Beverly Hills Chamber Challenged : Merchant Petitions Seek More Power for Small Businesses

Members of two merchant groups have launched a petition campaign to eliminate what they see as unfair domination of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce by large firms in the central business district.

At stake is control of the chamber, a 67-year-old organization that seeks business for the city, promotes the city’s image and plays an important role in municipal planning.

“If the representatives of the large businesses keep voting themselves and their close associates into the chamber directorship, they have no reason to help us and we have no recourse for our grievances,” said Russ Levi, a liquor store owner on South Beverly Drive.

“Streets like Robertson that are not in the center Rodeo Drive-area of Beverly Hills have gotten sort of forgotten and gotten sort of second-fiddle treatment,” said Tracey Lewis Darroll, secretary-treasurer of the Robertson Boulevard Assn.

Levi, chairman of the South Beverly Drive Business Assn., said he sent a petition to about 1,000 members of the Chamber of Commerce and to 450 civic leaders last week.

Darroll said she plans to mail 5,000 copies of the appeal to business operators, office tenants and property owners in the Robertson area next week.

More Votes

“When it came to light how the chamber is set up, it’s not even possible for smaller business people to have their concerns really looked after,” she said. “That’s why we as the Robertson Boulevard Assn. joined in this protest.”

The chamber is governed by a board of directors chosen at an election in which organizations that pay more dues have more votes.

“It is a voting system that is very similar and adopted after the stock-market model. If you buy shares of stock you get as many (votes) as you have shares,” said Max Factor III, past president of the chamber.

The petitions call for limiting the number of votes of any one organization to three and allowing votes by people and companies located outside the city that belong to the Beverly Hills Chamber.

Factor said members pay dues according to different criteria, depending on factors such as the number of employees in businesses such as hotels or department stores, or the size of deposits in the case of banks and other financial institutions.

Since the chamber promotes the city extensively across the country and around the world, “the larger businesses pay more because they would benefit more from that activity,” Factor said. “The smaller businesses have lower dues so they can participate on local issues.”

Independent Voting

In any case, he said, there rarely is any block voting, because companies generally assign their mandates to individual employees who cast their ballots independently.

Factor said the Beverly Hills Chamber is awaiting responses from chambers of commerce elsewhere in California that it has contacted to determine whether its system is out of line with general practice.

Karl Schurz, president of the 1,800-member chamber, declined to comment on the protest, saying: “I really don’t think the story is newsworthy. I’m not going to get in a verbal volleyball fight in the newspaper with anybody. I’m not going to use the newspaper for an open forum with one or two people who are not happy, and that’s what it boils down to.”

Ivan Elmer, director of small-business programs in the Office of Chamber of Commerce Relations at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, said fights over control are not uncommon.

“I don’t know that I could name a place where there wouldn’t be disagreement, because everybody would like a little more,” he said. “The question is how you deal with it.”

The national chamber suggests in its model charter that individual firms get no more than 10 votes each, but Elmer said the central business district of any town will tend to dominate the Chamber of Commerce regardless of the voting system.

“The aggregate voting power in your main retail district is going to be larger than the other retail areas because of sheer numbers,” he said. “That’s what you’re seeing rather than a matter of big vs. small.”

Less Prominence

To buttress their argument, Levi and Darroll said their areas have been featured less prominently than the city’s main business triangle in chamber-sponsored promotions such as shopping maps and Christmas decorations.

The triangle is bounded by Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard and Rexford Drive.

Levi and Darroll also said that the chamber put little effort into winning more city parking lots for areas outside the central business district and that it disregarded them in its response to the city’s recently proposed urban design program.

“Every positive benefit that’s been given to us has been through our own activism, not through the chamber,” Levi said.

But Factor said that South Beverly Drive and South Robertson Boulevard were eventually included in the plans for the urban design project and that the chamber is open to anyone in the city.

As for outside people and enterprises, Factor said “it makes no sense to allow them to vote. They have business interests that are different than those of Beverly Hills.”