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The end of Hahn Hall? L.A. County takes first step to buy Gas Company Tower

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The end of Hahn Hall?  L.A. County takes first step to buy Gas Company Tower

L.A. County’s Board of Supervisors took its first major step Tuesday toward buying Gas Company Tower, one of the most prominent office skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles.

The looming purchase could move workers and public services out of existing county offices, including the well-known Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, which dates to 1960. The building is one of roughly 33 county-owned facilities that engineers say are vulnerable to collapse during a major earthquake.

The supervisors voted 3-1 to let the county’s Chief Executive Office move forward with the purchase, which they said cannot exceed $200 million. The board will need to vote again before the deal is finalized.

Supervisor Janice Hahn voted against the purchase, telling her colleagues she was concerned about the fate of the downtown civic center if the Hall of Administration shut down. The building is named after her father, longtime Supervisor Kenneth Hahn.

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“I know there’s a tendency to jump on real estate deals,” she said. “We have to think bigger.”

Supervisor Hilda Solis abstained from the vote, saying she wanted to see “a more comprehensive and practical plan” to address the county’s aging buildings before giving her support. She also noted that the county had already sunk about $25 million into a plan to make the Hall of Administration seismically safe and still had several buildings downtown in need of upgrades, including Men’s Central Jail.

“I want to make sure that we know exactly what we’re getting ourselves into before committing any funding to this purchase,” she said.

The proposed price is a deep discount from the building’s appraised value of $632 million in 2020, underscoring how much downtown office values have fallen in recent years.

After selling last year for $110 million, Union Bank Plaza on Figueroa Street sold again recently for just $80 million, or $114 per square foot, according to real estate data provider CoStar. Another downtown high-rise tower at 777 S. Figueroa St. recently sold for $120 million, or $115 per square foot.

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At $200 million, the county would get the Gas Company Tower for about $137 a square foot, still a bargain by historical standards.

“All these prices are a massive discount from only three years ago, when 915 Wilshire Blvd. traded for over $500 a foot,” said real estate broker Kevin Shannon of Newmark, who helped arrange the Union Bank Plaza sale to the Southwest Carpenters Pension Trust. “The world has changed.”

It makes sense for entities like the county and the Carpenters Pension Trust to buy their own buildings because they can lock in their occupancy costs long term, Shannon said.

The 52-story tower at 555 W. 5th St. was widely considered one of the city’s most prestigious office buildings when it was completed in 1991. It has nearly 1.5 million square feet of space on a 1.4-acre site at the base of Bunker Hill.

In recent years, the downtown office market has turned against landlords as many tenants reduced their office footprint in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when it became more common for employees to work remotely.

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Last year, the owner of the Gas Company Tower, an affiliate of Brookfield Asset Management, defaulted on its debt and the property was put in receivership, in which a court-appointed representative took custody of the building to help creditors recover funds they lent to Brookfield. The building has about $465 million in outstanding loans.

Elevated interest rates have weighed on prices by making it difficult for building owners to refinance debt and pushing them into quick sales or foreclosures. Some downtown L.A. office tenants have left for other local office centers including Century City over concerns that the streets are less safe than before the pandemic.

Southern California Gas Co. said last month it is planning to move from its longtime headquarters in its namesake tower, where it has been a primary tenant since the building was completed, and move a block north to another skyscraper, at 350 S. Grand Ave.

The utility signed a long-term lease for nearly 200,000 square feet on eight floors in the Grand Avenue building on Bunker Hill often known as Two California Plaza, its new landlord said, and is expected to move by spring 2026 after building out the new offices. The Gas Company will also have an office on the ground floor to serve customers.

Other major tenants in the Gas Company Tower include law firm Latham & Watkins and accounting firm Deloitte.

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The building is in good condition with “a remaining useful life” of no less than 35 years, according to a recent property condition report prepared for the current owner that was obtained by The Times.

The report also said the tower and parking garage need about $1.3 million to address urgently needed repairs and deferred maintenance. Additional long-term costs to maintain and modernize the properties were estimated at about $48.7 million over 12 years. Projected costs include roof repairs, refurbishing air conditioning systems and updating the elevators.

Seismic engineers are conducting an “in-depth evaluation” of how the building would respond in a major earthquake to determine whether the Gas Company Tower, the fifth-tallest member of the downtown skyline, has vulnerabilities that need to be addressed, an L.A. County spokesperson said last month.

“Those issues are exactly what we are exploring through our due diligence,” the county said in a statement. “Without getting ahead of the work currently underway, one factor is assessing how this building would perform compared to the performance of the Hall of Administration, and the respective costs of each approach.”

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Nike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan

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Nike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan

Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.

In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”

“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”

Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.

In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.

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The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.

“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.

Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.

The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.

Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.

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Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.

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Senate committee kills bill mandating insurance coverage for wildfire safe homes

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Senate committee kills bill mandating insurance coverage for wildfire safe homes

A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.

The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.

The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.

The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.

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It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.

However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.

Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.

Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.

“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.

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In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”

The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.

“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.

Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.

Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.

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Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.

The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.

But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.

Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.

A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.

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“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .

Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.

Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.

Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.

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How We Cover the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

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How We Cover the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.

But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.

While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.

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“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.

It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”

Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.

“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.

The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.

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Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.

Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”

Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.

Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.

“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”

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For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.

“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”

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