[Carry_Okie]

Attempts by the state's home building industry to change the 1970 law, signed by former Gov. Ronald Reagan, are nothing new, but this year Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a growing list of Democrats are joining in. Key lawmakers are pushing bills to make it easier for developers to maneuver around the law, especially to build housing in downtowns and older urban neighborhoods.

Arnold knows on which side his Broad is buttered.

[calcowgirl]

http://governing.com/articles/6billion.htm 

Sugar Daddy Government
A new generation of billionaires is remaking American cities. The cities are better off; the democratic process sometimes suffers.
From Governing’s June 2004 issue
By JOHN BUNTIN

(snip)

BROAD AGENDA

Other cities exhibit similar ambivalence toward their current billionaire benefactors. Los Angeles is feeling it about Eli Broad, the city’s second-richest man, who led the homebuilders Kauffman and Broad (now KB Homes) and the annuity giant [AIG] Sun America. Broad, 71, is a native New Yorker, the son of staunchly Democratic lower-middle-class parents who, in his words, “was raised on this rhetoric of the poor workers and the big bad bosses.”

While Broad made much of his fortune building suburban tract houses, he has also made a major effort to strengthen central Los Angeles, arguing that “no city in world history has been great without a center.” In the late ’70s, he took the lead in creating the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. More recently, he stepped in to rescue the faltering downtown Disney Concert Hall project, and adjudicated a longstanding dispute between the city and Los Angeles County over development plans for Grand Avenue, a downtown boulevard that Broad is determined to transform into Los Angeles’ Champs-Elysees.

Meanwhile, Broad has used his money to alter the course of city electoral politics. Two years ago, when communities in the San Fernando Valley considered seceding from Los Angeles, he attempted to reconcile the warring camps. When that effort failed, he contributed handsomely to a successful media campaign aimed at defeating the secession movement in a referendum.

At the same time, he has emerged as an often-controversial power behind the scenes in the city’s school policy decisions. In 1999, Broad helped engineer a takeover of the L.A. school board. Along with Mayor Richard Riordan, he created a new school pressure group, the Coalition for Kids, and contributed more than $200,000 to its slate of candidates. The Coalition’s slate swept into office, defeating three incumbents. Two years later, Broad and Riordan pressured one board member to scale down a teacher salary increase, and then, when she refused, contributed to a candidate who ousted her in the next election. Broad is said to have dangled $10 million before the president of Occidental College in an unsuccessful effort to persuade him to run against another school board member.

All this involvement in local politics has generated a backlash, notwithstanding the general good feeling about Broad’s charitable efforts. Broad has become a target for criticism not only from teachers’ unions but also from the Los Angeles Times, which has published accusations that Broad profited from school board construction decisions and improperly lobbied the school board to build yet another Broad project: a fancy new arts high school downtown.