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Year:
By Mayor Kelly McDowell
Welcome, everyone.
Welcome to El Segundo--the Most Business-Friendly City in Los Angeles County!
Not bad for a 90-year-old!
Celebrating the city's 90th birthday on January 18 is how we started this year.
I want to start off with especial thanks to the long-time residents of our city who took part in that celebration--and most especially the 14 people 90 years of age and older who were there, including Loren Hilliard, who turned 101 in March.
I know this because I got to go to his birthday party for the second straight year--and he is as sharp as ever.
I'm sad, though, that John Gaines is no longer with us to be part of all that's going on in the city of El Segundo.
It is tough--awfully tough--to lose a colleague and close friend--and now two compatriots from the 1998 council are gone.
But if John were here I'm certain that he would tell me to stop being a crybaby and get on with the program--and so I will.
This city was essentially founded by a business--Chevron's predecessor, Standard Oil.
Times have changed, but business has just gotten better.
Today El Segundo is booming--there's just no other way to put it.
By almost any measure, our city is busier than it has ever been.
We thought we were busy last year.
And we were.
The momentum that our business community regained back in 2005 accelerated dramatically in 2006 and is moving even faster in 2007, as the pace of commercial activity here approaches warp speed--which is appropriate for the aerospace capital of the world.
El Segundo has welcomed a slew of new companies into our community since we gathered here last, many of them choosing our city for their headquarters operations.
Tesco USA opened their U.S. headquarters in El Segundo, becoming the first major retail firm with their head offices in our city.
They are no small source of pride for us and we are eagerly awaiting the rollout of their new American chain of Fresh and Easy neighborhood grocery stores.
Time-Warner Cable has chosen El Segundo for their Southern California operations headquarters.
The 515 employees at the new head office are busy bringing an additional 1.5 million customers in our region into the company fold as a result of Time Warner's acquisition of Adelphia Communications Corporation.
Meanwhile, cable's biggest competitor, DirecTV, whose head office has always been in our city, announced a 40% profit jump for the first quarter of 2007 under its new ownership.
We are also the new HQ for the Teledyne Controls unit of Teledyne Technologies.
That firm is moving its headquarters staff of 350 into 125,000 square feet of newly-improved office space.
COM DEV USA, a major Canadian aerospace company with long-standing ties to the El Segundo business community, is gearing up for the opening of its U.S. headquarters facility in our city.
And on June 1 EVA Airways Corporation will kick off the opening of their new America Head Office in our city.
EVA will become the third major air carrier to pick El Segundo for its headquarters, joining China Airlines and JAL.
But the good business news isn't limited to head offices.
Raytheon, long a fixture in El Segundo, is moving its Goleta, California unit to town in 2008, which will add about 225 employees to its operations.
Just last week the first F/A-18 Growler fuselage assembly rolled off the line at Northrop-Grumman, the first of 84 which the firm expects to produce in El Segundo.
Northrop has produced 1800 F/A-18 fuselages in our city since 1976.
One of El Segundo's new arrivals, 365 Main, has already filled its state-of-the-art data center on El Segundo Boulevard to capacity, serving the IT needs of business.
Discussions are underway with other industry leaders for more collocation facilities in the city to serve the information needs of major businesses here and elsewhere.
These kinds of facilities use a lot of electricity, so they contribute heavily to city revenues through the utility users tax and we are thankful for that.
The conservation efforts of El Segundo's businesses have been the primary reason that the city has reached some incredible environmental benchmarks, too.
For calendar year 2005 our city had the highest solid waste diversion rate in the state of California--81%.
That means that more than four out of every five tons of refuse from our city which was otherwise destined for landfills was either recycled or reused.
And the West Basin water district tells us that, thanks to Chevron's purchases, over two-thirds of the water used in this city is reclaimed.
If the other refineries in our region followed Chevron's example, it would free up millions of acre-feet of scarce drinking water so critically needed for household and agricultural use.
El Segundo's commercial real estate market is once again thriving.
Between 2005 and 2006 the number of building permits the city issued skyrocketed to over 2,700 and over $147 million of new construction took place in our city.
That's just one measure of our real estate success.
Thomas Properties Group, which completed its acquisition of the mammoth 46-acre site in the northeastern part of the city early last year, welcomed Mar Ventures and its 14-acre Edge development on the north portion of the property.
Construction is well underway and completion is expected within a year.
The city's new five-acre athletic field facility at the same site will be ready for play this July.
Over 1,000 kids in El Segundo participate in youth soccer programs and hundreds more are active in other sports leagues.
These new fields fulfill the city's long-standing promise to the community and are critically needed to maintain the quality of our recreation programs.
Just a few weeks ago the city licensed naming rights for the fields to Thomas Properties Group for a whopping $1.5 million, which helps to cover a big part of the facility's costs.
We are very grateful for TPG's more-than-generous contribution.
Next door to the athletic fields construction of a new firehouse will start in just nine months and design work is well underway now.
This is a project which has been in the making for a generation and it will be reality very soon.
