Buying Local

I’m sorry The Times is opposing my efforts to place a measure on the June ballot that would enable the city to give preference in city contract awards to California and locally made goods and to require a minimum domestic content for city purchases (editorials, Feb. 7 and 26).

If we become a “laughingstock” through these efforts, as you suggest, we’ll be in very good company: Currently, over half of the 50 American states utilize some form of local preference in their purchasing programs. What’s more, local and state transportation agencies that buy buses or rail vehicles with federal grant dollars are required by federal law to buy only those goods that include at least 60% domestic content. (In other words, had the Green Line been federally funded, the Sumitomo bid--which included only 22% domestic content--would have been disallowed.)

Los Angeles, like countless other local government agencies, regularly uses its power as a consumer to pursue its public policy goals. For example, we refuse to contract with companies that do business in or with South Africa. We require that would-be city contractors make extensive efforts to recruit minority, woman-owned and other disadvantaged subcontractors to share in city work.

Local bid preference is another variation on this theme. But your editorial writers think that because we live in an “inexorably global economy,” it’s too complicated to work. Did they ask the Federal Transportation Administration how they administer their 60% domestic content requirement without hopelessly gumming up the works? The answer is clear: It isn’t easy, but it can be done, and it is being done.

Local bid preference and domestic content requirements make sense. It costs more to make a widget in L.A. than to make it somewhere overseas where the costs of land, labor, environmental protection, occupational health and safety, workers’ compensation, etc., are far lower than they are here. Local bid preference won’t require that we accept an inferior or uncompetitive product, or break the bank in order to reward those firms that choose to stay in Los Angeles. It will simply provide a small bid preference--probably 5% or 10%--to local, otherwise qualified firms in recognition of the high cost of doing business here.

ZEV YAROSLAVSKY

Los Angeles City Council