California Inc.: Seeking cleaner air for SoCal, battling Pokémon

By David Lazarus

Aug. 15, 2016 3 AM PT

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section.

I’m Business columnist David Lazarus, and here’s a rundown of upcoming stories this week and the highlights of last week.

The latest shot across the economy’s bow: Consumers, accounting for about two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, eased up on spending last month. Retail sales in July were flat compared with those of the previous month, the Commerce Department said Friday. The report ended three straight months of gains, although June was revised up slightly to 0.8%, from 0.6%.

LOOKING AHEAD

Water and power: Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power will get a new leader Wednesday, albeit a temporary one. DWP Chief Operating Officer David Wright will take over as general manager on an interim basis after the departure of Marcie Edwards, whose last day is Tuesday. Wright has 27 years of experience working for public utilities. In two and a half years in the job, Edwards steered the agency through the difficult aftermath of its botched rollout of a new billing system but had less success in making the department more responsive to ratepayers.

PCH plans: Long Beach residents will get a closer look Thursday at a plan that could pave the way for development of one of the city’s busiest and most important crossroads. The Long Beach Planning Commission will hold a public study session on proposed zoning changes at Pacific Coast Highway and 2nd Street. The plan could lead to new residential units, shops and taller buildings, but also would protect portions of the Los Cerritos Wetlands. Previous efforts to build condo towers and other developments at the site have been opposed by residents.

Clean air: Thursday is the deadline for the public to submit comments on a plan to use more incentives, and fewer regulations, to control Southern California air pollution. The industry-friendly proposal by the South Coast Air Quality Management District would rely on finding billions in incentive funds to encourage people and businesses to voluntarily transition to lower-polluting cars, trucks and equipment. Environmentalists have criticized the plan, saying it lacks funding and enforcement mechanisms and would shift financial responsibility for cleaning the air toward taxpayers and away from polluting industries.

New stock exchange: The Investors Exchange, or IEX, will become the nation’s newest stock exchange on Friday. IEX, which was featured prominently in author Michael Lewis’ 2014 book “Flash Boys” and was backed by Los Angeles money management firm Capital Group, has functioned as a private trading market for the past two years. It now will become a full-fledged public market about two months after receiving SEC approval. The new exchange aims to take away advantages held by high-speed traders, which IEX’s founders and many others on Wall Street say enrich those traders at the expense of ordinary investors.

Pikachupalooza: Around 500 competitors from 35 countries are expected to gather in San Francisco beginning Friday for the three-day Pokémon World Championships. Players will vie for titles in video games and trading card competitions. This will be the first Pokémon championship since the release of “Pokémon Go,” the breakout app that is making big bucks for Niantic, the small San Francisco gaming start-up that developed the mobile game. The renewed surge in Pokémon and all things Pikachu has at least one downside: Unlike in past years, this year’s championships will be closed to the public. Organizers cited “limited venue capacity.”

THE AGENDA

Monday’s Business section walks a mile in the shoes of a TSA screener. The starting pay is about $34,000 a year with no automatic pay raises. They are on the front line in the battle against terrorism but don’t carry a gun. Their employer is the punchline of jokes on late-night television. Now, with U.S. airports handling record crowds this summer, there is a push by airlines and federal lawmakers to improve morale and reduce the high turnover rate among the nation’s more than 42,500 screeners to ensure security lines are well-staffed during peak travel periods.

STORY LINES

Here are some of the other stories that ran in the Times Business section in recent days that we’re continuing to follow:

Retirement accounts: An investment industry trade group is trying to kill a California bill that would make retirement savings accounts an almost universal benefit for workers in the state, saying that plan will be more expensive than lawmakers anticipate. In a letter sent to Gov. Jerry Brown, Washington trade group Investment Company Institute laid out a bevy of arguments against the retirement proposal and essentially asked Brown to veto legislation that, if approved, would create the new program.

Queen Mary makeover: The city of Long Beach and a local developer revealed a privately financed $15-million makeover of the Queen Mary. Los Angeles developer Urban Commons — which took over a long-term lease for the city-owned ship and adjacent land earlier this year — said it wants to give the ship the luxuries of a boutique hotel, while preserving the feel and touches of a “bygone era.”

Retail woes: Macy’s said it will close about 100 of its full-line stores next year — some 15% of its base — as the struggling retailer grapples with rapid changes in people’s buying habits. The company said the locations of the closed stores would be announced at a later date. It would not say whether the closures would include any of its 127 stores in California. Most of the closures will occur early next year and involve job cuts, Macy’s said.

Delta outage: Last week’s systemwide computer outage at Delta Air Lines caused the cancellation of more than 2,100 flights and the delay of many more. Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded around the globe as the ripples spread from Delta’s Atlanta hub. The carrier initially blamed the problems on a power outage by the Atlanta utility company but later said it was the result of an internal outage followed by the failure of a backup system to take over when the main computer system failed.

Huffington heads out: Arianna Huffington, whose first job in media was as founder of the Huffington Post, is resigning as editor-in-chief of the site. The mogul, 66, said in a letter to staff that she was leaving to work full time on Thrive Global, a wellness start-up she founded. One other reason Huffington may be stepping down is that her role at the company, and its future, are less certain. Verizon purchased AOL, the Huffington Post’s parent company, for $4.4 billion last year.

WHAT WE’RE READING

And some recent stories from other publications that caught our eye:

Drinking deep: Mother Jones serves up an attention-getting headline: “Meet the California couple who uses more water than every home in Los Angeles combined.” This would be Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the Beverly Hills power duo behind Fiji Water and Pom Wonderful.

Lasting scars: An observation from the Wall Street Journal: “Wage and income gains in the U.S. have improved significantly since the last presidential election, yet voters remain deeply unhappy.” This, it says, “underscores the scars and anxieties that remain” since the recession.

A beautiful thing: Fast Company looks at how Richelieu Dennis, founder and CEO of Sundial Brands, is bringing multiculturalism to the beauty aisle. “The brand has come a long way from 25 years ago, when Dennis was living in New York City and hawking shea-butter shampoos by the pound on the streets of Harlem.”

Driving on Autopilot: We’ve heard that Tesla’s Autopilot feature can be dangerous. However, a Bloomberg writer drove for eight hours on Autopilot. His finding? “When the conditions are right, Autopilot unburdens us of the most tedious tasks of driving.”

FirstSevenJobs: A nice piece from the Atlantic on the meme du jour — #FirstSevenJobs. “What is compelling about this snapshot of career trajectories is that it, by nature, emphasizes a career as a journey and not necessarily the logical result of a blinkered, do what you love mantra.”

SPARE CHANGE

Needless to say, the Internet is spilling over with young people discussing first jobs (and discovering that working is, like, work). Such as this one, and this one, and this one. Maybe they should watch this motivational gem from our friends at Chevrolet.

For the latest money news, go to www.latimes.com/business. Until next time, I’ll see you in the Business section.