Ovrom Leads Mayor Villaraigosa's Economic Development Team

Bud, as a veteran administrator of city redevelopment agencies in Burbank and Los Angeles, many were pleased that Mayor Villaraigosa tapped you to be his new Deputy Mayor for Economic Development. Share your thoughts on this new opportunity and the relationship you're going to have with LACRA and other related city agencies.

I'm very excited about being here. I thoroughly enjoyed my two years at CRA and I probably would have been happy to stay there, but when Antonio Villaraigosa got elected to mayor I thought that this would be a unique opportunity for the mayor's office to have a really dramatic impact on overall economic development. I'm a very objective, analytical person, so I don't just jump on bandwagons. But I think he is extremely well positioned with his relationship with the council, with the county, with the supervisors, with the state legislature, with Washington, D.C., and with the community as a whole. I think he is positioned to have a really dramatic impact on economic development in Los Angeles and, frankly, I just thought it would be exciting to be a part of that.

What I want to accomplish on his behalf is to get all of the operating departments involved in housing and economic development to work more together, as you would find in a smaller city, in a Burbank or a Glendale or Pasadena in a city manager form of government. There isn't any challenge getting the departments like housing and building and safety and planning and the redevelopment agency getting them to work together. It's just expected. It's a way of life in the smaller cities, and I thought that we could do that here. One of the frustrations I had with the redevelopment agency was the silo mentality of Los Angeles. Each department was kind of doing its own thing, and I think under the charter reform and with the strong mayor you can use the executive power of the mayor to really pull all of the L.A. departments together to accomplish the mayor's visions.

Your answer must be music to the ears of our readers, but why don't you elaborate a little bit more on what the platform of the mayor's office affords in moving forward in this city, Los Angeles, which has this history of silos to tie them together into focused economic development?

Well, I think you're going to see it on a variety of fronts. One, I have formed an economic development cabinet, which has a bi-weekly meeting. Every two weeks there is a meeting of myself and the general managers, and there's the planning department, the redevelopment agency, the housing department, the housing authority, the building and safety. We sit down in the conference room and we hash through all of the issues that are facing us,. I think just being together in a structured format is a step in the right direction. In the prior administration we had a gang of four where informally the redevelopment director, the planning director, the housing director and the CED director would get together for breakfast once a month, but that was informal. And then there was a cabinet in the Hahn administration but it dealt with ad-hoc projects. This cabinet has all of the general managers that are associated with land use meeting regularly with a structured agenda and really grappling with the issues that we need to grapple with.

And I think you are going to see stronger leadership from the mayor in terms of expressing what his priorities are. One is for all of the departments to work together hand-in-glove. We have the business team, which will be mainly used as expediters or navigators to help projects move through the bureaucracy that's inherent in being the second-largest city in the nation. The other part of our office is our strategic planning groups, which will be identifying areas where with greatest potential for growth and developing strategic plans for growing jobs in those areas. L.A. is a big place and a complicated place, and we have so many segments of our economy we'd like to work on. But with limited resources we have to prioritize, so the strategic planning group is developing strategies specifically with regard to the entertainment industry, international trade, tourism and bio-med. So the office has two parts. There are the doers -- the business team out expediting projects and pushing them through the bureaucracy -- and the strategic planning, who are the thinkers, are developing our longer term plans for these targeted areas.

It's obviously good to have the doers back in City Hall, but let's turn to the strategic folks you mention and focus on bio-med as a case example. What will be your strategies to encourage growth, and is there a place or an area of the city that the mayor prefers for bio-med?

Well, let's start with the place, because we're being very sensitive to the fact that we have two large, prominent universities. I happen to be a Trojan, and the mayor happens to be a Bruin. So, there is very even-handed play to make sure that we work with both USC and UCLA to promote their work. So, we are in active deliberations with both those universities. We're active with USC developing plans for the bio-med park out around the health services campus in East L.A. near County-USC Hospital. And just a couple of weeks ago we were meeting with all of the key staff at UCLA to assess where they are on their bio-med work and what we can do to help them move their efforts along.

The Hahn administration took a pretty heavy rap for not having done a very good job of going after the administrative offices of the statewide bio-med effort. I think that was unfortunate, but that was never really the big money. That was just for the administrative offices. The big money is eventually, once they clean up all of their problems, going to be coming for the actual work that needs to be done. We just want to make sure that Los Angeles gets all of its, or more than its, fair share of state funding.

Re: economic development, what's at stake for the city if it fails to adequately priortize your work?

Well, in all of these areas what's at stake is the desire to create good jobs. I'm one of these people who happens to believe that all jobs are good jobs and that everybody should take pride in the work that they do, but the truth is that over the last decade or longer Los Angeles has lost quality jobs. We've lost the aerospace jobs. We've lost the auto manufacturing jobs. We've lost a lot of good, union, high paying, good benefits jobs, and the growth that's happened in Los Angeles in the past couple of decades has been primarily in low-paying retail jobs, big box retail and things like that. Those places meet a need, but they don't have the high paying, benefited jobs. So, by going after areas like bio-med and entertainment we're really trying to focus on how to get good quality jobs back into L.A. and not just retail jobs.

Elaborate on the geographical challenges presented by a 400-plus square mile city with sub-regional economic development needs and varied assets. How do you manage this metropolis from the mayor's office and with little staff? Are there geographical assignments?

