WHERE DOES THE CITY STAND?- The Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, Pedro Baez, Publisher Voice of the People, and other civil rights leaders (and organizations) demanded on Sunday that the LA City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti review the taxpayer subsidy of $71 million ladled out in 1997 to Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) and still due and payable through 2025 to build the Staples Center.
This is the LA Clippers home. (The LA Clippers are owned by Donald Sterling.)
The 1997 Memorandum of Understanding signed by AEG and the City for the Staples Center contains, in the City’s own words, “little direct financial benefits for the City while exposing the City to potentially significant financial risk.”
The massive subsidy on the taxpayer dime in lieu of Sterling’s racist rants, as well as his past racially dubious actions, now amounts to a subsidy for bigotry.
The City Council and Mayor Garcetti must ask: does the massive subsidy of the Staples Center that benefits Donald T. Sterling represent a public subsidy of bigotry, and given the stringent civil rights laws that forbid public funding of a business or its owners that engage in racially discriminatory acts, violate and even abrogate the terms of the city’s contract?
Does it allow taxpayers to continue to subsidize Sterling through Staples?
(Our elected officials must act. When a moral and legal wrong has been committed you either speak up and take action or by your acquiescence and your silence, lend your support to racists.)
(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is President of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable. Pedro Baez is the publisher of the Voice of the People.)
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 35
Pub: Apr 29, 2014
