Santa Monica Nativity scenes to move to private property

Santa Monica's much-debated Nativity scenes will be staged after all — on private property. The decision was hailed by advocates for the separation of church and state, but there was little indication the acrimony would subside on the other side, where an attorney pledged to continue to fight for religious displays on public land.

Less than a week after a federal judge finalized a ruling that Santa Monica has the right to ban seasonal displays in public spaces, Nativity scene organizers announced that they would move to a new location.

The display — 14 scenes of life-size figures depicting the birth of Jesus Christ — will open Sunday in the 2700 block of Ocean Park Boulevard, between Clover Park and 28th Street, said Nativity Scenes Committee Chairman Hunter Jameson. The scenes are scheduled to remain on display until early January.

"We are deeply grateful for the use of this new site to allow all of Santa Monica's distinctive Christmas story to continue spreading the message of joy, hope and peace found in the Christ child's birth," Jameson said in a statement.

When told of the development, Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, responded: "Well, hallelujah — praise secularism."

"This move is great," she said. "But it does undercut any argument they have that they don't have free expression. Obviously, they do."

For nearly six decades, scenes celebrating Jesus' birth were a seasonal fixture in Palisades Park, which runs along the coastal bluffs on Ocean Avenue. In recent years, debate over the displays had become rancorous, with activists submitting applications to establish their own displays, including a satirical homage to "Pastafarianism."

Earlier this year, the Santa Monica City Council — seeking to head off clashes between atheists and Christian organizations, as well as legal disputes that could become costly to taxpayers — barred private, unattended displays in the park.

At the time, city officials pointed out that those wishing to celebrate the Nativity, or anything else for that matter, could erect displays on private property. But Nativity scene proponents filed suit in U.S. District Court seeking to restore the Palisades Park tradition. The case drew national attention.

Last month, Judge Audrey B. Collins of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles denied the church coalition's request to require the city to allow the Nativity scenes in the park.

William J. Becker Jr., an attorney for the Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee — who has compared the campaign against the nativity displays to Pontius Pilates' judgment against Jesus, — lashed out at the decision anew Monday and pledged to appeal.

"Judges are fallible," Becker said. "They are often motivated by their own ideological dispositions, whether they want to admit it or not."

The move to private land is "not a resolution," Becker said.

"Everybody has the right to use private property to express themselves," he said. "It's still no substitute for 1st Amendment protections that we are guaranteed to express our viewpoints in a public forum."

Gaylor, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said she is untroubled by the prospect of prolonged appeal.

"Santa Monica is going to win — should win, ultimately," she said. "This judge obviously did the right thing."

scott.gold@latimes.com

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‘The Daily’ doomed by dull content and isolation

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It was too expensive. It lacked editorial focus. And for a digital publication, it was strangely cut off from the Internet. That’s the obituary being written in real time through posts, tweets and online chats about The Daily, the first-of-its-kind iPad newspaper that is being shut down this month.

Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp. said Monday that The Daily will publish its final issue on Dec. 15, less than two years after its January 2011 launch. The app has already been removed from Apple’s iTunes, where it once received lukewarm ratings.

The Daily had roughly 100,000 subscribers who paid either 99 cents a week or $ 40 a year for its daily download of journalism tailored for touch screens. But that wasn’t enough to sustain some 100 employees and millions of dollars in losses since its launch. At the time of its debut, News Corp. said The Daily’s operating costs would amount to about half a million dollars a week, or around $ 26 million a year.

When News Corp. launched The Daily, it was touted as a bold experiment in new media. The company hired top-name journalists from other publications, such as the New York Post’s former Page Six editor, Richard Johnson, and said it poured $ 30 million into the newspaper’s launch. Now, the company is acknowledging that The Daily no longer has a place at News Corp., which is being split in two to separate its publishing enterprises from its TV and movie businesses.

Murdoch said in a statement that News Corp. “could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term.” Some employees are being hired in other parts of the company.

