Business
After Los Angeles County bought a skyscraper, a fight over whether to tear down its historic headquarters
With the ink dry on the County of Los Angeles’ $200-million purchase of the Gas Company Tower office building downtown, a fight is brewing over what to do with the 1960s-vintage headquarters it plans to leave behind.
Supervisor Janice Hahn and preservationists are pushing back against a plan to move workers into the newly purchased skyscraper on Bunker Hill and raze the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, which was renamed after Hahn’s father and is a centerpiece of the government-oriented Civic Center neighborhood.
“It came as a big shock to me when I realized what was happening,” she said, blaming county administrators for quietly pushing through what she called a closely held plan to move the seat of county power and thousands of workers, then knock down a prominent public building.
“I thought it was a little bit of a secretive process, a little bit of they knew what they were doing, but didn’t exactly reveal it,” she said.
County officials, however, plan to start moving staff from the Hall of Administration and other county buildings into the downtown skyscraper next summer, the start of a process that could take three or four years.
Los Angeles County’s $200-million purchase of the Gas Company Tower in downtown L.A. is complete and county workers are slated to start moving in next summer.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Preliminary county plans call for razing the Hall of Administration but keeping the building where the Board of Supervisors convenes in public sessions. That building is connected to the Hall of Administration but is a separate structure that could stand on its own.
The plan to raze the Hall of Administration is not set in stone, county officials said. Formal planning for the future of the site will begin in early 2025 and a master plan should be complete in about a year, followed by an environmental review of the plan that may last into 2027. But keeping the building would raise budget challenges because a large portion of the funds used to buy the Gas Company Tower came from money that had been earmarked for seismic retrofits and other necessary fixes to the Hall of Administration and other county buildings.
Hahn cast the sole “no” vote on the county’s purchase of the Gas Company Tower last month. When she first learned of the proposal to buy the 52-story building, which faced foreclosure, she thought it was an opportunity for the county to make a favorable investment in a down market. The county could potentially consolidate some of its many offices there and then sell it later at a profit when the office real estate market recovered.
Then, she said, “it was revealed” that the plan was to move the the Board of Supervisors offices and county services to the Gas Company Tower, and ultimately demolish the Hall of Administration.
“It’s really still unnerving to me, and a bit of a shock, that this was their plan all along,” Hahn said. “I think the public is still a little in the dark about what the plan is.”
The Hall of Administration was a source of civic pride when it and other key buildings in the Civic Center, including the Los Angeles County Superior Court — Stanley Mosk Courthouse, were being built starting in the 1950s.
“What the Acropolis was to Ancient Greece during her Golden Age, the new Civic Center now being hewn from the shabby slopes of Bunker Hill will be to Los Angeles,” The Times wrote in 1957.
The Hall of Administration was being built to last a century, it was reported. The capital projects analyst in the office of the county’s chief administrative officer was “ready to wager the Hall of Administration will still be in service by 2059,” The Times said
The building was renamed the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration in 1992 in honor of Hahn’s father, who was the county’s longest serving supervisor and a former Los Angeles city councilman.
Hahn said she is not driven by his legacy to save the building.
“Hey, if you want to take the name off, if that makes you feel better about preserving it,” she said, “I’m OK with that.”
The head of the Los Angeles Conservancy, which advocates for the preservation of meaningful local structures, said the Hall of Administration is “definitely historic” and significant. It was designed by a prominent team of midcentury architects including Paul R. Williams, the first licensed Black architect west of the Mississippi, who designed movie stars’ homes and prominent public buildings.
Knocking the Hall of Administration down would be “a misstep for a lot of reasons,” conservancy President Adrian Scott Fine said.
Among the reasons to keep it, he said, is its position across Gloria Molina Grand Park from the Mosk Courthouse. The two are a pair that frame the park connecting City Hall with the Music Center.
“These two buildings are integral” to the Civic Center, Fine said. “You can’t lose one without losing the function that they were intended to do.”
The Hall of Administration public spaces are filled with light brown marble and terrazzo that can make the halls feel institutional. There are spots in the building that appear to need painting, patching and other maintenance.
“It’s kind of a bleak place,” acknowledged frequent visitor Will Wright, director of government and public affairs for the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “Which tells me you really need to invest in its upkeep.”
With investment the county could “restore and uplift” the interior to make it more appealing to employees and visitors, he said.
Ideally, the county would own both the Gas Company Tower and a restored Hall of Administration, Wright said, a position Hahn supports.
“I believe the amount of money that it would take to retrofit this is still an amount of money that we could easily find in a $50-billion budget,” Hahn said in an interview in her office. “I don’t think it’s too big of an ask for what this has meant for decades to the people of Los Angeles County.”
Los Angeles County oversaw the renovation of the Hall of Justice a decade ago. The historic building was seriously damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The Hall of Administration is less flashy than other downtown landmarks such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, City Hall and the LADWP headquarters, but it doesn’t need to be eye-catching to be important, real estate developer and preservationist Dan Rosenfeld said.
“Not every public building needs to scream for attention,” he said. “It would be a very discordant city if they did.”
Rosenfeld worked on preserving other significant historic downtown buildings that were seismically unsafe and threatened by the wrecking ball, including City Hall and the Hall of Justice, both of which date to the 1920s and remain in use after renovations.
“It would be relatively simple to reinforce the building for lateral seismic strength and to modernize the interior,” Rosenfeld said of the Hall of Administration. “The building can and should be saved.”
The Hall of Administration is part of a Civic Center with public spaces and state, local and federal buildings “that defines Los Angeles,” he said, and should not be abandoned by the county. The Civic Center “is a symbol of our democracy,” he said, a place where citizens gather to celebrate, protest and mourn.
“A civic center is more than a collection of buildings,” Rosenfeld said. “It is a symbol of what a community believes in.”
The county will not neglect the Civic Center, Chief Executive Fesia Davenport said.
“We understand the importance of a vibrant and well-functioning Civic Center and are committed to maintaining the County’s presence in this vital public space,” Davenport said in a statement. “As we embark on our Civic Center master planning process over the next year, we will be inviting extensive public input to help shape our recommendations to the Board of Supervisors to help guide their decisions on how best to reimagine our Civic Center buildings for optimal public use.”
The 52-story tower Gas Company 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.
Slightly more than half of the building is leased to a diverse mix of tenants including law firm Latham & Watkins and accounting firm Deloitte, real estate brokerage JLL said. Its namesake tenant, Southern California Gas Co., said in September that it will move from the tower where it has been a primary tenant since the building was completed to another skyscraper a block north at 350 S. Grand Ave.
Times staff writer Rebecca Ellis contributed to this report.
Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.
“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.
He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.
The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.
One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.
As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.
Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.
“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”
On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.
On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.
In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.
Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.
Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.
The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.
It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.
On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.
Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.
As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.
“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”
As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.
The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.
The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”
As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.
Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.
“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.
Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.
Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.
“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”
California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.
The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.
“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”
Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.
The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.
The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.
California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.
“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”
In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.
The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.
“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”
The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.
Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.
The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.
“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.
Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.
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.
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.
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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