Tomas O’Grady’s mantra is: “Streamline, streamline, streamline,” Los Feliz Ledger reports about doing business in LA
RELATED POST = The gross receipts tax decrease and the minimum wage increase. You can’t have one without the other.
Los Feliz Ledger | November 28 2014 | Los Angeles
Tomas O’Grady’s mantra is: “Streamline, streamline, streamline,” and in this case, he said, is key to helping new businesses in Los Angeles.
O’Grady spoke of his own experiences as a public education advocate that have shown him, first hand, the issues in dealing with the city to get things done. As a result, he has a few solutions he would offer if elected.
With his nonprofit EnrichLA, which builds gardens in public schools, O’Grady said it’s “really sad” that so much time is spent dealing with the city’s bureaucracy which gives him and his staffers less time to actually doing their work.
Working as a volunteer with Silver Lake’s Thomas Starr King Middle School, he said, he saw more successes working with the school once a number of administrative positions were eliminated due to budget cuts.
“I think it’s because of that, not despite it, that the channels of getting things done were made simpler. I reported as a volunteer directly to the principal. There wasn’t multiple channels to deal with and it meant we got more stuff done [and] we got it done faster.”
O’Grady said getting government out of peoples’ ways is another key to progress in the city. But doing that is not as simple as just cutting jobs. The process must be improved, he said.
Simplifying the permitting process is critical, he said, and can be done so just by presenting information to applicants in a convenient way. For a new restaurant, for instance, there should be a single packet with all the required city permit applications. O’Grady said he will have that ready “from day one in office,” and that it will be available electronically, to “help applicants. . . get [their] businesses open faster.”
The current process is ludicrous, said O’Grady, often forcing business owners to hire an “expeditor.”
“You need to hire someone to take your hand and walk you through the bureaucracy,” he said. “It’s almost laughable, like the end of the Roman Empire.” “This is what we’ve become? We’ve built such a massive bureaucracy, now we have to hire somebody to walk us through the bureaucracy.”
O’Grady said, if elected, his council office would be technologically superior to any other and will be one that leads by example. Staff would be equipped with touch pads to log constituent complaints with a routing app that would direct them instantly to the person, or department, to fix it.
But that’s only step one, he said. He said he will also work to overhaul the entire system.
“I will figure out why it is the constituent had to come to me in the first place,” he said. “I should not be involved. It is a waste of taxpayer money for the council office to be even picking up the phone to call about a repair or a complaint or a pothole. Every time I get a complaint I will both fix the complaint and will also fix the reason why the complaint came to my office to begin with, because [the caller wasn’t] getting service from the office that was supposed to deliver it.”
O’Grady blamed the system, rather than individuals, for Los Angeles’ burdensome business bureaucracy.
The health inspector, for instance, does not want dealing with him to be confusing. “They don’t want to be the bad guy,” O’Grady said. “They are not conspiratorial in creating this sort of mess.”
But so far, the city’s leadership, he said, has not been inquisitive enough or interested enough to affect change and streamline the process.
Under O’Grady, the CD4 office would run off pilot programs, he said, so their mistakes would be contained and successes would be proven before applying them citywide.
O’Grady additionally railed against the city’s business tax, quoting an unknown constituent during the 2013 mayoral election, as saying, “There’s only two people who can take money off the top: the mob and the city.”
Sentiments such as this, have led to businesses moving to neighboring cities such as Glendale, Santa Monica and Burbank, he said, simply to avoid Los Angeles’ business tax.
O’Grady said it needs to be eliminated but it can’t because the city has become “addicted to the cash.”
“They need to pay for [for their own] bureaucracy,” he said.
The only solution, O’Grady said, is reducing the costs of services the city delivers so that it can do without that tax. Today, he said, he wouldn’t vote, as a councilmember, to get rid of the tax because that would only reduce city services.
A plan must be put in place, he said, “to deliver services at a lower cost, and therefore we can start to phase [the business tax] out.”
O’Grady also criticized the city’s “minimum wage debacle,” as he called it, where Mayor Eric Garcetti has proposed the city gradually raise the minimum wage from the current $9 an hour to $13.25 by 2017.
“That’s a group of politicians who, for years, have made it confusing and difficult for people to open up businesses to create good paying jobs,” he said. “They are complicit in this, it’s not the businesses’ fault.”
O’Grady blamed Garcetti and the city council that is exploring this option for not helping local schools better educate students to make “real wages” and continuing a “system of unsustainable economic practices” while continuing to require the gross receipts tax on these businesses.
“And [city leaders] have the gall to congratulate themselves for telling businesses to dig deeper into their pockets to pay for a greater minimum wage,” he said.
If the city were rewarding businesses for raising minimum wages by eliminating their gross receipt tax, O’Grady said, then it would be a fair demand. As it is, he said, the city is only “passing the buck” on the problem.
“I am vehemently against any minimum wage increase that is not joined at the hip with an equivalent reform of the city bureaucracy and a reform of the mob-like gross receipts tax,” he said. “You’re not helping [workers], all you did is tell the businesses to pay them more. You need to help the businesses to pay them more. Stop taxing the businesses so the businesses can pay their workers more.”
While running his non-profit, O’Grady said every day he sees the necessity for efficient finance management. Every dollar wasted, is one less dollar that won’t be spent on EnrichLA’s mission.
“I get it,” he said. “I haven’t developed any bad habits that people in government have developed. I never say—ever—’It can’t be done.’ I’ve run into lots of obstacles and I always say [they’re] not acceptable. I want a solution.”
