California’s high energy costs and environmental initiatives pushing green energy are making it more expensive for businesses to operate in the state, a new report finds, exacting a significant toll on low- and middle-class communities.
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach maintained their ranking as the nation’s top gateway for international trade last year and container traffic through the twin ports is expected to rise 5.5 percent this year and 5.8 percent in 2015.
While the people who decide where to make movies uniformly say that they’d prefer to work in their hometown, better subsidies that other states and countries offer has made that almost impossible to justify.
Commissioned by the Southern California Association of Governments to examine the Golden State’s $100 million annual tax program, the report found an 11 percent return on investment in the program’s first three years.
Dozens of Los Angeles film and television workers gathered at Los Angeles City Hall on Monday night to share somber stories of layoffs and diminishing job opportunities in the entertainment industry.
Two state legislators said this week they will introduce motions next January to boost tax incentives for film and television production, one of a handful of bills addressing runaway production.
Kinkisharyo International Inc., the No. 1 supplier of low-floor light rail vehicles in North America, is moving its U.S. headquarters from Massachusetts to El Segundo, bringing about 25 jobs to the South Bay city and another 250 positions to the Palmdale area, where it will manufacture rail cars for the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
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.
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.
Setting the tone for his City Hall tenure, Eric Garcetti said he will make job creation one of his top priorities in his first 100 days.
The median price of a previously owned house in California soared 31.9 percent in May, the largest year-over-year increase in more than three decades as sales of more expensive properties increased and inventory remained tight, a trade group said Monday.
Construction creates jobs. But it’s tough to get large infrastructure projects going when they’re blocked by overly stringent environmental laws and state regulations that slow and sometimes halt the process.
California’s enterprise zones have been a part of state government since the mid-1980s, but there is disagreement as to whether they have successfully attracted and retained businesses or merely shifted commercial activities from communities without zones to others where the program is in effect.
Many hurdles remain between here and meaningful reform of the California Environmental Quality Act, namely the obstacle that a Democrat-led state Legislature is bound to face when it defies labor unions. But state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg’s bill to modernize CEQA has taken a step toward passage by winning approval from the Senate Environmental Quality Committee.
As mayors of two of California’s largest cities, we’ve joined with other large city mayors including San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, and Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido, to call for a modernization of one of California’s oldest and most important environmental laws, the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.