Critics say The Daily’s day-to-day mix of news, opinion and info-graphics wasn’t that different from content available for free on the Internet. And despite a high-profile launch that drew lots of media attention, the publication failed to build a distinctive brand. There was no ad campaign touting its coverage and stories weren’t accessible to non-subscribers, so it didn’t benefit from buzz that comes from social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Trevor Butterworth, who wrote a weekly column for The Daily called “The Information Society,” says the disconnect between the app and the broader Internet curtailed its reach. He was laid off in July when the publication shrank from 170 workers to about 120. As part of the purge, The Daily cut its dedicated opinion section and dropped sports coverage in favor of using a feed from its News Corp. sister outfit, Fox Sports.

“Stories weren’t widely shared or widely known,” says Butterworth. “It felt like I was writing into the void.”

When it launched, The Daily was meant to take advantage of the explosion of tablet computer sales, and the notion that people generally read on them in the morning or evening, like a magazine.

But each issue came in a giant file — sometimes 1 gigabyte large — and took 10 or 15 minutes to download over a broadband connection, which is unheard of for news apps, says Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter.com, one of the first community blogs on the Internet.

Because the stories weren’t linkable, The Daily didn’t benefit from new Internet traffic that would have come from content aggregators like Flipboard and Tumblr.

“They ignored the obvious, which was the Web,” Haughey says. Although many people are foregoing buying a laptop for the lightweight convenience of a tablet, the day hasn’t arrived yet when all online access will come through apps rather than the Web. “Maybe in five or 10 years, the Web will be less important,” he says. “For now it seems like they were missing out.”

It may also have been a problem that News Corp. launched The Daily from scratch into an environment where readers tend to gravitate toward trusted sources and established brands. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey, 84 percent of mobile device users said a news app’s brand was a major factor in deciding whether to download it.

One of the intangible challenges The Daily had was standing out in a sea of online journalism, both paid and free. Some national newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have carved out a niche with informed coverage of sometimes complex topics and have gained paying digital subscribers by limiting the number of free articles they offer online.

Gannett Co., which publishes USA Today and about 80 other newspapers, has succeeded in raising circulation revenue at local papers by putting up so-called online “pay walls,” taking advantage of the fact that there are few alternative sources of coverage for certain communities.

Without a unique coverage niche or a local monopoly, The Daily was caught between two worlds.

By being digital-only, the publication didn’t have a defined coverage area. It was “in competition with everybody and everything,” says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. Yet it failed to carve out its own niche in that larger universe, he says.

“Its lack of editorial focus played a role,” Benton notes. “It was sort of a pleasant, middle-brow, slightly tabloidy mix of news and features. And there’s lots of that available for free online. I would imagine if ‘The Daily’ were starting again now, they would invest more in establishing their brand identity early on.”

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Additional copies of 'Lincoln' headed to theaters

LOS ANGELES (AP) — "Lincoln" is marching to more movie theaters.

Disney, which distributed the DreamWorks film, is making additional prints of director Steven Spielberg's historical saga starring Daniel Day-Lewis to meet an unexpected demand that has left some moviegoers in Alaska out in the cold.

"To say that we're encouraged by the results to date or that they've exceeded our expectations is an understatement," said Dave Hollis, head of distribution at the Walt Disney Co. "We're in the midst of making additional prints to accommodate demand and will have them available to our partners in exhibition by mid-December for what we hope will be a great run through the holiday and awards corridor."

Disney said "Lincoln" opened Nov. 9 in 11 theaters and expanded to additional theaters Nov. 16 and 21 in North America. The film, which has earned $83.6 million in the U.S. and Canada so far, has been unavailable at some smaller venues, such as the Gross Alaska theaters in Juneau.

But the extra prints are coming a little too late to fit the movie into the five-screen Glacier Cinemas theater during the holiday season, said Kenny Solomon-Gross, general manager of the Gross Alaska, which runs two theaters in Juneau and one in Ketchikan, Alaska.

