Mann Gets OK to Buy Parcel
It took him more than a year of wrangling with city officials, but Alfred Mann, one of the wealthiest businessmen in the San Fernando Valley, finally got the green light Wednesday to buy a hunk of land in Sylmar for a new biomedical plant.
Councilman Alex Padilla had blocked the project for months, insisting that Mann meet several conditions--including setting up an internship program for Mission College students--before the lawmaker agreed to support it. Although Padilla’s objections raised eyebrows among business leaders, he said he wanted to ensure that his constituents reap some benefit from the $3.3-million deal.
“The expansion of Al Mann’s companies is certainly good for the business community, but I needed to be sure it would be a win-win for the residential community as well,” Padilla said. “I think we’ve achieved that.”
The Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved the land sale Wednesday. Mann, the billionaire founder of Northridge-based insulin pump maker MiniMed Inc., intends to build a cancer drug research and manufacturing plant for one of his fledgling biotech companies, CTL ImmunoTherapies Corp. He said the facility planned in Sylmar could open by 2003, creating up to 800 jobs.
Mann said he had originally intended to use the eight-acre property to expand his Advanced Bionics Corp., which operated on adjacent land and manufactures ear implants for the hearing impaired.
But biotechnology moves faster than city government, and Advanced Bionics was already outgrowing the space even as Mann waited for approval to buy the land, a barren debris basin owned by the Department of Water and Power. Fed up with the delays, Mann moved Advanced Bionics to Santa Clarita last fall and proposed bringing CTL to the Sylmar site instead--but neglected to clear the change with Padilla.
After a closed-door meeting in October, the councilman agreed to back the new project but required Mann to create a timetable for hiring local residents and to make sure that any environmental and health effects would be negligible. It took until this week to execute an agreement between CTL and Mission College for the internship program.
Business leaders were relieved to hear that the deal had finally gone through.
“It’s about time,” said Bruce Ackerman, president of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley. “I wish it hadn’t taken as long as it had. It just kept giving the city this negative business image.”
But the mild-mannered Mann, a septuagenarian physicist who presides over a medical technology empire with no less a goal than curing blindness, deafness and cancer, had only kind words for Padilla.
“Mr. Padilla’s a fine guy,” Mann said. “He trying to do what’s best for his district.”
