The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved plans by the Walt Disney Co. to build a high-tech film and television production studio complex on sprawling ranch land in the Santa Clarita Valley.
Los Angeles’ new mayor has vowed to help stanch the flow of film and TV production jobs out of Hollywood, starting with the appointment of a film czar at City Hall. But to make a real difference, Eric Garcetti needs to convince skeptical state pols to combat the lure of rich tax incentives from outside California.
If you harbor reservations about California’s business climate, or its attractiveness to commercial ventures, it can only mean you have yet to make the acquaintance of Kish Rajan, the state’s director of business and economic development. When the former Walnut Creek councilman talks about what lies ahead, he sounds as excited as a kid on Christmas Eve.
Real estate brokers through the Lake Tahoe and Reno markets say sales of upper-end homes have been buoyed since the start of the year by California residents who make no bones about their desire to get beyond the reach of the Golden State taxman.
It’s an uncomfortable point of notoriety for a city with pockets of fabulous wealth that craves civility and political correctness. For the record, Palo Alto has “unhoused individuals,” not homeless people; and an Opportunity Center as opposed to a homeless shelter.
Massachusetts retained its No. 1 spot as the state with the most R&D jobs in biotech (27,883), according to an annual industry report published by MassBio, the state’s industry trade group, and released this week. California ranked second with 23,438 biotech R&D jobs. But from 2007 to 2012 — among the darkest days for the biotech industry as investors retreated from the sector — those California jobs grew by 4,304, or 22.5 percent. That beat Massachusetts by almost two-to-one.
Substantially overhauling the 40-year-old California Environmental Quality Act may still happen, but with just two weeks remaining in the legislative session, it probably won’t happen this year.
As several new private ventures to take people on trips to space come closer to becoming reality, California lawmakers are racing other states to woo the new space companies with cushy incentives.
Export manufacturing has recently become the unsung hero of the U.S. economy. Despite all the public focus on the U.S. trade deficit, little attention has been paid to the fact that the country’s exports have been growing more than seven times faster than GDP since 2005. As a share of the U.S. economy, in fact, exports are at their highest point in 50 years.
Anyone interested in exploring economic, demographic and other data about California and its communities – yours truly, for example – has had to work at it because there’s been no central repository. One must mine data from federal agencies such as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from state agencies such as the Employment Development Department, the Department of Education or the Department of Finance, or from private and academic data banks.
California has experienced negative domestic migration in recent years. The increase in the number of residents moving out of the Golden State to other places in the United States is often blamed on California’s high personal income taxes. In fact, this was one of the main arguments waged against the recently enacted Proposition 30, which raised the statewide income tax rate as a way to address the state’s fiscal woes. However, data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the perceived connection between out-migrants and the state’s income tax is likely overblown. Statistics on the characteristics of California’s inbound and outbound migrants suggest that the patterns in domestic migration over the past decade are more related to housing costs in the state than to the local income tax structure.
Executive Summary: This is an extremely dynamic time in the California energy industry. Electricity providers are facing new generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure needs, aggressive renewable energy and emissions goals, and increasingly complex, multifaceted, and multi-jurisdictional policies and regulations, all while striving to maintain reliable and affordable service. Additionally, transportation fuel providers will have to meet stringent carbon intensity limits. As the goals and objectives of these policies and regulations mature from legislation to implementation, they are beginning to introduce additional and potentially substantial costs to the California energy industry.
One of the biggest obstacles facing Americans today is a lack of opportunity and social mobility. While we have entry-level and high-end jobs, we have lost the jobs in the middle that helped each generation of Americans do better than the one before it. Some call this an “hourglass economy”; I tend to think of it as a canyon being hollowed out between the two ends of the job market.
Over the past 18 months, a group of plaintiffs’ lawyers who got rich suing the tobacco industry have turned their litigious attention to what they hope will be the next big thing: challenges to healthy-sounding food labels they allege are misleading. Hailing from across the U.S., the lawyers decided to sue in federal courts in Northern California, where the consumer-protection laws are expansive and the jury pool nutrition-conscious.
As the debate over the practice of hydraulic fracturing to reach deeply embedded oil heats up, listening to a discussion on the topic sponsored by Los Angeles’ BizFed Institute last week, I have the feeling we will see it happen. Or should I say continue to happen since fracking, as it is called, has been going on in California for 60 years.