Austin Beutner, a Pacific Palisades resident and candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, spoke at a breakfast meeting of the Corpus Christi Business Network Group last Thursday, and said he believes the city’s problems can be solved by stripping away bureaucracy and cutting taxes. Dubbed the ‘jobs czar,’ Beutner served as the city’s first deputy mayor and chief executive for economic and business policy from January 2010 until May of this year and said jobs can be created if the city does its part to attract business. He views the city’s gross-receipts tax as a major barrier to businesses. ‘Every business pays a portion of its top line to the city. That’s why business leaves Los Angeles when it can. That’s why business does not move to Los Angeles to start here,’ Beutner said at the Oak Room on Swarthmore. While working for the city, he instituted a gross receipts tax holiday for new businesses moving in, which he says was responsible for convincing Google to move 800 jobs to Venice and architectural firm Gensler to move 250 jobs downtown. He said city staffers had been studying the idea of a tax holiday for two years when he called experts at USC and UCLA to get their research and sat down with polarized members of the Los Angeles City Council to discuss a plan. A tax break was passed in just 45 days after he took on the project. Beutner bills himself as the ‘unpolitician,’ repeatedly citing his lack of experience in the public sector as an asset. His father was an engineer and his mother was a public school teacher, and while Beutner was growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he says the family’s focus was simple. ’We talked about school and we talked about where we were going to find work,’ he said. ‘Not the consumer economy, not what we might do on vacation.’ He worked a variety of small jobs to put help himself through college and graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in economics. Since then, he has enjoyed great success in business. He was named the then-youngest partner, 29, at Blackstone, a leading private equity firm, and later co-founded Evercore, an investment banking advisory firm, with Roger Altman (deputy treasury secretary under President Clinton). Beutner has some history in public service, having worked for the Clinton State Department in Russia in the mid-1990s. He and his wife, Virginia, have given back to the community through their philanthropy and personal involvement, much of which has focused on the arts. Beutner serves as chairman of the Board of Trustees of CalArts and the board of the Broad Stage and co-chairs the CalArts Community Arts Partnership. When Beutner fell and broke his neck while biking in the Santa Monica Mountains in 2007, his long recovery led him to change course. He retired from Evercore and later took the job working for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for an annual salary of $1. Explaining his choice to the Corpus Christi group, Beutner said: ‘For me, this is mostly about kids. Kids in our [city] who can’t find that same opportunity for an education and a job that many of us have benefited from.’ (The candidate and his wife have four children of their own, ranging in age from 8 to 15.) In his 15 months as first deputy mayor, he found ‘a city that’s forgotten that city government is to serve the needs of its constituents, its customers.’ And just like the private sector, Beutner says, if government doesn’t serve its customers, they will leave. He took on projects ranging from halving the time needed to permit restaurants to persuading more auto dealers to open up shop in the city. Beutner uses the dealerships to illustrate his point about cutting red tape. Dealerships are the number-one source of sales-tax revenues, he said, yet the city hadn’t opened a new one in more than 25 years at the time he joined the staff. One obstacle was a concern about finding trained entry-level service technicians. Beutner encouraged community colleges to change their curriculum to create classes that would prepare students for jobs at dealerships. That ultimately helped pave the way for two new dealerships to open in the city. ’It shows what can happen when we listen to the needs of constituents and we take the resources we already have and use them sensibly,’ Beutner said. He believes that current estimates of 12- to 13-percent unemployment in the city grossly understate the reality, which he says he believes is ‘close to 20 percent,’ when those who are underemployed or have given up are considered. ‘That’s a five-alarm fire.’ Beutner draws an unsettling comparison with Detroit, which was once a vibrant city and has since lost roughly half of its population and serves as an example of urban blight. ’That does not have to be Los Angeles, but we’re on the cusp,’ he warned, though he immediately followed by listing all the advantages this ‘most diverse big city in the country’ has to offer, from some of the best American universities to critical trade links with Asia and Latin America. To avoid losing those assets, Beutner said, Angelenos need to engage and make a difference in the city where they live. Pointing out that there was only about 10-percent turnout for the last City Council election, Beutner said that one of the ways people can engage is by voting. The mayoral election is nonpartisan, which suits Beutner just fine’as a voter, he declines to state any political affiliation. He says he’s a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. He has raised $405,034 in campaign funds as of June 30, but will need a great deal more to battle opponents with significant name recognition, including Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti (who had not yet filed as of June 30) and City Controller Wendy Greuel (who had raised $518,992 by the same date). Results of a recent poll by political consultant Harvey Englander published November 8 by L.A. Weekly showed Garcetti, Greuel and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky running close together and well ahead of Beutner and Councilwoman Jan Perry (who had raised $456,809 as of June 30). Yaroslavsky has yet to declare his candidacy, but there is widespread speculation that he will run. Endorsements also matter, and Beutner was almost immediately embraced by former Mayor Richard Riordan when he announced his candidacy. ’Beutner means jobs,’ Riordan told the Daily News in April. ‘He is the right person at the right time with the right experience for the job.’ The Corpus Christi Business Network Group breakfast meetings are open to the public. The group will hold an evening event with a distinguished financial panel of experts from AllianceBerstein, Merrill Lynch, SunTrust and UBS on January 12 at the Corpus Christi auditorium.
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