year.

In Oxnard, the economic development corporation is trying to shoulder the bureaucratic burden of a permit process that can be daunting for commercial and office developers.

“Once a company finds a location, we can act as their surrogate all the way through,” said Steven Kinney, president of Economic Development Corp. of Oxnard. “This way they don’t ever have to step foot in City Hall.”

The permit process can be burdensome for entrepreneurs, he said, not because city staff isn’t helpful but because questions or concerns about a project are inevitable.

The development corporation, which has contracted with the city for the last 12 years to help build Oxnard’s job base, works with commercial and office property owners but not smaller retailers and professional services.

It obtains such requirements as zoning clearances and business licenses, for example, and helps city staff resolve questions involving improvement and construction plans or safety issues.

The development corporation expanded its services three years ago, Kinney said, as a natural extension of the process of getting businesses acquainted with the city.

“Instead of just dropping someone off at the Planning Department counter and introducing them to the right person, we kept on inevitably hanging around longer,” he said.

The corporation helped the newest kosher winery in California, Herzog Wine Cellars, open last summer in an industrial park.

Herzog General Manager Rich Keer said Oxnard was unusually cooperative with the company, and the development corporation provided “invaluable” help when questions arose.

When Herzog staged its opening gala on a Sunday last summer, for example, the city police -- without being asked -- used brown paper bags to cover the “no parking” signs on the street outside the winery, providing extra parking.

“There had never been a project like ours in Oxnard, so when the city inspectors would go to find the codes, there weren’t any,” Keer said. “But no matter what the issue was, everybody always said, ‘We’ll make it work.’ ”

With a restaurant in addition to its winemaking facility, Herzog’s water use presented a billing quandary for the city, which charges different rates for different categories of water use. The development corporation and city staff devised a solution: A submeter was installed to measure how much was flowing to the restaurant.

Indeed, the 70,000-square-foot facility, with its specialized equipment and extensive plumbing, required extra attention from city staff.

“Everything had to be blessed by the city as well as the rabbis, so to speak,” Kinney said