Author: Charles Crumpley

Antonio Villaraigosa’s re-election Tuesday is OK. After all, he is a pretty good mayor.

My only complaint: He’s no friend to business.

That’s always seemed evident but it became even more clear last week when, in a late campaign swing, he stopped by the Los Angeles Business Journal offices to meet with reporters and editors. Our first question: Since businesses here are stuck with unusually high costs and high tax rates – and soon will face among the country’s highest sales tax rates – is his administration doing anything to help L.A.’s businesses combat those disadvantages?

Instead of talking about what he plans to do, he talked about the past. He said that when the city was facing a big budget deficit, he refused to suspend the third year of a scheduled tax cut for businesses.

Imagine taking a nice Sunday excursion into the desert a few years from now. Maybe you’ll pass some Joshua trees and some spectacular geologic formations. But chances are, the feature you’ll see most will be miles and miles of high-voltage transmission lines.

Yes, massive transmission lines will soon dominate the desert scenery around Los Angeles. That’s thanks to the quest to boost alternative electrical power. Utilities in California are required to get one-third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Up till now, transmission lines that stretched across the hinterlands haven’t been particularly common because electricity-generating plants have been close to most cities.

Is this really the worst economy since the Great Depression?

We’ve heard that phrase endlessly in recent months, but it’s idiotic just to put today’s economy in the same sentence as the Great Depression. Unemployment hit 25 percent in the depression, the stock market lost 90 percent of its value and the gross domestic product fell by one-third. We’re nowhere near those numbers. You couldn’t drive a Model A from those numbers to today’s.

OK, OK. The phrase is this is the worst economy since the Great Depression. But even that’s hard to swallow.

I can’t help but remember years ago when my aunt died and her property was put up for sale. I wanted to buy it – keep it in the family and all. The price was fine, but I decided I couldn’t buy it for one reason: Mortgage interest rates were 18 percent.

I just arrived at the office, and I’m dying to drink a Tropicana juice.

That’s because I drove past one of those big supergraphics on a building that everyone seems so upset about. It’s a big advertisement for Tropicana, and I succumbed. It’s in my head and I can’t get it out. I must drink one.

I’m sure I’m not alone. People all over Los Angeles are probably rushing out this very minute to drink one. At least, that’s one of the arguments against supergraphics; since they’re immense and convey such an overwhelming message, we weak humans just can’t resist. That’s probably true. I mean, have you ever been able to ignore a single commercial message? Just one? I didn’t think so. Those supergraphics must come down.

Now, I guess you could argue that Los Angeles has gang problems and school problems, and the recession is hurting everyone, so maybe we shouldn’t worry about supergraphics. But I for one am real happy that some of our elected officials are spending a good deal of time and energy on this menace.

If you ask David Fleming about L.A.’s infamous traffic congestion, he’ll tell you it is one of the most complained-about problems of doing business here. In fact, Fleming, who’s chairman of the Los Angeles County Business Federation, said when that organization last year surveyed its members, traffic was the No. 1 concern.

Heck, it’s a big issue for just about every one of the 10 million of us who live in Los Angeles County and who spend countless and needless hours inching our way along streets that seem more like moving parking lots.

So that’s why he was flummoxed last week about what’s been going on in Sacramento. State legislators are seriously toying with the idea of pinching off a funding source for L.A. County’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, the agency that runs buses and commuter trains.

It looks like the MTA could lose about 16 percent of its budget not only now but in the future, and that upsets Fleming, who also is a director on MTA’s board. (Believe it or not, the guy sits on 14 boards.)

Will the Screen Actors Guild do to Los Angeles what the United Auto Workers did to Detroit?

It’s starting to feel that way. Consider the situation.

The most radical faction in the 120,000-member SAG is in the leadership. They want authority to strike. A couple of weeks ago, moderates tried to negate the leaders but got beaten back. It’s unclear that the leaders will get their way, but the point is those most agitating to strike still have a leading role in this drama.

Besides this internal blood feud, SAG has a second fight that it believes is the big one. That is the external fight with the studios over how to divvy up revenue streams, including future new-media residuals.

But has SAG lost sight of the fact that it is in a third fight? That third fight really is the big one, because it is about survival.

I attended an event last week at the Los Angeles hotel everyone still calls the Century Plaza, and I was reminded of what a truly nice structure it is.

Walk into the interior, and you’re quickly put at ease. That’s a bit surprising, since the décor is sleek and the space is cavernous. Instead of being put off, you want to linger in its comfortable formality. You’d be forgiven if you sat and ordered a martini because there’s an honest mid-’60s glamour to the place that survived the hotel’s recent and very expensive makeover. Shaken, not stirred, please.

But outside is where the hotel is at its best. It’s a building that’s not ashamed to be simple. The front of the building makes that perfect arc, a curve that seems to reach out and embrace visitors. The room balconies form nice symmetrical rows. The entire appearance makes the hotel seem sturdy yet graceful.

And the building fits perfectly amid its neighbors. It faces and complements the 2000 Avenue of the Stars building directly across the street. The horizontal mass of the hotel nicely offsets the towers that have sprung up, and continue to spring up, in Century City.

If you read the January 12 issue of the Los Angeles Business Journal, you may think we accidentally republished some articles from the 1980s.

Privatization and poison pills – common terms from 20 years ago – are the subjects of two articles in the issue. Both seem to be making a bit of a comeback.

It would be heartening to see a true revival of privatization. Outgoing Los Angeles City Controller Laura Chick floated the notion of leasing out or contracting out some city functions.

Think about it: Is there really any philosophical justification for the city of Los Angeles, or any city or any county or state for that matter, to operate golf courses and parking lots?

A Los Angeles Business Journal poll last week asked at what age people planned to retire (or already retired). The biggest number of respondents – 35 percent – said “never,” and 28 percent plan on retiring well after age 65.

Granted, this is a decidedly unscientific poll, but still, a total of 63 percent are planning to blow well past the age of 65 before they hang it up, if they do so at all. That’s pretty amazing. (What prompted the poll question, by the way, was a recent special report in the Business Journal, “Eight Over 80,” which profiled eight Angelenos, all 80 or older, who are not just still in the game of business but still throwing heat.)

I bring this up because of a pet peeve of mine: all those consultants out there striving to persuade business owners that they have a big problem on the horizon because of the tsunami of retirements of baby boomers.