Ed Roski Jr. and his entourage will watch the Super Bowl from a club box on the 40-yard line at Sun Life Stadium in Miami, while millions of the rest of us gather in front of television sets with our chips and beer.
A billionaire real estate mogul, Roski has spent 14 years seeking admission into the rich man’s club that is the National Football League. He is close to his goal of fielding an NFL team in the Los Angeles area, thanks to a pliant Legislature and governor.
As the football season began last fall, Roski tapped Assemblyman Isadore Hall, a Democrat from Compton, to carry an extraordinary bill that ultimately swept aside a lawsuit that blocked him from building an 80,000-seat football stadium in the City of Industry.
Roski’s end run was the latest chapter in a power-politics story that stretches back decades. The City of Industry, 20 miles east of Los Angeles, is a mere 12 square miles. But it has a colorful and sordid history, and plays far larger than its size in Sacramento.
The episode points to a deeper issue: today’s term-limited legislators and celebrity governor, unfettered by a sense of history or precedent, do the bidding of moneyed interests, while those patrons become ever bolder.
Environmental law regularly is invoked to slow hospitals, housing, even levees that might avert floods. But pro football? Legislators become enthralled by professional sports and, perhaps, of more campaign money.
Since Oct. 22, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law, Roski’s privately held Majestic Realty has spread around $502,450 to California politicians and their causes. Beneficiaries and benefactors say, as always, that the money is coincidence and has no influence on policy-makers.
Of course.
Majestic, among the nation’s largest property owners, gave $10,000 three weeks ago to Schwarzenegger, pushing the total from Majestic to the governor’s committees to $111,000 since 2003. Majestic Realty has given $3.2 million altogether to California politicians and their causes since 2000.
The bill, AB81 X3, was nothing other than a piece of special-interest legislation sponsored by Majestic Realty for Majestic Realty, and endorsed by the City of Industry.
Roski hopes to bring a team to Los Angeles next year and have a stadium built by 2013. Whether all of that happens, Hall’s bill did end a lawsuit by residents of a neighboring city who demanded further environmental study.
The bill did more than halt the litigation. It exempted the project from future lawsuits over the California Environmental Quality Act. State land-use planning laws do not apply to this project.
Majestic’s lobbyists straight-armed several opponents, including Los Angeles County, which opposed it because officials are no longer sure they can enforce basic public works requirements on the project.
Under normal circumstances, a bill touching on such topics might have faced hearings in legislative committees with jurisdiction over local government, the environment and the judiciary.
Majestic’s bill went through one committee in the Assembly – Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism and Internet, hardly a force in the Capitol – and no Senate committee.
Sen. Dave Cox, R-Fair Oaks, not known as a radical environmentalist, still is incensed about the Majestic bill, which passed the Senate 21-14, with five not voting.
“All the rules were bent, broken or disregarded,” Cox said.
It’s not the first time the Legislature has bent for the City of Industry. Over the decades, the city’s lobbyists have secured exemptions that have allowed the city to maintain its status as an enclave for industry, and not people.
The exemptions are arcane but significant. One, for example, exempts the city from having to provide low-cost housing within its boundaries. The city does not pretend to be a place to live; it has 800 residents and fewer than 100 voters. As its name implies, the city is devoted unabashedly to promoting industry.
The City of Industry was dubbed the City of Insiders in a 1980 investigative series in the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Those articles detailed how the city’s founder, James M. Stafford, wielded power over virtually all its affairs.
The series prompted a federal investigation that led to Stafford’s indictment in a kickback case. Stafford pleaded guilty in 1984, served three years in prison and died in 2001.
City of Industry’s past is all but forgotten in these term-limited days when institutional memory is vague at best.
“I was graduating from sixth grade,” Hall said, when I asked if he knew anything about the fall of the city’s founder.
“As far as history, I’m not that locked in,” said Assemblyman Curt Hagman, a Republican who represents City of Industry and supported the bill.
Back in 1984, Victor Valle was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, as was I. We teamed up on stories about Stafford’s indictment, and about the clout the city wielded in Sacramento.
I moved on, but Valle, who became an ethnic studies professor at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, stuck with the story, ultimately producing a book published last year, “City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California.”
Roski was not implicated in Stafford’s criminal wrongdoing. But Valle detailed Stafford and Roski’s friendship and business relationship, writing that Roski “inherited his mentor’s influence in the city.”
“That’s why I wrote it, so people would remember,” Valle told me by phone.
Then as now, Majestic Realty enjoyed a place of prominence in City of Industry, where it has extensive holdings, including warehouses, a hotel and the hillside where Roski hopes to construct the football stadium.
To bring football to City of Industry, Roski has enlisted Maria Elena Durazo, the powerful head of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation. The two walked the Capitol halls buttonholing legislators, seeking support for the legislation and project.
Soon after Schwarzenegger signed the bill, Durazo formed a campaign committee to place an initiative on the ballot in November to alter California’s term limits. The change would permit legislators to spend 12 years in the Assembly or the Senate, rather than the current six years in the lower house and eight years in the upper house. Majestic gave $300,000 to the effort and the L.A. Labor Fed gave $100,000.
As the Saints-vs.-Colts game kicks off, John Semcken, the Majestic vice president overseeing the stadium project, will join his boss on the 40-yard line. Isadore Hall won’t be there. But he does have a souvenir for his effort – a football signed by Schwarzenegger and Roski.
Semcken said creation of the term-limit initiative committee was “coincidental” to the bill signing.
“As a company, we feel that Sacramento is broken,” Semcken said. The City of Industry is anything but dysfunctional, he said, calling it “one place in California where you can do business.”
For a few weeks last fall, Sacramento was a place to do business, too, at least for Majestic Realty.