Lobbying effort derails plan for L.A. real estate tax

If Los Angeles City Council members vote Tuesday to place a sales tax hike on next year's ballot, they will have delivered a major victory to the real estate industry.

The city's top budget official spent six months laying the groundwork for a March ballot measure that would have increased the tax on real estate sales, saying it would provide much needed revenue to a city in crisis.

But two weeks ago, City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana abruptly changed course, working with council President Herb Wesson to abandon the real estate measure and push instead for a tax on retail sales, one that would generate twice as much money but also hit working-class Angelenos harder.

That shift followed furious efforts by the region's real estate lobby to kill the proposed tax on property transactions. Those groups sent mailers to voters attacking the idea. And behind the scenes, they presented city leaders with polling numbers saying voters would reject the real estate measure but handily approve a sales tax hike.

The machinations provide the latest example of special interest clout at City Hall. Last month, Councilman Ed Reyes confirmed that his strategy for developing new regulations for digital billboards was first drafted by an outdoor advertising company that is at risk of losing 79 electronic signs.

Harvey Englander, whose lobbying company represents a coalition of 10 real estate groups, said his clients were in "virtually every meeting and conversation" that his firm had with Santana on the tax plan. Those groups wanted to come up with a solution, he said, and not just be "the party of 'no.'" So they made the case that a general sales tax would do more to address the city's financial crisis while spreading the pain more evenly.

"We don't think Realtors should be the only ones to carry the burden. We think everyone should," Englander added.

Wesson unveiled his sales tax plan Oct. 30, a day before the vote to draft measures for the March 5 ballot. Advocates for working-class residents complained they were not consulted on the proposal, which would add a half-cent tax to every dollar in taxable sales.

"We have the real estate industry funding what is clearly not an unbiased third-party poll to provide cover for elected officials to do their bidding," said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival. He assailed the proposal as harmful to low-income residents.

Wesson said the sales tax hike, if approved, would provide more than twice as much money as a real estate tax measure — effectively erasing next year's $216-million budget shortfall. He offered few details about the origins of the proposal, saying he backed it after talking to people in "various political campaigns."

Asked to specifically identify them, Wesson spokesman Ed Johnson responded: "He talks to a lot of people."

Santana said it was "no secret" that he had been talking with Englander and the city's real estate groups over the last two months. But he downplayed their influence, saying the biggest factor in getting the sales tax hike on the ballot will probably be the fact that so many similar measures were approved in other cities in last week's election.

"We welcome a dialogue with anybody that wants to talk about it," he added.

Santana first recommended a real estate sales tax hike to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the council in April, as part of his three-year financial rescue plan. In that 52-page report, he called for two March ballot measures: a doubling of the tax on real estate sales and a hike in the parking tax from 10% to 15%. Together, he said, the measures would generate up to $150 million annually.

Real estate groups opposed the increase, saying it would wreak havoc in a city reeling from foreclosures and declining home values. They formed the nonprofit advocacy group Los Angeles Citizens Against Discriminatory Taxes, with Englander's firm as their representative.

At Santana's urging, the council voted in August to analyze the real estate and parking tax measures. He and Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller discarded the idea of a general sales tax increase, saying such a move could send consumers outside the city.

"People vote with their dollars," Santana told the council at the time. "And ultimately, there would be an argument made that people would simply go to Glendale or to Beverly Hills or to ... another part of the county to purchase their items."

Real estate agents kept up the pressure, sending voters more than 100,000 pieces of mail denouncing the proposal. Laura Olhasso, speaking for three real estate groups, told the council the industry had a poll showing that 70% of voters opposed the real estate tax hike after learning the money would go toward public safety, street repairs, keeping city workers employed and avoiding municipal bankruptcy.

"We'd be happy to meet with you and show it to you so you can see it yourself," she told the council.

Santana again backed the real estate tax on Oct. 17. This time, he reworked it in an attempt to win over the real estate industry, promising that the tax increases would only apply to home sales worth more than $365,000.

Real estate boards oppose that plan too, Englander said. And they responded by offering more polling data.