The Xerox Centre building on El Segundo Boulevard near Sepulveda is gearing up for a full-blown, $30 million renovation, which will provide 330,000 square feet of brand-new, Class A office space for our city's growing economy.
All this activity in real property has attracted the attention of a couple of major players from outside the city.
Tishman Speyer, headquartered in New York, has bought both of the Continental Grand Plaza buildings and Snyder Partners is the new owner of the LAX Business Center at Sepulveda and Grand.
But despite all this exciting news in business and real estate, it is another project that has captured everyone's attention: the new shopping center at Rosecrans and Sepulveda.
Plaza El Segundo broke ground only a year ago.
Thanks to a breakneck construction schedule and skillful management,
Best Buy, Cost Plus, Borders Books, Chick's Sporting Goods and four other big stores opened their doors in time for Christmas shopping last year.
Since then the pace hasn't let up a bit.
Over the past couple of months more top-of-the-line stores, like Smith & Hawken, Anthropologie and Salt Creek Grille have opened for business.
Then, on April 26 it finally happened.
Whole Foods Markets opened its magnificent 67,000 square-foot monument to good gastronomy at Plaza El Segundo and immediately captured the attention of the entire South Bay.
The store is, simply, unbelievable.
If you are one of the four people in the region who haven't been inside, go!
Now!
It's a food-shopping experience unlike any other.
And the draw of Whole Foods is boosting the business of many of its shopping center neighbors to chain-wide records.
For the first time in its history, El Segundo is truly a shopping destination, thanks to Plaza El Segundo.
And there is more--much more--to come.
Richard Lundquist, Dan Crosser and their partners deserve tremendous credit for this spectacular addition to El Segundo's business community.
Meanwhile, downtown El Segundo is about to unveil a new and exciting promotional and retail recruitment campaign so that its merchants can capitalize on the flood of new shoppers into our city.
My sincere thanks to Brenda Newman, Sally Martin and Cris Bennett.
They are the downtown business owners who have worked so hard to develop the new campaign with the assistance of the city, not to mention the generous monetary contribution of Plaza El Segundo to the effort.
I think that our downtown shopkeepers are going to see business take off in the near future, thanks in large part to the efforts of this outstanding citizen team.
Right next to downtown on Grand Avenue, the brand-new Grand Park Plaza shopping center is open, fully-occupied and thriving.
This is the first commercial development that Richie Kizirian has undertaken and, with the help of El Segundo native Mike Rotolo of TG Construction, Inc., whose offices are in Smokey Hollow, Richie has made the center a success from day one.
Yes, the last year has been a great one for business.
Everyone in town, business and residents alike, has a lot to be proud of.
And none of this went unnoticed.
Certainly not by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, the nonprofit organization which helps business throughout the county and its 88 cities.
The successes of our business community is why last October El Segundo beat out four other finalist cities--all of them much, much bigger than we are--to win LAEDC's first-ever award as the Most Business-Friendly City in Los Angeles County.
It is--literally--an unprecedented honor.
And that honor belongs not just to the city itself, but to everyone in this room and everyone else in this city--businesses and residents alike.
Our business community but most of all, our residents deserve much praise for fostering a climate and culture in El Segundo that attracts and keeps companies like the ones I just mentioned.
The same quality of life that leads people to settle in our city brings business, too--and keeps it here
Low taxes, lower crime and a determination to preserve a unique way of living appeal as much to business as to our residents and the LAEDC award stands as proof.
Congratulations to everybody in El Segundo for this incredible achievement!
However, the last year hasn't been just about business.
The public sector of the city also saw some spectacular accomplishments this past year.
For starters--and thanks to a thriving business community--the city racked up a surplus for the last fiscal year of over $7 million.
And this year revenues are running 8% ahead of budget at midyear.
These great financial results mean that the city can replace the money lost when the state picked our pocket a couple of years back.
Good financial news like this also means that programs are back to full funding and city departments are fully staffed, especially public safety.
Public safety is job one in El Segundo and always will be.
This past year saw new chiefs take the helms in both the police and fire departments, which are off to great starts under their leadership.
New police chief and El Segundo native Dave Cummings--and the entire police department--can take great pride in the fact that the crime rate in our city for 2006 was the lowest it has been in 37 years.
New fire chief Kevin Smith, who has been with the department for 21 years,
presides over a leadership team that includes two new battalion chiefs, two new fire captains and two new engineers--all promoted from within.
One of our goals as a city is to be the best disaster-prepared community in the state.
Kevin and his team are an integral part of that effort, of course.
But their hard work in building our network of civilian CERT emergency volunteers in both the residential and business communities, providing emergency preparedness information to every city resident and in training all city employees in the newly-required federal emergency management system puts El Segundo ahead of almost every other community.
Disaster preparedness is essential--not just for earthquakes and other calamities of nature--but for homeland security as well.
Los Angeles Air Force Base is an essential element of homeland security and our nation's war on terrorism.
The base stands out as a lynchpin of our national security and we are so proud that it is in our city.
That is why its successes this past year are so important.
Last July marked the stand up of eleven new wings at Los Angeles Air Force Base.
