Business People Split on Valley Secession

Talk to business people in the San Fernando Valley about their dealings with the city of Los Angeles and they’re nearly unanimous: It’s a hostile place, with cumbersome rules and regulations.

But ask them whether breaking the Valley away from the city would solve their problems, and their opinions become more divided: It’s either a bad idea or worth a try, depending on who’s talking.

“I look at this [secession] as a rush to judgment,” said Sy Feerst, a Canoga Park printing broker. “What the hell would we have gained? There is no magic bullet in breaking away.”

Many business owners say they have little interest in a secession proposal because they believe the biggest problems are in Sacramento, not Los Angeles City Hall.

Take Jeff Bush, president of Optiphase Inc., a Van Nuys firm that makes advanced sensors used in aircraft and satellites. In New York, he said, the state provides matching funds when high-tech companies like his win certain federal contracts. California offers no such incentives, he said.

“But I wouldn’t see any of that changing if the Valley seceded from the city.”

Pat A. Zicarelli, president of Style Realty in Tarzana, said he’d “like to wait and see what posture the city is taking, rather than putting Band-Aids” on the Valley’s problems.

Zicarelli thinks that, for now, the best course is to work within the Los Angeles city government for reforms on issues ranging from the distribution of police to education matters. If the problems aren’t resolved, only then does he believe that a step as drastic as secession should be considered.

But many in the business community say they’re ready to support secession now. They worry that the city has become so large and unwieldy that little gets accomplished. And they express frustration over everything from an inhospitable city bureaucracy to the absence of coordinated efforts to assist businesses.

That sentiment has helped Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills) rally support for her bill that would make it easier for the Valley to break away by stripping the City Council of the power to veto a secession request.

Indeed, the idea of secession prompts a gut-level response from some small-business owners, such as Paul Avganim, owner of APA Automotive Center in Woodland Hills.

Avganim reels off a litany of complaints about doing business in Los Angeles. “It’s very difficult to deal with the city, with the Fire Department,” he said. Burdensome fees and taxes, duplicate licensing requirements, massive paperwork and costly inspections have made him think seriously of moving away.

Recently, for example, Avganim applied to the city to expand his business by adding to his work area with a canopy. The permit got snagged on a single point: His restroom didn’t meet requirements for disability access, he said. “They needed it to be 8 feet by 8 feet, and mine is 8 by 6,” he said. “So what am I supposed to do? Put an extension to the building? . . . It’s unbelievable.”

Tom Hilborn, who runs an automotive shop in Reseda, was quick to agree. Secession “is an excellent idea,” he said. Los Angeles has “a lot of regulations that in my point of view are pretty much a waste of time.”

For small, neighborhood businesses such as Hilborn’s, simple quality-of-life issues like street cleanliness are key. “Businesses need to have attractive and safe areas to do business. Aesthetics, crime [prevention]--all that kind of stuff can be done more efficiently if [a city] is smaller. . . . Los Angeles is just too big. As things get bigger and bigger, they get less and less efficient.”

Patricia Everett, owner of Corporate Fine Arts of Chatsworth, which sells art to businesses, said she didn’t know if secession is a good idea. “But I hope this will really get the attention of City Hall. I feel really ripped off that we haven’t gotten any other mass transit out here. We’ve been paying taxes for 50 years and we still haven’t seen an east-west rail line,”

And Trudi Friedman, vice president of Collection ‘85, a small Pacoima manufacturer of lamps and accent furniture, said she’s fed up with seeing companies leave Los Angeles or go out of business, which she blames partly on the city government. When people lose their jobs or move away, that hurts her business, Friedman said. The public education system is another problem, she said, because “you can’t get good employees. They can’t read. They can’t write.”

So, Friedman said, “anything is worth a try. When you’re working as a smaller entity you might have more of a say.”

The frustration with city government isn’t restricted to small businesses. Brian McDermott, chief executive of Leslie’s Poolmart, a large swimming pool supplies retailer based in Chatsworth, also has a “visceral positive reaction” to the idea of secession.

McDermott recalled that when Leslie’s opened a distribution center in Dallas, the city sent an ombudsman to help the company clear all the regulatory hurdles. That allowed Leslie’s to open the facility quickly, and took the guesswork out of estimating its costs.

“Here, there is no such thing,” McDermott said. “You never know what’s going to be around the next corner.”

But McDermott said he would want more information before supporting a breakup plan.

“What I’d try to do is look at how it would break down economically. What’s the population base? How would tax revenues be split up? What would the cost be of running services? I think there has to be a study done and a specific set of proposals that people would react to.”

Jeffrey Ornstein, spokesman for Superior Industries International Inc. in Van Nuys, a major supplier of aluminum auto wheels, agreed that Los Angeles is “not conducive to business opportunities.” For that reason, the company has funneled its expanding operations to other areas of the country.

But Ornstein said the secession proposal “doesn’t sound like something that would concern us too much.” Mainly that’s because Superior’s biggest complaint is the high cost of workers’ compensation, and that is a problem it would face anywhere in the state. The company needs operations in California, because it’s a hub of Pacific Rim trade--and it’s especially important for Superior to be in the Los Angeles area to be close to the huge ports in San Pedro and Long Beach.

Syncor International Inc. also sees little benefit coming to it from a separate Valley jurisdiction. The Chatsworth operator of specialty pharmaceutical centers has 200 administrative employees at its Chatsworth headquarters, but its other 2,000 employees are dotted across the country at 119 sites. It links the far-flung operations electronically, and has few dealings with city bureaucracy.

“You could put this corporate office in Alaska and we’d still do the same thing,” said company spokeswoman Mary Meusborn.

Gary Goddard, chief executive of Landmark Entertainment Group, a North Hollywood designer of themed attractions, said he didn’t see any advantage in splitting up the city. “We’re in the entertainment business, so it doesn’t really matter” what city the company is in, he said, as long as it’s close to the media centers in Los Angeles and Burbank.

And Sidney Wing, chief executive at Datametrics, a Woodland Hills maker of high-speed printers and other computer products, said that when all the factors are weighed, doing business in Los Angeles isn’t so bad after all.

Wing came to that conclusion two years ago, when the company was transforming from a defense-oriented business to one that sells to commercial markets. At the time, he considered moving Datametrics to Oregon or Arizona, but decided to stay put because of the high-tech labor base here and the advantage of being in a large metropolitan area.

Despite all the talk about Los Angeles being a tough place to do business, Wing said, “on the whole, I think we’re better off here.”