It looks like Chamber President Ezunial “Eze” Burts’ position at the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce was not so permanent after all.

Five weeks after new Chamber Chairman Charles Woo told the Business Journal that “Eze Burts is the president and no replacement is being considered,” Burts submitted his resignation from the post, effective March 30.

Woo is now heading up the effort to find an interim replacement for Burts and said last week that he expects that search to wrap up in the next couple of weeks. Finding a permanent replacement will involve a national search and will likely take several months.

Both Burts and Woo maintain that it was Burts who initiated the move to resign, after four years at the chamber’s helm. Woo last week said Burts came to him in mid-January and told him he was planning to step down, that “the timing was right,” in Burts’ own words. Burts had always maintained that he did not want to spend more than four or five years at the chamber helm.

“I always understood that he would leave, either in my term or in the term of my successor (PDQ Personnel Services Inc. Chief Executive Patty DeDominic) in 2002,” Woo said. “I just didn’t expect it would happen so soon.”

For his part, Burts said now was the right time to step aside. He said he accomplished three of his main goals: stabilizing the chamber’s finances, making the chamber a more powerful voice in the community and bringing new segments of L.A. business under the chamber tent.

“Having accomplished these things, I felt it was the right time to step aside and look at other career opportunities,” Burts said.

While Woo acknowledged that some members of the board were not pleased with the direction of the chamber under Burts, he flatly denied that there was any pressure put on him to step down.

“This was his decision and his alone,” Woo said.

Power Poaching

When the state Legislature passed electricity deregulation four years ago, the big fear of municipal utilities was that investor-owned utilities and independent power generators would come in and poach their biggest customers.

Now the tables have turned. Cities bordering municipal utilities, like West Hollywood, are looking to get out from under investor-owned utilities Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric and escape from the prospect of rolling blackouts and rising rates. They want to either sign up with municipal utilities or form their own power units. And they are pushing hard for legislation by state Sen. Richard Alarcon, D-Van Nuys, that would make it easier for them to sign up with a municipal utility.

Alarcon’s bill, SB1x-8, essentially would remove some of the state-imposed barriers on cities seeking to escape the clutches of Edison and PG & E.; Specifically, it would delete the requirement that municipal utilities seeking to serve retail customers of another utility obtain the consent of that utility. In other words, if Alarcon’s bill passes, the DWP would no longer have to get approval from Edison to serve West Hollywood.

“The bill is about freedom of choice for cities,” said Steve Svonkin, chief of staff for state Assemblyman Paul Koretz, who serves the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills area.

When Alarcon introduced his bill on Jan. 18, many Sacramento watchers pronounced it dead on arrival because they expected heavy opposition from Edison and PG & E;, which didn’t want to see their customer bases shrink. But the two utilities have so far stayed silent.

Indeed, Edison declined to comment last week. Spokesman Gil Alexander said the utility was preoccupied with the massive utility rescue bill being considered by the Legislature.

But Svonkin suggests the utilities have stayed mum on the issue because it would appear unseemly for them to cry bankruptcy on the one hand and on the other hand try to block attempts to relieve their electricity service load.

“It would seem terribly self-serving if they lobbied against it,” he said.

With the utilities silent on the Alarcon bill, there is little organized opposition, which means it stands a good chance of passing the Legislature.

Tax Bill on Hold

With state legislators now focused full-time on fixing the state’s power crisis, other legislation has fallen by the wayside, including a bill long sought by L.A. city and business officials to make it easier to go after business tax scofflaws.

The legislation would provide the linchpin for reforms that would lower business taxes and simplify the tax code in the city.

The bill, AB 63 by Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, would make state Franchise Tax Board income tax data available to cities so that city officials could track down tax scofflaws. A similar bill by Cedillo died in the confusion of the closing minutes of last year’s legislative session, which was a bitter disappointment to city and business lobbyists that thought it would be a shoe-in.

Cedillo reintroduced the bill when the new session opened in December, promising swift passage, before the budget process got under way. He was pushing for the bill to be heard late last month.

But the power crisis forced legislative leaders to postpone other business for several weeks; Cedillo’s bill is now not scheduled to be heard until mid-March, at the earliest. As a result, a Cedillo staffer said it is not likely to win passage before late August, putting it right back in that last-minute crunch situation that backers had sought to avoid this time.

“It’s not going to be fast-tracked this time,” said one local lobbyist pushing for the bill.

And that pretty much wipes out any chance of significant business tax cuts or code simplification before Mayor Richard Riordan leaves office June 30. It will likely to fall to the next mayor and the next council to pick up the issue.

Staff reporter Howard Fine can be reached by phone at (323) 549-5225, ext. 227, or by e-mail at [email protected].