Author: Greg Lippe

In 2001 the U.S. Department of Commerce released a report, “The Migration of U.S. Film and Television Production” which estimated that television production flight (runaway production) increased 230 percent from 1990 to 1998 and that up to $10 billion in film and television production was lost to other countries during the five years prior to the report. The most significant flight was from California to Canada, and the productions most affected were those with budgets between $1 million and $5 million. Films that made up the majority of that budget range were the television “Movies of the Week.” As of 1999, most of those television movies had been lost to Canada with 696 weeks of production in Canada during the year and only 152 weeks in the United States.

From 1999 to 2003, film industry jobs in the five county Los Angeles region dropped from 146, 000 to 111,000 (a 24% drop in just 4 years).The hardest hit were the “below the line” workers (art, construction, costumes, sound, camera, grips etc.), followed by ancillary service businesses (caterers, dry cleaners, transportation, janitorial, security etc.). The San Fernando Valley was particularly vulnerable to runaway production job losses since, in the year 2000, approximately 54,000 film industry employees (representing close to 60% of L, A. County’s film industry employees and approximately 37% of those in the five county L.A. region) worked in the Valley.

We need a new Sheriff in L.A., and it’s not because we have problems with gangs, drugs, graffiti and other crime. We need a new Sheriff to keep law and order down at City Hall, to keep our politicians honest and to keep our taxes from breaking the bank, and we need our Sheriff now. City Council members Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti passed a motion last month to create a “Collections Sheriff”; a position or department that will hold department heads accountable and make them do their jobs.

Why do we need the “Collections Sheriff”, you ask? Let’s start with the $500 million in aging debt, some as much as two decades old, that the City of L.A. has on its balance sheets that it hasn’t done anything with since it found out about these accounts in June 2007. Then let’s look at the fact that in 2007 L.A. had over $1 billion in “uncollectables” on its books, meaning that it intended to write off all of this revenue it is supposed to collect. Finally, we need a Collections Sheriff because the city has known about these and other problems for years and has failed to take any serious action to rectify the situation.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has approved Measure U for the November 4 ballot, and they are calling it a tax cut. I don’t remember the last time someone asked for my permission to “lower” taxes. Usually after a tax cut is signed, I see a press conference with elected officials telling us what a good job they’ve done and how they’re looking out for the taxpayer. So, why a vote from the L.A. County Board of Supervisors to “lower taxes”?

The Board proposes to lower the utilities tax rate from five percent to 4.5 percent for unincorporated portions of Los Angeles County. But, the Board seeks to expand the scope of what telecommunications services are taxed to just about everything except e-mail, which by law cannot be taxed (mark your calendar for 2014 for the federal sunset of this law). County officials say the revenue lost from the current 5% tax and the revenue gained from the 4.5% tax, should the measure pass, will be a wash. Really?