Lieutenant General Mike Hamel's innovative leadership of the Space and Missile Systems Center has made the base home to nearly half the wings in the Air Force's Space Command an extraordinary achievement and yet another sign of the permanence of the base's presence in our city and the importance of space to our nation's safety.
Congratulations to General Hamel and everyone at SMC.
And congratulations again to the Air Force for reaching another milestone: fifty straight successful launches of Air Force rockets carrying satellite payloads vital to our nation's security and critical to the safety of our warfighters in the field.
Aviation developments also meant a big personnel change for Los Angeles World Airports, the agency that oversees LAX and three other airports.
I am pleased to offer the city's heartiest congratulations to Gina Marie Lindsey, whom Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa just appointed as the new LAWA Executive Director.
My colleagues and I look forward to working with her.
Over the past year we have seen a year's worth of cooperative planning efforts in partnership with LAWA and our airport neighbor allies as the historic settlement with LAX began implementation.
For the first time our city has a real voice in the airport's future a future that includes constraining its capacity to serve passengers.
The LAX settlement marked the first time in history that a major American airport has been limited in its ability to grow--and the first time an airport is required to reduce the number of passenger gates.
But there is more to be done, and I look forward to working with Ms.
Lindsey in planning the airport's future.
And I want to thank Carl Jacobson in particular for his tireless work on airport issues for many, many years.
The near-collision between two airliners on the north side of LAX just two weeks ago vividly demonstrates that Los Angeles International must be a safer airport in all respects--including insuring the safety of its neighbors.
Safety improvements include making the north side safer and reducing airplane congestion on the south side by improving facilities to the north--without adding impacts to airport neighbors.
The proposal which our city and Inglewood have prepared as part of the airport planning process shows how this can be done.
We cannot wait for a catastrophic accident to undertake this work.
The time to make all of LAX safe is now.
Without additional impacts.
The LAX settlement also means enough funding from LAWA to sound insulate every eligible house in El Segundo up to $70 million total.
Our city met its goal in 2006 to start insulation work on a house every day.
But we didn't stop there.
James O'Neill and his staff at city hall directing the residential sound insulation program managed to get contracts signed or completed for 483 homes.
I know that James is an overachiever, but this is incredible.
Congratulations to him and his entire staff.
As I said earlier, maintaining the unique quality of life in our city is essential.
Councilmen Carl Jacobson and Jim Boulgarides deserve much credit and praise for crafting and implementing a comprehensive set of changes to our zoning code to protect our R-1 residential zone.
New, mammoth houses, blocking their neighbors' light and views, are of great concern to every community on the coast.
But few cities have successfully addressed the problem.
Carl and Jim had the foresight to undertake the difficult task of making these zoning reforms while balancing the interests of homeowners and developers--and they succeeded in doing a great job.
Our quality of life in El Segundo also includes a lot of peace and quiet.
In recent years we have seen a dramatic increase in television and movie production in the city.
We are flattered that production companies pick El Segundo as a location--and the school district realizes significant revenues from filming activities.
But productions can cause adverse and unwanted impacts on residents and businesses, too.
Our city regulations covering production activities are out of date and don't account for some of these impacts.
I want to thank my colleague Bill Fisher, for working so hard with me, city staffers, community members and the state film commission to craft new rules for filming that will minimize the impacts of production on our people while permitting filming to continue in our city.
In order for our residents to enjoy our city's quality of life they have to be able to continue to live here.
But if you need help doing that, you have to leave El Segundo.
Mayor Pro Tem Eric Busch, who is in Italy on a long-delayed honeymoon, deserves special recognition for relentlessly pursuing the goal of building an assisted living facility in our city.
We will get this done.
Our growing senior population makes it essential.
Traffic threatens our quality of life, too.
That's why Public Works Director Steve Finton deserves so much credit for his patient, skillful management of the Douglas Street gap closure project.
Despite obstacles that seem to emerge with every shovelful of dirt, Steve has kept this critical project on course for completion by year's end, to be followed shortly thereafter by the return to two-way traffic on both Douglas and Nash Streets.
And he has managed this project in the midst of the most active construction period this city has ever seen.
Over the next decade our city needs to improve its aging infrastructure and make other public facility improvements, too.
That is why I asked the council to direct the preparation of a ten-year capital improvement program for our city and I thank all of them for sharing this concern.
El Segundo is a pay-as-you-go city and that philosophy has served us well.
But pay as you go requires planning.
That is why I asked the council to direct the preparation of and implement a ten-year, pay-as-you-go capital spending plan for El Segundo.
Rapidly rising construction costs and a changing economy mean that we need a roadmap laying out a careful, prudent path to maintaining and enhancing our city's infrastructure and other facilities.
I thank my colleagues for sharing this concern and for thinking ahead about our city's future.
In nearly every respect life in El Segundo is good--very good.
So I offer my thanks to my city council colleagues, a dedicated city staff, an unrivaled business community and--most of all--the people of El Segundo themselves--all 16,000 of us--for making a terrific year possible and the future bright.
Thank you all for your support and for making this city's achievements possible.
I cannot think of a job in government more rewarding or enjoyable than being mayor of this city.
Thank you again.
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