A second poll commissioned by the industry concluded that a sales tax hike would garner support "in the high 50s" from likely voters — a much better response than the real estate measure, Englander said. A third found 64% of likely voters favored or were leaning toward a half-cent sales tax hike, one pitched as a way to preserve public safety.

Englander said he informed Wesson and Santana of the results. With the sales tax hike now on the verge of reaching the ballot, backers will need to find someone to help run the campaign.

Asked if he would be interested in the job, Englander responded: "Absolutely."

david.zahniser@latimes.com

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The New Islamists: Tunisia Battles Over Pulpits and a Revolution’s Legacy

Moises Saman for The New York Times

Female students at the Grand Mosque in Kairouan, Tunisia, a site of anti-Western sermons.

KAIROUAN, Tunisia — On the Friday after Tunisia’s president fell, Mohamed al-Khelif mounted the pulpit of this city’s historic Grand Mosque to deliver a full-throttle attack on the country’s corrupt culture, to condemn its close ties with the West and to demand that a new constitution implement Shariah, or Islamic law.

“They’ve slaughtered Islam!” thundered Dr. Khelif, whom the ousted government had barred from preaching for 20 years. “Whoever fights Islam and implements Western plans becomes in the eyes of Western politicians a blessed leader and a reformer, even if he was the most criminal leader with the dirtiest hands.”

Mosques across Tunisia blazed with similar sermons that day and, indeed, every Friday since, in what has become the battle of the pulpit, a heated competition to define Tunisia’s religious and political identity.

Revolution freed the country’s estimated 5,000 officially sanctioned mosques from the rigid controls of the previous government, which appointed every prayer leader and issued lists of acceptable topics for their Friday sermons.

That system pushed a moderate, apolitical model of Islam that avoided confronting a dictator. When the system collapsed last year, ultraconservative Salafis seized control of up to 500 mosques by government estimates. The government, a proponent of a more temperate political Islam, says it has since wrested back control of all but 70 of the mosques, but acknowledges it has not yet routed the extremists nor thwarted their agenda.

“Before, the state suffocated religion — they controlled the imams, the sermons, the mosques,” said Sheik Tai’eb al-Ghozzi, the Friday Prayer leader at the Grand Mosque here. “Now everything is out of control — the situation is better but needs control.”

To this day, Salafi clerics like Dr. Khelif, who espouse the most puritanical, most orthodox interpretation of Islam, hammer on favorite themes that include putting Islamic law into effect immediately, veiling women, outlawing alcohol, shunning the West and joining the jihad in Syria. Democracy, they insist, is not compatible with Islam.

“If the majority is ignorant of religious instruction, then they are against God,” said Sheik Khatib al-Idrissi, 60, considered the spiritual guide of all Tunisian Salafis. “If the majority is corrupt, how can we accept them? Truth is in the governance of God.”

The battle for Tunisia’s mosques is one front in a broader struggle, as pockets of extremism take hold across the region. Freshly minted Islamic governments largely triumphed over their often fractious, secular rivals in postrevolutionary elections. But those new governments are locked in fierce, sometimes violent, competition with the more hard-line wing of the Islamic political movements over how much of the faith can mix with democracy, over the very building blocks of religious identity. That competition is especially significant in Tunisia, once the most secular of the Arab nations, with a large educated middle class and close ties to Europe.

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia, and its ability to reconcile faith and governance may well serve as a barometer for the region.

Some analysts link the assertive Tunisian Salafi movement to what they consider a worrying spread of violent extremism across North Africa — including an affiliate of Al Qaeda seizing control of northern Mali; a murderous attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya; a growing jihadi force facing Israel in the Sinai; and a mob looting an American school and parts of the United States Embassy in Tunis.

Senior government officials said the various groups share an ideology and are in contact with one another, suggesting that while they are scattered and do not coordinate their operations, they reinforce one another’s agendas. There have been several episodes of jihadists caught smuggling small arms from Libya to Mali or Algeria across Tunisia, for example, including two small trucks packed with Kalashnikovs and some manner of shoulder-fired missiles or grenades in June, said Ali Laarayedh, the interior minister.

