The outlook for a 100-acre biotech park next to USC’s Health Sciences campus appears bleak following the failure to garner key political support for the project.
Supervisor Gloria Molina, who represents the Boyle Heights neighborhood in which the park would be located, is backing a competing proposal that calls for a much smaller park. The 100-acre proposal calls for the county to move Eastlake Central Juvenile Hall.
Molina contends there isn’t the $200 million necessary to move the facility especially with the economic slowdown and energy crisis constraining state and county budgets.
Moreover, the county’s juvenile justice system is under investigation by the federal Department of Justice for substandard conditions outlined last year in a county grand jury report. The county already has cobbled together $70 million in state and local funds to renovate the Eastlake complex.
Molina made her views known through a deputy at a meeting on the proposal late last month organized by the Southern California Biomedical Council and state Sen. Richard Polanco, D-Los Angeles, who also represents the area and is an enthusiastic supporter of the 100-acre project.
In an interview last week, she repeated her opposition in her first public comments on the controversy.
“The county is willing to embrace and make a major accommodation to biotech, but not to the detriment of other priorities,” Molina said. “I don’t know why (USC) has such an unbelievably stubborn feeling about this juvenile hall.”
She added that even if the county had the money to move the facility, finding another location would be difficult. She said that with the county juvenile system overcrowded, any extra money should be spent building more facilities, not moving existing ones.
Molina’s stance creates an enormous political obstacle for the park’s supporters given the realities of the county governing process, in which members of the Board of Supervisors typically defer to their colleagues on issues that do not affect their individual districts.
Moreover, the park’s proponents still need to work with Molina on a smaller, 30-acre proposal. That project eventually could grow to 60 acres, with the juvenile jail sandwiched in between. It involves the use of private land and underutilized and surplus county property.
But Polanco and other supporters are not giving up their efforts to salvage the larger project.
He is sponsoring a bond measure in the Assembly that would set aside $400 million for improving the state’s juvenile justice system, a total Polanco said he might be able to augment. “We are going to move forward, and we are going to do everything possible to make this project a reality,” he said.
Polanco added that it also may be possible to build the larger project in phases, calling for the relocation of Eastlake in several years.
Advocates of the larger project say that while the smaller park would help relieve a shortage of wet lab space for startups and other biotech companies, a first-class biotech park could help catapult Los Angeles to a leading biotech center.
Los Angeles biotech entrepreneur Alfred Mann said it is possible to build a larger park in phases, as long as tenants knew that the juvenile jail would be moved in the long run.
But Molina said that once $70 million in taxpayer’s money is spent upgrading Eastlake, it would be absurd to think of spending another $200 million to move it.