"When we had the room for 'Lincoln,' Disney didn't have a copy for us," Solomon-Gross said Monday.

His film lineup is pretty booked through the end of the year, and he probably can't screen "Lincoln" until after the first of the new year. Yes, the excitement over the film will have dimmed, but then the Academy Awards season will be stirring up, he said. That should kick up the buzz.

In the meantime, Solomon-Gross plans to head to Las Vegas this week and catch the film there.

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang . Associated Press writer Rachel D'Oro in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.

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Online:

http://www.thelincolnmovie.com

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Global Update: GlaxoSmithKline Tops Access to Medicines Index

Sang Tan/Associated Press

GlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in.

Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically they conduct clinical trials in poor countries, and similar issues.

Johnson & Johnson shot up to second place, while AstraZeneca fell to 16th from 7th. AstraZeneca has had major management shake-ups. It did not do less, but the industry is improving so rapidly that others outscored it, the report said.

The index was greeted with skepticism by some drugmakers when it was introduced in 2008. But now 19 of the 20 companies have a board member or subcommittee tracking how well they do at what the index measures, said David Sampson, the chief author.

The one exception was a Japanese company. As before, Japanese drugmakers ranked at or near the index’s bottom, and European companies clustered near the top. Generic companies — most of them Indian — that export to poor countries are ranked separately.

Johnson & Johnson moved up because it created an access team, disclosed more and bought Crucell, a vaccine company.

The foundation that creates the index now has enough money to continue for five more years, said its founder, Wim Leereveld, a former pharmaceutical executive.

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Teen girl petitions Hasbro to market Easy Bake Oven also to boys

By Tiffany Hsu, Los Angeles Times

December 4, 2012

What to get a little boy for Christmas that isn't the usual toy car set, video game or sports item? One fresh-faced activist suggests an Easy Bake Oven.

McKenna Pope, 13, is petitioning toy maker Hasbro Inc. to stop marketing the kitchen set to only young girls. She's asking for images of boys to also be placed on Easy Bake boxes.

On Hasbro's website, the Easy Bake brand is included under Cooking & Baking Games for Girls.

The Garfield, N.J., eighth-grader, moved to action by her 4-year-old brother's attempts to cook on top of a lamp's light bulb, has already scored nearly 18,000 signatures on her petition on Change.org.

On the petition, McKenna writes that she found the lack of packaging or promotional materials featuring boys to be "quite appalling." The girlie purple and pink colors used on Easy Bake ovens didn't help either.

"I feel that this sends a clear message: women cook, men work," she wrote. "I want my brother to know that it's not 'wrong' for him to want to be a chef."

As McKenna points out, many of the top figures in the culinary industry are men — Emeril Lagasse, Gordon Ramsay, Wolfgang Puck, among many others.

To really pound her point home, Pope uploaded a video in which she goads her brother into explaining the trouble with wanting an Easy Bake Oven (he also hopes for a dinosaur).

"Only girls play with it," he says as he tries to bake cookies.

tiffany.hsu@latimes.com

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Slaying of 4 rocks Northridge neighborhood

Shane Grady was jolted awake early Sunday when he heard gunfire on Devonshire Street.

He said he dropped to the floor and looked out his window, but the slowing traffic blocked his view.

Then came the police sirens and helicopter flying so low, another neighbor said, that it was "shaking the rooftop."

Residents in the usually quiet Northridge neighborhood woke up to a shocking scene. Police said two men and two women were found shot dead outside a home in the 17400 block of Devonshire in the San Fernando Valley.

Investigators do not have a motive or suspects. City Councilman Mitchell Englander, who represents the area and is a reserve LAPD officer, said police believe the slayings weren't a random act.

Officers were dispatched to the home about 4:25 a.m., LAPD Capt. William Hayes said. A 911 caller reported hearing yelling and "a number of shots," Hayes said.

Three of the bodies were found face-down, and the victims appeared to have been shot at close range, Englander said.

