Tom Skeeter and daughter Sandy Skeeter (Sound City Studio), Mike O’Donnell (Four n 20 Restaurants), Gus Valdespino (Valley Presbyterian Hospital), Dianne Harrison (CSUN), Steve Miller (Tierra del Sol Foundation).
Awards Highlight a Diverse Group of Valley Businesses
Hundreds of guests gather to honor members of education, healthcare, entertainment, restaurants and nonprofits
When Marla Clemow (Wells Fargo) kicked off the 6th Annual San Fernando Valley Business Hall of Fame, she described the event's appeal: "We love being a part of an organization like VICA, who brings us all together." More than 300 Valley business leaders were brought together at Thursday's event, presented by Wells Fargo and J.PMorgan Chase at the Sheraton Universal Hotel. In between a reception and a dinner, VICA members, elected officials and the night's emcee, NBC4 weathercaster Fritz Coleman, celebrated the five inductees joining VICA's Hall of Fame: California State University, Northridge, Four 'n 20 Restaurants, Sound City Studios, Tierra del Sol Foundation and Valley Presbyterian Hospital. The event was co-sponsored by AEG, Daily News, Jackson Shrub Supply, Northridge Hospital and Medical Center, and the San Fernando Valley Business Journal.
Please watch out for action alerts in the coming weeks and months to help VICA ensure that these important pieces of business-friendly legislation become law.
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VICA VICTORIES: Pro-Business Bills That Passed in House of Origin
Last week, the Legislature reached a major deadline in this year’s session: the last day for bills to be passed in their house of origin. For many bills, that meant the end of the road – at least for this year of the two-year session. For those survive the grueling hearing and amendment process, they will now move onto the other house – Assembly bills to the Senate and vice versa. Among the usual crop of job-killing bills that we expect from our Legislature, there were a few bright lights that made it through with a little help from VICA:
AB 12 (Cooley) Regulatory review – Requires the Department of Finance and Office of Administrative Law to annually review the economic impact of existing major regulations and to recommend legislative actions to improve the economic analysis process.
AB 37 (Perea) CEQA process – Requires the lead agency of a CEQA analysis to prepare a record of proceedings concurrently with the preparation of environmental impact documents, reduce the processing time of CEQA challenges by up to 55 days.
AB 53 (Perez) Economic development – Requires the Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development to prepare a state economic development strategic plan every two years.
AB 113 (Committee on the Budget) Business filings – Appropriates additional funds to Secretary of State's office to hire overtime and temporary workers, in order to speed processing of business filings.
AB 116 (Bocanegra) Development maps – Automatically extends the expiration date of all subdivision maps by 2 years, allowing developers more time to finalize planning without repeating the state approval process of the maps.
AB 576 (Manuel Perez) Underground economy – Creates a multiagency partnership, known as the Centralized Intelligence Partnership, to combat illegal underground economic operations, including sale of counterfeit IT and media.
AB 1309 (Perea) Workers’ compensation – Closes a loophole in our workers’ compensation system regarding retired professional athletes that is costing all employers through a surcharge on their insurance policies.
SB 12 (Corbett) Marketing of California products – Establishes the Made in California Program to foster purchases of products manufactured in California.
SB 594 (Steinberg) Workforce development – Creates incentives for corporate partnerships with schools to develop and fund career pathways programs.
SB 713 (Correa) State compliance – Affirms that employers may rely upon the written advice of a state agency regarding how to comply with a law or regulation.
SB 731 (Steinberg) CEQA reform – Enacts comprehensive reform of the California Environmental Quality Act, including: 1) expanding the infill exemption, 2) streamlining the process for several types of projects, 3) adopting thresholds of significance for certain environmental impacts, 4) streamlining the process for projects subject to a full Environmental Impact Report, 5) giving clearer instruction to trial courts, and 6) addressing document dumping.
VICA VICTORIES: Anti-Business Bills that Died this Session
VICA-opposed fees, taxes and regulations did not make it out of their house of origin
Today is the deadline for bills to make it through their house of origin in the California Legislature, and VICA is pleased to see a handful of anti-business and job-killing bills have been stalled and killed this session. These include unfair taxes and fees, unreasonable regulations on businesses and added complexities for the California Environmental Quality Act. Here is a list of VICA-opposed legislation that is currently stalled or killed:
AB 67 (Olsen) Public Postsecondary Education: Funding – Prohibits tuition increases by the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems.
AB 152 (Yamada) Unemployment: Self-Employment Assistance Program – Re-establishes a failed Self-Employment Assistance Program that waives the requirement for unemployed individuals to look for work and be available for work if they are seeking to start a business.
AB 188 (Ammiano) Split Roll Change of Ownership — Unfairly targets commercial property by redefining “change of ownership” so that such property is more frequently reassessed.
AB 1164 (Lowenthal) Inappropriate Wage Liens — Allows employees to file liens on an employer’s personal property or the property of a third party based on an alleged but unproven wage claim.
SB 622 (Monning) Targeted Tax — Threatens jobs in beverage, retail and restaurant industries by arbitrarily and unfairly targeting certain beverages for a new tax.
SB 529 (Leno) Disposable Fast-Food Container Ban — An unreasonable ban on disposable food services containers, unless restaurants and stores can meet an unreasonable recycling threshold.
SB 754 (Evans) California Environmental Quality Act – Unnecessarily complex revisions to CEQA, including: prohibiting a lead agency from asking a project proponent to draft an EIR, forcing re-analysis of projects more than seven years old, creating a new cause of action to allow anyone to stop a project by alleging that a mitigation measure has not been implemented, and removing limits on archeological resources mitigation fees.
