Breaking News: Northeast Valley Enterprise Zone Revived

Apparently the fight for the Northeast Valley Enterprise Zone that I wrote about earlier worked out pretty well.

From the San Fernando Business Journal:

The Pacoima area has been included in the expanded boundaries of the Los Angeles Central/Hollywood enterprise zone, the governor’s office announced Monday.

The move preserves an area of the San Fernando Valley in which businesses located within the boundaries receive tax incentives for hiring local residents.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger credited working with the city and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his staff for reconfiguring the enterprise zone to include Pacoima.

“The addition of the Pacoima area strengthens the region’s economic development activities and allows incentives to remain in place to promote business expansion and job growth,” Schwarzenegger said in a prepared statement.

The Los Angeles Business Journal also has a piece, and here is the official press release from the Governor's Office.

Update 12/19/2006

A more detailed article appears today in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. I'm curious about the following quotation:

State officials acknowledged Monday that even though Pacoima no longer meets the technical requirements for a zone, it still needs help.

Janet Huston, a spokeswoman for the state Housing and Community Development Department, said the state had received far more applications for enterprise zones than it had available slots. But revoking Pacoima's designation seemed inappropriate, she said.

"There are businesses currently in the Pacoima area that would have lost their benefits, and that's not in anyone's best interest. The result would have been a loss of jobs," she said.

First, if the area does not meet the "technical" (statutory?) requirements of a zone, how can they make it a zone? Second, since with the addition of the Pacoima area 100% of the applications submitted were selected as zones, what does it mean that there were "far more" applications than slots?