Officers searched the property and neighborhood immediately after the shooting, LAPD Cmdr. Andy Smith said, but no weapon was recovered.

The victims had not been identified Sunday evening. The female victims were in their 20s; one man was in his mid-30s and the other in his late 40s, Hayes said. Police believe at least some of the victims lived at the residence and may have been related.

Englander said the property was an unlicensed boarding home, but had not been a problem location for police.

That was confirmed by neighbors, who said the rooms appeared to have been rented out to single men who primarily kept to themselves. Nothing stood out, they said, except for some occasional loud music.

Englander said that about a dozen people were believed to have been living in the four- or five-bedroom home in conditions he described as "deplorable." Mattresses and makeshift kitchens were scattered about the house, he said, and one room was accessible only by a window.

A woman who lived around the block said she heard loud music hours before the shootings. About 1:30 a.m., the woman said she heard the music and people yelling. She managed to go to sleep an hour later but said the noise hadn't stopped.

"I just figured it was a party that was out of control," the woman said.

Residents described the area as quiet, the kind of neighborhood where people know one another and walk to the nearby grocery store or the synagogue down the street from where the slayings occurred.

The LAPD's Devonshire Division station is a mile away.

"It's usually sleepy-time America," said Richard Rutherford, 58, who also was awakened by the gunfire.

Englander, who chairs the City Council's Public Safety Committee, said he was "shocked" by the incident.

"Typically you don't have these kinds of incidents in this type of community," he said.

The violent crime rate for Northridge falls in the middle of all Los Angeles neighborhoods, but homicide is rare in the community, according to LAPD data analyzed in The Times' Crime L.A. database. In the previous six months, Northridge had one homicide out of the 89 violent crimes reported.

Since 2007, and before Sunday's quadruple homicide, Northridge had 11 homicides, 10 of them south of Nordhoff Street. The location of Sunday's slayings is on the border with Granada Hills, which typically has a much lower violent-crime rate than Northridge.

Jeff Kaye, 62, remembered a few incidents in the 33 years he's lived in the neighborhood. There was a shooting a few years back, he said, and he once walked in on a robbery. But nothing like Sunday's shooting had occurred.

"It concerns you," he said. "You want to know what's going on."

A few onlookers stopped by as investigators prepared to bring the bodies out of the home, and some drivers shouted questions at news crews gathered at the scene. "What's going on?" one man yelled.

"How often in this neighborhood do you hear about four dead bodies?" Grady said.

kate.mather@latimes.com

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Young down by boardwalk for benefit show

NEW YORK (AP) — Neil Young said Sunday that he couldn't see performing in the area devastated by Superstorm Sandy without doing something to help people who were affected by it.

Young and his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse, will hold a benefit concert for the American Red Cross' storm relief effort Thursday at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City. The New Jersey coastline areas were hit hard by the storm in late October.

People in the New York area who suffered damage in the storm have been supporting him for 40 years, he said.

"I couldn't see coming back here and just playing and have it be business as usual," he said. Young is touring in the area, with concerts scheduled for Monday in Brooklyn and Tuesday in Bridgeport, Conn.

Minimum ticket prices for the standing-room show in Atlantic City will be $75 and $150, although Young notes there's no maximum. He hopes to raise several hundred thousand dollars for the Red Cross.

Young said he was invited to join the Dec. 12 benefit at New York's Madison Square Garden that will feature Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, the Who, Kanye West and others, but had other obligations. Besides, there's enough star power there, he said.

"It wasn't going to make much difference whether I was there or not, so I decided to go someplace where I could make a difference," he said.

Young performed at a televised benefit in 2001 following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, memorably covering John Lennon's "Imagine."

Fans can expect a two-hour plus rock show on Thursday with opening band Everest. No special guests are planned, although Young issued an invitation to "anyone who wants to come in and play with us that we know and we know can play."

It's hard to resist wondering whether Young's epic "Like a Hurricane" will make it onto the set list, given the occasion.

