L.A. Unveils Corps to Retain Valley Firms : Business: Volunteer group seeks to prevent companies from leaving the area by lending a friendly ear to complaints.
A newly formed corps of volunteers, mostly local business people, will be hitting the phones and casing the streets starting this week to persuade their colleagues not to bail out for Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver or what one local businessman simply called “Smallville, U.S.A., where they don’t have the resources to enforce all these regulations.”
Called the Valley Business Corps, the organization, unveiled by Mayor Richard Riordan at a press conference Friday, consists of 80 volunteers who will seek to burnish the San Fernando Valley’s image.
Complaints about L.A.’s environmental regulations, heavy taxes and crime abound among San Fernando Valley business owners. And statistics kept by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power suggest that hundreds of Valley businesses left or failed after the quake. Although many have subsequently returned or been replaced, overall, the number of commercial power customers in the Valley has dropped by nearly 700 since 1993 to an annual average of 55,213, said Jan Merlo, a DWP spokeswoman.
John Rooney, president of the nonprofit Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley, painted an even darker picture: In a March survey of 550 business owners, the alliance found that 28% were considering relocating or expanding outside the area. “It’s an alarming number,” he said.
Business retention has been a running theme of the Riordan Administration. Aggressive recruitment efforts by out-of-state locales, combined with the unsettling effects of the Northridge earthquake, have helped fuel the notion that more needs to be done. Gary Thomas, coordinator of the corps, said the aim of this new effort is to fight “the retreat attitude, . . . the idea that when things get tough, you just move on.”
The Valley Business Corps is a joint venture of the nonprofit Economic Alliance and the L.A. Business Team, a new agency funded through the city’s general fund. Its volunteers will make random calls to owners of businesses with 50 to 100 employees to ask them if they are thinking of leaving, and if so, what can be done to make them stay. They will also trouble-shoot for business, act as intermediaries with local government and try to find businesses that might expand or move here, Thomas said.
Perhaps most important, Thomas said, the volunteers will seek to give business owners a sense that someone is looking out for them: “It makes a big difference for businesses just to know someone cares,” said Thomas, who works for The Aaron Group, a Republican campaign consulting firm.
Walter Mosher, president of Precision Dynamics Corp. of Pacoima, said the creation of the corps is an encouraging sign. Mosher said his competitors outside Los Angeles enjoy lower taxes and fewer regulations. Meanwhile, he gets calls and brochures from other cities trying to entice him to move. “We have been considering leaving for three years,” he said, citing taxes, regulations, crime and poor schools. “But I think things are getting better.”
To stay in L.A. for the long term, though, Mosher looks for more profound changes: He supports the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and even talks of secession of the San Fernando Valley from the city of Los Angeles.
The launching of the Valley Business Corps considerably expands the scope of the 9-month-old L.A. Business Team. The team has a budget of $1.5 million this fiscal year, and claims to have contacted well over 600 companies since its inception. Its payroll includes 10 professional business representatives assigned to the San Fernando Valley. These will now be aided by the army of volunteers in suits.
Allison Keller, director of the Business Team, said the agency’s business-retention efforts so far have worked. One of its success stories is Harrison Sports, a manufacturer of golf equipment, which is soon slated to move into a renovated, $1-million facility in Pacoima.
Michael Cheng, president of Harrison, said the company was about to move to Tijuana when Business Team staffers persuaded him to move instead to Pacoima. They also helped him get financing from a local economic development corporation, and even hastened approval for the building.
“Every time I tell my business colleagues I’m setting up a facility in L.A., they look at me like someone passed away in my family,” Cheng said. “But I’m telling you, the assistance I’ve gotten, you wouldn’t believe it.”
When Cheng’s factory in Pacoima opens, it will employ 60 people. Before, the building itself was abandoned. There were bullet casings in the parking lot and broken windows, he said. Now it’s a lighted security building.
Cheng said increasing the business-retention effort can only help. “Without assistance, my project would have been impossible,” he said. “I don’t want to leave now. Believe me, I love L.A. I don’t want to go to someplace in the middle of the country where you can’t see the ocean.”
