Hey Los Angeles, Try Keeping Films In House, Before Stealing The Vikings

While Minnesota Vikings fans are understandably nervous about losing their football team to Los Angeles, lets remember that getting a new stadium built in LA is far from a done deal.

Even though the city power brokers have managed to grease the skids on the ultra tough environmental rules in the Golden State for this project, until I see cranes putting the scoreboard in place, I won't believe anything.

And if you want to know how completely effed up Los Angeles and California are when it comes to their enviro laws, consider this: the FILM INDUSTRY has lost almost HALF of its work to other locations in the last 15 years!

From Koel Kotkin's piece in Forbes about the LA stadium push...

LA’s leaders should therefore focus on the systematic causes for the region’s ailing economy. 

One source of the problem lies in tough environmental rules that, although lifted on behalf of football, clamp on growth of virtually every other industry, including the city’s port and manufacturing sector. Powerful green interests, for example, make any plan to modernize the port all but impossible. This could prove catastrophic when the widening of the Panama Canal will allow aggressive, cheaper posts in the Gulf or Southeast U.S. to compete with the Pacific Asian trade that has driven LA’s port economy for decades. 

Los Angeles’ huge industrial sector has also been a victim of the regulatory tsunami. 

Manufacturers have lost roughly one-third of their jobs over the past decade as firms head out to more congenial regions with less onerous regulatory burdens. Sadly, Los Angeles has benefited little from the recent upsurge in manufacturing nationwidewhen compared with metropolitan areas such as Detroit, Salt Lake City and San Antonio. 

Even Hollywood, an industry less affected by green regulations, has begun to lose steam. Film production has dropped by more than half over the past 15 years. LA’s share of film and television production has eroded as well, with much of the new work headed to Toronto, New Mexico, New Orleans, New York and Atlanta. All these cities offer richer incentives to attract productions than the world’s self-proclaimed “entertainment capital."