"Anything's possible," Young said. "We have the equipment."

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Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.

But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. That point was reiterated recently in two studies, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.

The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.

The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.

Dr. Yancey goes further. She has a treadmill desk in the office and works on her recumbent bike at home.

If there is a movement toward ergonomic diversity and upright work in the information age, it will also be a return to the past. Today, the diligent worker tends to be defined as a person who puts in long hours crouched in front of a screen. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, office workers, like clerks, accountants and managers, mostly stood. Sitting was slacking. And if you stand at work today, you join a distinguished lineage — Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, Philip Roth.

DR. JAMES A. LEVINE of the Mayo Clinic is a leading researcher in the field of inactivity studies. When he began his research 15 years ago, he says, it was seen as a novelty.

“But it’s totally mainstream now,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of research in this area, because the health care cost implications are so enormous.”

Steelcase, the big maker of office furniture, has seen a similar trend in the emerging marketplace for adjustable workstations, which allow workers to sit or stand during the day, and for workstations with a treadmill underneath for walking. (Its treadmill model was inspired by Dr. Levine, who built his own and shared his research with Steelcase.)

The company offered its first models of height-adjustable desks in 2004. In the last five years, sales of its lines of adjustable desks and the treadmill desk have surged fivefold, to more than $40 million. Its models for stand-up work range from about $1,600 to more than $4,000 for a desk that includes an actual treadmill. Corporate customers include Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing, Apple and Google.

“It started out very small, but it’s not a niche market anymore,” says Allan Smith, vice president for product marketing at Steelcase.

The Steelcase offerings are the Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs of upright workstations, but there are plenty of Chevys as well, especially from small, entrepreneurial companies.

In 2009, Daniel Sharkey was laid off as a plant manager of a tool-and-die factory, after nearly 30 years with the company. A garage tinkerer, Mr. Sharkey had designed his own adjustable desk for standing. On a whim, he called it the kangaroo desk, because “it holds things, and goes up and down.” He says that when he lost his job, his wife, Kathy, told him, “People think that kangaroo thing is pretty neat.”

Today, Mr. Sharkey’s company, Ergo Desktop, employs 16 people at its 8,000-square-foot assembly factory in Celina, Ohio. Sales of its several models, priced from $260 to $600, have quadrupled in the last year, and it now ships tens of thousands of workstations a year.

Steve Bordley of Scottsdale, Ariz., also designed a solution for himself that became a full-time business. After a leg injury left him unable to run, he gained weight. So he fixed up a desktop that could be mounted on a treadmill he already owned. He walked slowly on the treadmill while making phone calls and working on a computer. In six weeks, Mr. Bordley says, he lost 25 pounds and his nagging back pain vanished.

He quit the commercial real estate business and founded TrekDesk in 2007. He began shipping his desk the next year. (The treadmill must be supplied by the user.) Sales have grown tenfold from 2008, with several thousand of the desks, priced at $479, now sold annually.

“It’s gone from being treated as a laughingstock to a product that many people find genuinely interesting,” Mr. Bordley says.

There is also a growing collection of do-it-yourself solutions for stand-up work. Many are posted on Web sites like howtogeek.com, and freely shared like recipes. For example, Colin Nederkoorn, chief executive of an e-mail marketing start-up, Customer.io, has posted one such design on his blog. Such setups can cost as little as $30 or even less, if cobbled together with available materials.

UPRIGHT workstations were hailed recently by no less a trend spotter of modern work habits and gadgetry than Wired magazine. In its October issue, it chose “Get a Standing Desk” as one of its “18 Data-Driven Ways to Be Happier, Healthier and Even a Little Smarter.”

The magazine has kept tabs on the evolving standing-desk research and marketplace, and several staff members have become converts themselves in the last few months.

“And we’re all universally happy about it,” Thomas Goetz, Wired’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail — sent from his new standing desk.

