Hawthorne Press Tribune
Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 61, No. 26 - June 27, 2019
Inside
This Issue
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................7
City Council..........................3
Classifieds............................3
Entertainment......................2
Food.......................................3
Lawndale..............................4
Legals.................................6,7
Pets........................................5
Real Estate...........................8
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
Partly
Cloudy
72˚/62˚
Saturday
Partly
Cloudy
73˚/63˚
Sunday
Sunny
74˚/63˚
The Weekly Newspaper of Hawthorne
Herald Wins Business of the Year
Last week, Herald Publications CEO Heidi Maerker went to Sacramento to be honored at the State Legislature’s California Small Business Day™ 2019. From left to right, Lawndale Mayor Robert Pullen-Miles,
Assemblywoman Autumn Burke and Heidi Maerker. Herald Publications won Small Business of the Year for the 62nd Assembly District. Maerker was one of approximately 75 small business owners
honored out of 3.3 million in the State of California.
Sports Pump Up the Volume,
the Fans and the Local Economy
By Rob McCarthy
Life in the Southland is an all-you-can-eat
buffet for sports fans. Baseball lovers have
their choice of the Dodgers or the Angels. Pro
football fans who like hard-hitting action pull
for the Rams or the Chargers (or both). If pro
basketball is your jam, the Lakers and the Clippers
share the court in the L.A. sports scene.
The Lakers keep their development league
team -- formerly called the D-Fenders -- at
their team headquarters in El Segundo. The
squad is now called the South Bay Lakers.
On ice, there are the past Stanley Cup champion
Kings and the Anaheim Ducks who play
down the I-5 in Orange County. On the pitch,
the Galaxy and Los Angeles Football Club --
the LAFC, for short -- provide thrills for local
legions of soccer fans. The L.A. Sparks of the
Women’s National Basketball Association are
right in there too. Led by their All-Star forward
Candace Parker, the Sparks don’t share the city
with another WNBA team.
Ditto for the college sports scene with
the longstanding rivalry between UCLA and
USC in every sport. Loyola Marymount in
Westchester has a rich past in basketball and
baseball, and the men’s basketball program
at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson can’t
be overlooked. Interest in sports runs so high
here that one team for each sport isn’t enough.
It’s likely there is a professional or college
sporting event to attend every night of the week.
The NFL stadium being raised in Inglewood
is a source of pride for its city leaders and
residents, and an exclamation point on the
Southland’s claim to being the epicenter of
the sports and entertainment business. Where
LeBron James goes, championships follow.
“The King” didn’t get a three-peat in his L.A.
debut season and win an NBA championship
like he did is his first seasons in Miami and
back in Cleveland for a second stint. He did
command the spotlight and energized Lakers
fans waiting for another championship. Look
out, Boston with its current World Series and
Super Bowl championships: the Dodgers and the
Rams could make L.A. a dual champion soon.
Competition on a field, a court or a track is
in L.A. County’s DNA. How else to explain
why this area is the only ever to witness a
“Super Sports Phenomena?” This oh-so-rare
event occurs when each major team (think
Dodgers, Angels, Lakers, Clippers, Rams,
Chargers, Kings and Ducks) all played a game
on the same day. Even more incredibly, both
two Major League Soccer teams were in action
on the pitch that day too.
Local fans come, they cheer, they support
pro sports to the tune of $4.5 billion, according
to newly released data from a team of
economists who studied the fiscal impact of
pro and college teams in Greater Los Angeles.
Unlike other cities that asked taxpayers to foot
the bill for new stadiums, the NFL stadium
in Inglewood is privately funded and when it
opens will contribute tax dollars to the state
and local governments.
The Los Angeles Sports Council, a nonprofit
organization that encourages community
involvement in local sporting events, wanted
to know how much pro and college sporting
events contribute to the region’s economy.
The council recruited the applied economic
data team with the Los Angeles Economic
Development Corporation to crunch the spending
numbers from 2018. The team looked at
full- and part-time employment, direct spending
by the teams, their vendors and support
industries that benefit from sporting events,
and they calculated the amount of tax revenue
collected last year.
The amount of money pumped into the local
economy because of pro and college sports in
2018 was a staggering $6.2 billion, the data
showed. That figure includes direct spending
by the teams to vendors and wages paid to
employees. Workers were hired for 39,100
jobs at the stadiums, outside in parking lots,
at ticket offices and off-site with the vendors
and suppliers, the L.A.-based economists
discovered. The majority of workers in this
entertainment field are team players: 22,600
are directly hired by the teams and events.
Those team jobs, including staffing for the
Bruins and Trojans home games, generated
more than $3 billion in wages across the L.A.
metro area. Another $327 million in taxes was
distributed to local governments. The South
Bay cities of El Segundo (Lakers and Kings),
Carson (home field to the NFL Chargers and
the MLS’ the Galaxy and Los Angeles Football
Club), and Playa Vista (the Clippers) are in
better financial standing because of their teams.
The professional sports create a higher tax
revenue stream than the local colleges do,
the LAEDC team reported. Pumping nearly
$250 million into state and local government
coffers, the pros are a significant contributor
to budgets for local schools, parks and public
works projects. That stream of tax dollars is
only expected to grow starting next year when
the Rams and Chargers move into the new,
gleaming NFL stadium at Hollywood Park.
See Local Economy, page 4