The Business Perspective

This coming Fourth of July weekend will be extremely busy at Los Angeles International Airport. Travelers during the biggest holiday weekend of the summer will be part of an estimated 25.6 million summer passengers, a 2.7 percent increase over 2016. As traveler counts continue to rise, so does investment in the number one origin and destination airport in the world.

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When I wrote about the Los Angeles City Council's approval of the Wilshire Grand project in April 2011, the City was struggling to emerge from the recession. The promise of a new Wilshire Grand was a delicate balance of vision, commitment to L.A. and a test of private and public sector leadership. Now, after six years of watching this vision come to life at the corner of Wilshire and Figueroa, we eagerly anticipate the ribbon-cutting and dedication ceremony this Friday.

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As students and families celebrate recent high school commencements, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce congratulates all of our high school graduates. We also applaud the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for improving its high school graduation rate by an unprecedented five percentage points in one year, while at the same time stepping up completion requirements and university eligibility.

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Last Friday marked the deadline to get bills out of the house of origin for the California Legislature. More than 600 bills were voted on last week.

The good news is that the business community had some significant victories in defeating or stalling legislation that would have made it harder and more expensive to do business in California. Included were:  AB 5 (Fletcher-Gonzalez), an overly burdensome scheduling mandate on employers; SB 705 (Allen), a costly mandate prohibiting food establishments from using take-out containers made of polystyrene foam; SB 57 (Stern), which would threaten Southern California's energy reliability by shuttering Aliso Canyon.

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