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L.A. mayor loses patience with port strike as talks continue

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has had enough. He wants round-the-clock bargaining to end the six-day-old strike at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, with the help of a mediator.

The strike has pitted the 800-member International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63 Office Clerical Unit against some of the world's biggest shipping lines and terminal operators. It has shut down 10 of the 14 cargo container terminals at the nation's busiest seaport complex.

Until it launched the strike Tuesday, the union had been working without a contract since June 30, 2010. Although talks intensified over the weekend, there have also been periods of little or no negotiations, the mayor said.

"This cannot continue," Villaraigosa said in the terse, three-paragraph communication to John Fageaux Jr., president of the union's clerical unit, and Stephen L. Berry, chief negotiator for the employers group.

"With thousands of members of other ILWU locals now honoring picket lines," the strike is "costing our local economy billions of dollars. The cost is too great to continue down this failed path," the mayor said.

The mayor added, "Mediation is essential and every available hour must be used."

It's a tactic the mayor has used before, encouraging an agreement between building owners and janitors that helped end a series of walkouts and protests in 2008.

In 2009, the mayor sent his senior labor advisor into talks to help avert a strike by Southern California Gas Co. employees.

The current strike has crippled the ports because of support from the ILWU dockworkers, who have 50,000 members on the U.S. West Coast and in Hawaii and Canada.

The dockworkers negotiate their contracts separately, but the 10,000 members who work at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports have honored the clerical unit's picket lines.

The strike is considered potentially disastrous for the Southern California economy because the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the leading contributors to the region's goods-movement industry, which employs about 595,000 people.

Last year, the two ports handled 39.5% of the total value of all cargo container imports entering the U.S. from origins worldwide, according to Jock O'Connell, international trade economist and advisor to Beacon Economics.

On Sunday, the union workers' employers issued a statement saying they had offered concessions on new hires but been rejected. The employers had already called for a mediator to be brought in to speed up negotiations.

Union spokesman Craig Merrilees said the union was prepared to keep negotiating. "We need the employers to stay at the table until the job is done," he said. The union's main concern has been losing jobs through attrition without new hires to replace them.

Talks aimed at ending the strike were continuing as Sunday night began.

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Downtown L.A. residents voting on streetcar project

Voting will conclude Monday in a special election on a streetcar proposal in downtown Los Angeles.

The proposal before downtown residents calls for an assessment district to be created to help finance the $125-million project. If it receives the two-thirds majority required to pass, planning would move forward, with completion scheduled in 2015.

Supporters of the streetcar say it would bring a fresh wave of economic development to downtown. Its proposed route covers 10 blocks of Broadway — where the city is working to revive old movie palaces and vacant office buildings — before veering over toward L.A. Live and then up through the financial district.

"This is really going to be the cherry on top for all the revitalization and transformation we're seeing," said City Councilman Jose Huizar, a key supporter of the streetcar. He cited estimates that the fixed-rail streetcar would bring $1 billion in development to downtown, including 2,600 new housing units and 675,000 square feet of new office space.

A group of business leaders and developers has been actively campaigning in support of the project in recent months, with a series of town hall meetings and special events.

Jon Blanchard, a member of the Los Angeles Streetcar Inc. board and lead developer of the Ace Hotel project on Broadway, said the streetcar would cater specifically to tourists and young residents downtown who prefer a car-free urban experience.

"Just for everyday purposes, it really kind of connects the city and makes it one," he said. "It makes it a lot easier for people that come down here and live down here to get around."

Some have criticized the voting process used for the project, saying it's unfair that only residents can vote while property owners would pay the assessment. The Los Angeles Downtown News also took the campaign to task in an editorial, claiming that officials were not upfront about the portion of total funding that would come from the tax assessments, versus the federal grants the project is expected to receive.

Still, there is no organized opposition to the project, and several streetcar backers said they were confident it would pass.

Ballots were due to be submitted by mail last week, but residents can still turn in their votes in person at City Hall on Monday.

sam.allen@latimes.com

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