An effort to move the famed Hollywood Park racetrack from Inglewood to Irvine is a tale of the suburbs and the inner city.
For Irvine, a racetrack at the former El Toro Marine base would bolster its hopes to transform the closed base into a giant park surrounded by homes, offices and stores. Until 2002, the old military compound was headed for rebirth as a commercial airport.
In Inglewood, some track old-timers lament the prospect of losing the 66-year-old institution that opened during Hollywood’s golden era. But city officials are upbeat about the possibility of a move, which would open the track’s 237 acres to retail development that could double its current tax take.
A bid by the world’s largest corporation to bypass uncooperative elected officials and take its aggressive expansion plans to voters failed Tuesday, as Inglewood residents overwhelmingly rejected Wal-Mart’s proposal to build a colossal retail and grocery center without an environmental review or public hearings.
With all votes counted Tuesday evening, 4,575 Inglewood residents had voted in favor of Wal-Mart’s plan, while 7,049 had voted against it.
There are a lot of winners here: grocery workers, city planners, elected officials, local residents, small businesses and poker players. Really? Poker players? Yeah. They would have dumped their supercenter right in HPark’s parking lot. Not cool.
This measure failed, but it’s yet another example of why direct democracy is a bad idea. We need to do something about this whole initiative thing.
The creator of The Simpsons, Matt Groening, says Fox News threatened legal action after an episode poked fun at the channel.
The episode featured a “Fox News Crawl” at the bottom of the screen. It read: “Pointless news crawls up 37 per cent … Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com … Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer … Dow down 5000 points … Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay … JFK posthumously joins Republican Party … Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple …”