MCA Plan’s Impact Is About Residents, Not Just Dollars : Officials must weigh traffic, noise and illumination

For some time, Los Angeles enviously watched as smaller communities such as Burbank and Glendale reaped the benefits of an entertainment boom. It came in the form of huge tax revenues, revitalized downtown areas, admirably low office vacancy levels, high-wage jobs, and much much more.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles was the behemoth that couldn’t compete. It couldn’t match the incentive packages. Los Angeles’ costs were too high, and you needed the negotiating equivalent of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to scale its mountain of bureaucratic red tape.

That changed last year with the DreamWorks SKG’s plans for a corporate headquarters and a high-tech studio on 100 vacant areas near Marina del Rey. Los Angeles officials assembled the city’s largest tax incentive package ever to sweeten the deal.

Now, a project of similar financial proportions is gathering steam, and it will require a different tack from Los Angeles city and county officials.

In February, MCA Inc. announced its plan to double development on its Universal City property over the next 25 years. Preliminary estimates suggested that the project would generate $2 billion annually in new economic activity, and $75 million in tax revenues.

A bit more was revealed this past week, when MCA released previews of its $3-billion, 24-hour entertainment resort.

This time around, a dramatic incentive package is hardly necessary to keep the project in Los Angeles. MCA wants a complex that will rival the world’s top theme projects, right in the Cahuenga Pass.

The test for city and county officials this time will be to avoid dollar-sign blindness and approve a project that makes sense for the surrounding community in terms of traffic, noise and illumination, and that could be a tall order.

For its part, MCA has sent a few welcome signals. New roadways are planned that should disperse traffic, and the corporation has cut down on the noise from one of its louder studio tour attractions. It has also decreased noise and disguised a parking structure by hiding it with a forest-like facade. Let’s hope it’s a sign of things to come when more detailed expansion plans are released later this year.

MCA wants a complex that will rival the world’s top theme projects, right in the Cahuenga Pass.