L.A. County’s Firms, Cities ‘Connect’
Despite a disappointing turnout, participants of the first gathering of business and government leaders from all 88 cities of Los Angeles County called Monday’s economic summit a promising first step in devising ways to stimulate growth throughout the region.
After five hours of speeches and discussions, about 250 public officials and corporate executives walked away with six pages of broad recommendations, three glossy business directories and, many of them said, a pleasant discovery: how much they have in common.
“Our issues are everybody else’s issues,” said William Allen, president of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley, who came from Van Nuys for the Economic Action Summit at the California Science Center near downtown Los Angeles. The summit was sponsored by the New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership, a group funded by public and private dollars.
Indeed, it was hard to tell from the lively exchanges and the relatively quick consensus on a number of weighty issues that the various cities have had a history of squabbling and competing against one another. “People here are getting together and are finding they are connecting,” said Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Pepperdine University Institute for Public Policy.
In that way, the summit was perhaps more of a symbolic success than anything else. But conference leaders say they expect to see a real payoff within months if participants follow through on the plans of action drafted Monday.
The plans are aimed at making the region more competitive, and they address six areas that summit organizers had identified as critical by talking to leaders in sub-regions such as the South Bay: access to capital, competitive industrial sites, critical infrastructure, international trade, technology industry growth and work force readiness.
For all six areas, it was widely agreed, there is a lack of vital information, whether it’s the inventory of available industrial space or the precise skills people need to obtain jobs. Summit speakers talked often about how having such data--and making it accessible--becomes even more important in a sprawling economy that is dominated by small businesses and industry clusters.
In six two-hour sessions, summit participants drafted two short-term goals to strengthen each of the six areas. Regina Birdsell, executive director of NLAMP, said leaders of the six issues will finalize their plans early next year and take action immediately afterward.
Although attendance was far from the 400 expected, Birdsell hardly seemed disappointed.
“There was a lot of interesting debate and people interacting with those who they normally wouldn’t be,” she said. “That’s exactly what we were hoping for.”
Among the recommendations:
* To strengthen access to capital and create an alliance between governments and economic development organizations to help prepare businesses.
* Take a census of existing technology industry jobs, associations and firms and form a regionwide task force to pursue a major share of the Joint Strike Fighter and other projects.
* Use the Southern California Coordination Council to lead and coordinate trade advocacy in the region and work to depoliticize trade issues.
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* MAYOR’S SPEECH: At USC conference, L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan spun tales of successful and unsuccessful investing. B1