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Tori Spelling Introduces Son Finn Davey

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

11/11/2012 at 08:00 PM ET

Michael Simon/Startraks

Meet Finn Davey McDermott!

Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott introduce their fourth child, posing inside the 10-week-old’s nursery in a set of recently released photos.

After a difficult pregnancy that included hospitalization and bedrest due to placenta previa, the actress delivered her son via c-section at 37 weeks.

“I would rub my belly and talk to Finn. I kept telling him, ‘We’re going to be fine’ and ‘I can’t wait to hold you,’” Spelling, 39, tells PEOPLE.

Now happy and healthy at home, Finn joins siblings Hattie, 13 months, Stella, 4, and Liam, 5½, as well as Jack, 14, McDermott’s son from a prior marriage.

Check back Monday, when PEOPLE.com will have an exclusive look at all of Finn’s nursery details.

Michael Simon/Startraks

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Los Angeles' new porn condom law a hot topic in the industry

For the most part, the group assembled in the Sofitel meeting room appeared classically corporate: heavy on suits and button-down shirts, wearing laminated name tags.

Hotel memo pads and pencils were placed on tables for use during panel discussions. Attendees nibbled on pain au chocolat.

Along a wall were slick trade-show banners — including one for the Sex & Mischief line of "fantasy-play accessories." It featured a black-and-white photo of a stylish woman, smiling, clad in a collar and leash.

Such was the extent of raciness on display at the industry summit hosted last week by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for adult entertainment companies.

That this was big business, not back alley, was a point alluded to often during a session on what to do about Measure B, the newly passed Los Angeles County ballot initiative requiring health permits and condom use in porn productions.

There was plenty of talk about lawsuits and of leaving for Las Vegas — of showing L.A. voters what losing 10,000 jobs would look like. One lawyer suggested moving production to another country or even out to sea on "a love boat for real."

Still, participants conceded that part of what had landed them with voter-imposed regulations they did not want and insist they do not need was their own discomfort with stepping out of the shadows and exposing the way they do business.

"All those years of being under the radar means people could walk all over us," said Diane Duke, head of the Free Speech Coalition.

Jessica Drake, a porn actress and director, floated into the summit in a black pantsuit with a deep V-necked blouse, perfect waves of blond hair cascading down her back. She came not just to talk Measure B but also to attend an evening banquet where she was to receive the coalition's Positive Image Award for a female performer. (Drake is about to visit Haiti, not for the first time. She said she works with a charity but declined to name it for fear of giving it negative publicity.)

She has worked for Wicked Pictures for 10 years. Drake directs as many as eight movies a year and stars in seven more. She described her most recent vehicle, "$ex," as a "futuristic story about the collapse of the financial system" in which she plays Annika, a high-priced call girl with a laser-scannable bar code on her wrist. Most of what Wicked produces is plot-driven, she said, featuring sex that "means something."

Wicked has a 100% condom-only policy. But other companies — whether they use condoms or not, Drake said — follow the industry standard of requiring performers to be tested every 14 to 28 days for HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis.

"I'm so clean, I squeak," said porn star Kylie Ireland of her 17 years of tests for about 480 films. (She now also does production design, and said the "big thing" is "superhero porn" such as "Avengers XXX" and "Iron Man XXX.")

Measure B's enforcement details still have to be worked out, although some producers said the cost of the permit fees, which will pay for the inspections, will break them.

Also worrisome, they said, were requirements that any producer of adult films take a blood-borne pathogen training course and submit an "exposure control plan."

Measure B repeatedly references the state's regulations for occupational exposure to blood and other potentially infectious materials, which include requirements that employers provide "protective equipment."

Ireland and others painted a picture of porn stars decked out in goggles and gloves. That might work for a "Blade Runner"-style plot but not for most of what they produce, they said.

Ireland, a curvaceous redhead, put it this way: "It's going to make it so it's impossible for us to make the kind of porn that you want to watch."

nita.lelyveld@latimes.com

Follow Lelyveld's City Beat on Twitter @latimescitybeat or on Facebook at Los Angeles Times City Beat.

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