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Governor Brown Signs Bill To Expedite Stadium Build

By Sara Ramsey
September 28, 2011
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Photo via Neon Tommy
Photo via Neon Tommy

"There are too many damn regulations," Governor Jerry Brown said Tuesday on the steps of the L.A. Convention Center. And so he signed Senate Bill 292, a measure focused on "cutting red tape all over the state."

SB 292 will help streamline the building process of Farmers Field, allowing legal challenges to go directly to the California Court of Appeal for decision within 175 days. The measure is meant to protect AEG from long-drawn-out litigation.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said that although most people are excited about the prospect of bringing football back to L.A., he is more interested in the jobs that could be created and the transformation of the city of Los Angeles -- what he called "building the city of the future."

Amid the bureaucratic back-patting, hugging and cheering, it was also mentioned that of the 23,000 new jobs promised to the city, only 11,000 of them would be permanent, putting 12,000 people back amongst the unemployed.

AEG's Tim Leiweke also exclaimed to the crowd of media, politicians and high school football players, "tear it down!", in hopes of paving the way for Farmers Field while making Los Angeles one of the top convention city's in the nation. Left out of those remarks are that new plans for the convention center only add about 5,000 square feet of new space to the existing space, and even top convention cities like Las Vegas have seen a decline in convention attendance.

Leiweke went on to ask the crowd to join him in convincing the NFL to make football in Los Angeles a reality.

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Sara Ramsey is a graduate student at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, which has partnered with KCET-TV to produce this blog about policy in Los Angeles.

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