We have assigned managers, business reps, on a geographical basis. So, I have a specific business rep in the West Valley, the East Valley, West and Central L.A., downtown, East L.A., and South L.A. So, I have six business reps assigned on a geographical basis because you're right; L.A. is too big to have one-size-fits-all and you have to recognize that. I did that in the redevelopment agency, and it was a little bit easier in the redevelopment agency because the redevelopment didn't cover the whole city. It only covered where there were project areas. Now, we have to cover the whole city. I expect these six people to know what's going on. If the mayor calls and says, "Hey what's that construction on the corner of such and such?" or a developer calls or a neighbor calls and complains about a project that's moving through the system, I expect that business rep to have their ear to the ground and to know what's going on, what companies need to expand, what companies want to expand, what companies are thinking about relocating and what we can do to help them.

Building off that answer, is the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation not in the same business, trying to provide the same services? Is there a link between the city's operations, which you now oversee, and the county economic development corporations mission and work?

Yes, absolutely, and we're going to be promoting that even more. The LAEDC also has geographic assignments, and so we expect our business reps to work with the CRA and LAEDC people who are assigned geographically, and I think we're going to be having some joint meetings for example between our business team and the LAEDC's outreach team just to strengthen those ties. The truth is that we are a still an extremely small shop. When the mayor hired me, he said, "I want you to restore the business team to the glory of the Rocky Delgadillo years," and, frankly, we sort of live off the fame of the Rocky Delgadillo days.

But I think Rocky had something like one business rep for every council district, and then he had some floaters so he had probably 15 to 18 people while I have six. So, the truth is that with a small office we can't begin to compare to the resources that the Riordan administration applied to the business team. So, we have to work smarter with everybody around us. I see our job as really managing the resources of the combined departments and working in closer collaboration with organizations like the LAEDC and the CRA.

Some would say that the true economic development engines in the city are the City's proprietary departments - the airport, the harbor, and the Department of Water and Power. How will your efforts link with these proprietary departments' plans and challenges?

Good question, as always. The port actually falls in my portfolio. I think in the prior administration all of the proprietaries were under one deputy mayor, and this administration the proprieties have been divided between deputy mayors, and I happen to have the port. So, we work very, very closely with the port and we have now selected our port harbor commissioners and we are in the final lap of electing a general manager for the port. So, because it's part of our portfolio, we work very closely with them on a day-to-day basis. In terms of the other two proprietary departments, we have official links to them but are not as firmed up in the airport because they just got a new interim general manager. Lydia Kennard is returning, so I haven't really established relationships with her yet, but I will.

In the case of the DWP, I mentioned that economic development cabinet and DWP actually sends a representative to those meetings and is a part of that dialogue. And, I have met with Ron Deaton and the head of the business team and talked about how to we integrate our efforts with the LADWP efforts. They not only have a team devoted to economic development but they have a budget specifically for economic development within their department and they are, you're absolutely right, a 900-pound gorilla when it comes to economic development. All three of those are so we have very good relationships with two of them, the DWP and the port, and we'll be reaching out and doing more of that with the airport now that Lydia Kennard's on board.

Hand-in-hand with economic development and job growth is a city's quality of life and the buildingof healthy neighborhoods. Based on your experience in redevelopment, how does LA both encourage job growth and more housing, parks and school facilities that serve the needs of our children and their families?

Very closely, because, whether it was in this office or the CRA or any of the cities where I've managed, I've always said that we're not in the business of building buildings, we're in the business of building neighborhoods. We should never look upon redevelopment as an end unto itself. It is simply a tool to help implement good planning, and good planning means that you build nothing smaller than a neighborhood. Neighborhoods have jobs. They have housing. They have parks. They have schools. They have libraries. I care as much about the building of schools in our neighborhoods as I do about building jobs and building housing.

I know that sometimes conflicts arise when you have limited land, and parks are competing for that land, housing is competing for that land, schools are competing for that land, and jobs are competing for that land. So, inherently in a fully developed area there are going to be conflicts, but I think that the mayor espouses – and I agree with this notion – that smart people can sit down and work together and figure it out. You need schools. You need parks. You need jobs. You need housing. You need all of those things to make a neighborhood a neighborhood. So, we just have to look at it that way and think about it as part of a whole and work together to figure out how to treat that balance.

Are public funding streams and fed/state/city rules and regulations properly fashioned to encourage that interagency/inter departmental collaboration, or do we need to change some of those rules and regulations and funding streams to better incentivize joint use and service cooperation?

Fortunately we're in a strong economy so each year for the last several years has been better than it was before. So, we're not in a cut-back mentality right now. We are in a growth economy, and that's a good thing. But, that having been said, the structure of local government finance is still fundamentally dysfunctional because it rewards cities for big box retails like K-Marts, Wal-Marts, and the like and doesn't reward enough for creating jobs.

So I guess the answer is kind of two-fold. We're not in the desperate straits that we were in a few years ago. But the fundamental system of local government finance is still dysfunctional and one of the areas that I think we're going to have to look at is whether the mayor in his statewide leadership role can provide some leadership in that area. It's not a day-one priority but I think it's something we're going to have to look to sometime during this first term.