I met with Ishmael Trone and a friend on a warm July morning for breakfast at Russell’s in Pasadena.
Trone, who just began his term as chairman of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, is no stranger to the city. He grew up in its northwest and still lives and works there.
Trone’s company, F&M Business Center, provides tax preparation, bookkeeping, and related business services to a community that remains something of a world apart from downtown Pasadena and its successful boutiques and artisanal coffee. Northwest Pasadena is figuratively the other side of the tracks and literally the other side of the 210 freeway. A traditionally African American community, the area is now also home to many Latinos and other more recent arrivals.
According to the chamber chairman, the 210 remains Pasadena’s great divide, depressing household incomes and contributing to a lack of educational and job opportunities more plentiful elsewhere in the region. Trone calls the area Pasadena’s Achilles’ heel.
Growing up in Northwest Pasadena, Trone experienced the stigma of coming from an area where many whites feared to tread. Like much of the L.A. basin and San Gabriel Valley, a legacy of de jure and de facto residential segregation continues to define and mar the geography of Pasadena. Which is what makes Trone’s rise to the helm of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce all the more striking.
Instead of perpetuating the separation of the Northwest part of the city from the rest of Pasadena, Trone’s presidency and Measure M, the Los Angeles County transportation initiative on the November ballot, have the potential to open new career doors for young people and others from across the city.
What works
As a business leader, Trone is the first to admit that “trickle down, doesn’t.” But he also shares some business owners’ concerns about the minimum wage.
As he explained over breakfast, “If you are going to pay a guy $13, $14, $15 an hour, the employer needs that person to be someone he can count on who has work experience.”
Trone is concerned that the result of a higher minimum wage might be that many young people are not afforded entry-level job opportunities and the gap only widens between the haves and have-nots. This he fears will simply lead to unemployment, crime, and teen pregnancy.
The chamber chairman believes that a youth minimum wage or “training wage” of six months’ duration, paired with job training and shadowing, would increase opportunities for young people and be more attractive to business owners. He previously supported a tax credit for employers but that idea fell on deaf ears at the Pasadena City Council.
When we met, Trone outlined a plan under which the philanthropic community would step up and supplement a portion of the higher minimum wage for young workers. But he acknowledged that even if this happened, U.S. Department of Labor regulations and liability concerns would likely put the kibosh on the idea.
Trone, who held his first leadership position at the chamber four years ago as chairman of the workforce development committee, has helped the chamber recognize the role that it has to play in youth workforce development. Today, that vision has helped the organization step up to its fiduciary responsibility as Pasadena’s business leadership group to support job training and mentoring.
During our interview, Trone recognized the chamber for its progress on job readiness and training while pointing out several local employers who have been critical to the program’s success. In addition to Parsons, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, and Lockheed Martin, Levitt Pavilion, which runs a summer music program at the Bandshell in Memorial Park, has also been an important partner, hiring 20 to 30 young people a year for work in production, business affairs, advertising, and marketing.
During his 12-month term, Trone wants to explore partnerships with employers such at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Huntington Hospital, Southern California Public Radio, and Kaiser Healthcare.
With five new hotels under construction in Pasadena and the upcoming renovation of the Rose Bowl, Trone hopes to use his podium as chamber chairman to get the word out about the importance of job training and local hiring. If he has his way, Pasadena will continue moving forward as a city of equal opportunity for all rather than as a tale of two cities.
Joel Epstein is a senior adviser to companies, law firms, foundations, and public initiatives on communications strategy, corporate social responsibility, and outreach.
