Quote:

LA Times
It's hard to find winners in the meltdown that occurred last week at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. A Japanese rail car manufacturing company trying to build a plant in Palmdale announced it was tired of fighting a union-supported environmental challenge and instead would build its plant in another state. The union that took on the company lost the chance to organize hundreds of new workers. Palmdale, which is still struggling to shake off the recession, lost out on an influx of good jobs. And California doubled down on its reputation as a place too messy to do business.

At Los Angeles County's Hall of Administration, news of the collapsing deal sent supervisors and others into a spasm of frustration. Supervisor Mike Antonovich called it “disastrous” and said it was “a tremendous disservice, not only to the workers in the Antelope Valley but to the entire region.” MTA officials lamented the breakdown as a “shame.” Palmdale's mayor called it “devastating.” Labor activists accused the company of bad faith and of distorting the debate.

That's a bad end to a once-promising proposal: In 2012, Kinkisharyo International won an $890-million contract from the MTA to build rail cars as part of the agency's expanding rail network. The company committed to assembling the cars locally after the manufacturing work was done in Japan and said it would eventually look to moving much of the actual manufacturing to California too, creating hundreds of skilled, good-paying jobs. To that end, it bought land from the city of Palmdale and set out to build a 427,507-square-foot plant there.


[www.latimes.com]