What can happen to a town that really doesn’t care about anything but jobs.

Adam Nagourney writes in the NY Times 1 March 2011: Plan Would Erase All-Business Town

VERNON, Calif. — Vernon is a bleak, 5.2-square-mile sprawl of warehouses, factories, toxic chemical plants and meat processors that looks like the backdrop for “Eraserhead,” the David Lynch movie set in an industrial wasteland. It has a population of 95 — and 1,800 businesses, drawn by low taxes, lax regulations and cheap municipal power.

It also has a history of corruption and public malfeasance going back nearly 50 years.

The rest of the story is mostly about how it’s gotten so bad the state is trying to abolish the city of Vernon and make it part of Los Angeles County.

John A. Pérez, the Democratic speaker of the State Assembly, is the chief sponsor of legislation to disincorporate Vernon. He described it as a shell city created to enrich municipal officials and businesses at the expense of the struggling, lower-middle-class communities that surround it.

“I have been frustrated with Vernon for a long time,” Mr. Pérez said, while driving the streets of this city, which is in his district. “How bad a neighbor it’s been. How shady its practices have been. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized this was really the center of tremendous corruption.”

Naturally, Vernon boosters fought back, with this, for example:

A slick two-minute advertisement promoting Vernon as a bastion of blue-collar employment will be shown in theaters in working-class neighborhoods with the opening of a new movie, “Battle: Los Angeles.” The commercial follows a $65,000-a-week television advertising campaign that began last week.

More tax money going to benefit corporations at the expense of people.

The story goes on and on about fraud convictions, lawsuits, advertising campaigns pro and con, and so forth. Obviously it’s not that bad here. But Vernon might be considered a cautionary tale about “jobs, jobs, jobs”.

-jsq

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