Oh, THAT Vital Industry - Hahn Rouses Himself for Hollywood
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Sniff, sniff. Hmm. Smell that? It's election season in Los Angeles. Mayor Jim Hahn has finally woken up and smelled it too: Constituents. Responsibility. Voters.
He shakes himself and remembers, Oh yeah. I have a job to do. Let's see, what's wrong with L.A. that I can fix with quick cosmetic gestures? Unsafe roads? Check. Pandering to the mass media? Check. Tickle the geeks? got it. Crime? Hmmm. Gotta work on that. Ah, here we go - the city's biggest industry is bleeding out like a second-string samurai with a severed carotid artery. I know, I'll finally do something about it.
That's right: fully 8 months after the City Council recommended it (and nine months after I started harping on his complete inaction to halt runaway production (and I'm late to the pundit game!)) Jim Hahn finally threw his support into a bid to keep Hollywood in Hollywood ...
Hahn wants to kill business taxes for entertainment businesses and people grossing less than $300,000 a year, and cut taxes for producers who spend less than $12 million on films. This will surely bring in votes from the indy-film crowd as well as the little companies renting grip trucks and peddling head shots. It's so politically cynical, it's pathetic.
It is also, as the Times points out, rather little, and quite late:
The city of Los Angeles consistently has the worst business climate in Los Angeles County and is among the one or two worst statewide, in part because of its complex and expensive business taxes, said Larry Kosmont, an economic development expert whose company performs an annual survey of the business climate in U.S. cities.
"It's been very disappointing to see how long it's taken Los Angeles to do anything on this issue," Kosmont said.
In his 2001 inauguration address, Hahn promised that he would be "implementing business tax reform and making city government more business-friendly."
The mayor has championed some small reforms.
Shortly after his inauguration, he pushed to extend a tax moratorium on new business.
But recently, the push for reform has largely come from elsewhere.
When businesses advocated a simpler system that would allow a business to avoid paying multiple tax rates, the City Council took the lead in 2003 and passed the measure.
Bob Hertzberg operative Matt Szabo put a finer point on it in the Daily News: "It's a truly remarkable tactic -- to publicly acknowledge that he has been asleep at the wheel for three years on this issue."
Expect a fawning tribute banquet from the publicists and smaller party caterers ere long. This is a 14-karat-plated doozy of a vote magnet.
Posted by: mack_reed on Tuesday, October 26, 2004 - 08:59 AM
