San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said the city’s push to build a stadium for the Chargers took “a huge step forward” when Gov. Jerry Brown approved an accelerated judicial-review process for any lawsuits filed against the project’s environmental-impact report.
Developers of an NFL stadium in Inglewood have promised hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity, but economists largely believe that the economic impact of sports stadiums is miniscule, KPCC reports. A 2003 analysis on Staples Center commissioned by the Los Angeles City Controller found that economic activity in Inglewood actually increased when the Lakers left town.
Thirteen California Indian tribes announced this week that they had struck a compromise to legalize online poker in California, but a successful law is not guaranteed because the powerful Morongo Band of Mission Indians is opposed.
Tribal gaming operations in California generated an estimated $8 billion in economic output in 2012 – $2.9 billion of which represented earnings by California workers – and supported over 56,000 jobs statewide. The 2012 operations had a roughly 7%-7.5% larger impact on California economic activity than in 2010.
There was no fanfare, no big press conference, not even a signing statement (though maybe this should have sufficed). In the end, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Sen. Darrell Steinberg’s final CEQA reform bill late on a Friday afternoon, a time-honored way to avoid media attention.