Glendale Councilman Offers Futuristic Plan : Vision of High-Tech Industry Meets Doubters

Rising land values and an emphasis on office and commercial development have steadily pushed manufacturing firms out of Glendale. Councilman Carl Raggio would like to change that.

He envisions building an industrial “technology park,” using state-of-the-art techniques, to give manufacturing a strong base in Glendale.

Raggio, a veteran space-age engineer with Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, acknowledges that his plan is futuristic. Some others dismiss it as a pipe dream.

The councilman’s goal is to form a consortium of city government, business, schools, universities and industry to build and share a sophisticated computer network center in Glendale. Unlike other technology parks that cater mainly to research and development firms, Raggio’s would apply technological advances to conventional uses in the industrial park or elsewhere in town.

Manufacturers could use technology developed at the park to operate tooling, machining and molding equipment, to process foods or assemble equipment. The park could serve as a place to teach students and workers the skills needed in a technologically advanced society. Financial and insurance institutions, as well as retail and commercial businesses, could benefit by using the park for computer processing centers.

Such a broad-based plan has not been developed anywhere else, Raggio said, and he wants Glendale to be the first to do so.

Glendale has never done much to build a strong industrial base, city officials say. Instead, many manufacturing firms in recent years have been pushed out of the city, largely because of high land prices.

Manufacturing in Glendale peaked in the early 1960s when more than 14,000 workers reported to local factories, according to U.S. Commerce Department statistics. But, although industrial employment continued to soar over the nation until 1980, it remained static in Glendale, with fewer than 13,000 such workers counted there in the 1982 census of manufacturers.

And the numbers are steadily declining, said Tony Maniscalchi, chairman of the Glendale Chamber of Commerce Industrial Committee. “The trend during the last seven years has been a rapid decline in industrial users and a rapid increase in non-industrial users,” said Maniscalchi, a commercial and industrial real estate broker. “As a whole, Glendale really doesn’t have an industrial base.”

Raggio won his first term on the City Council last year after a campaign that promised, among other things, to bring high-tech industry to the city. He said he is now prepared to ask the council to authorize a study of the needs of industry and its potential for growth.

“I’ve always felt that a community needs to be balanced in order to grow properly and to have the kinds of attributes and facilities that people want,” Raggio said. He defines “balance” as “a fairly good cross-section of places where people work--commercial, retail and industry.” While the commercial and retail sectors have thrived under Glendale’s redevelopment project, industry has been ignored. “There is no nucleus of industry,” Raggio said. “It is scattered. There is no one really doing anything as a group.”

Need Questioned

Some industrialists, though, say Raggio’s idea is far-fetched and that the city lacks reasonably priced land for it. John C. Schwarz, a plastics manufacturer who, for economic reasons, moved his plant to Sante Fe Springs last November after 50 years in Glendale, said there is little need for high-technology applications among local industries. He said technology “has not advanced to the point that everybody says it has. The electronic wonder has been oversold.”

Schwarz and other industrialists also say that businesses now in Glendale have no need for such high technology.

“There’s only a small nucleus of corporations or business entities that today can put together a high-tech system, then take advantage of it,” Schwarz said. “It takes a JPL or Lockheed to put that kind of effort together. Schwarz Bros. Plastics is one company that doesn’t need that.”

Others, however, believe Raggio’s ideas have merit. Jamie Maddox, director of promotions for Johnston Foods of Glendale, said, “High-tech is the present and the future. We had the Industrial Revolution; this is the communications revolution. Technological advances are going to be incredibly rapid.”

Raggio said he believes such new technology can be applied to any business or industry. He helped design the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, launched in 1958. And, as manager of design engineering at JPL, he introduced a sophisticated computer-aided design and manufacturing system five years ago. “People in my business are used to hearing, ‘It can’t be done.’ Then we go out and do it,” he said.

Glimpse Into Future

Wearing a gray sweater and casual slacks, Raggio guided a visitor on a recent morning through the computer-design room at JPL. In a room occupied by engineers working on multidimensional designs of space-age components on powerful computers, Raggio talked about new technology. His eyes gleamed as he described computers that allow the operator to not only look at the outside of a building, for example, but to turn it around or view it from above, even walk into the building and look out the window.

“A cube has six sides,” Raggio said. “But sometimes we spend all of our time looking at only the side we can see. We have new dimensions now that we never had before.”

Critics of Raggio’s plan point to the growing failures in many high-tech centers such as the Silicon Valley, where semiconductor manufacturers are struggling to survive because of dwindling sales and stiff international competition.

Wesley C. Seastrom, chairman of Seastrom Manufacturing of Glendale, one of the oldest and largest producers of nuts, bolts and electronic hardware, said he prefers the diversity of industry within Glendale to high-tech development. “With a broader base, we have a better chance that we would not go down if any one segment of industry caught cold,” he said.

Lack of Land

Seastrom, who helped define industrial goals when the city adopted its land-use element of the General Plan in 1977, also noted that the city lacks any large piece of land for industrial development. The Grand Central Industrial Centre, a 133-acre development on the site of the former airport in western Glendale now owned by Prudential Insurance Co., is the only large industrial park in the city. It also is home to most of the major manufacturers still remaining, Seastrom said, and he would balk at any attempt to force those users out.

The other industrial areas include a small industrial park in Montrose and a corridor along San Fernando Road in the southwest corner of the city. But much of the San Fernando Road strip has been converted to commercial services and offices.

Raggio said it is too soon to say where a technology park should be built or how much it might cost. But he maintains that it might not require much land. “If you don’t have land to spread out, you can spread up,” he said. “A computer doesn’t really care whether it is working in a laboratory or in a business office.”

Acreage zoned for industrial use in Glendale has dropped from 550 to 536 in 10 years, according to the city Planning Department. More acreage will be converted from industrial zoning to commercial and residential development when the city adopts its new zoning consistency plan this spring.

The land-use element proposes that the city form an industrial redevelopment zone to build industrial parks, particularly for high-tech research and development. But Seastrom and others say that proposal was dismissed years ago as too costly.

Rising Prices

At the same time, Seastrom concedes that many family-operated manufacturers are selling out to office and commercial developers because of rising land values, which have jumped from $4 a square foot in 1975 to $20 now. “You can’t fault people for being able to sell out and make a profit,” he said. But he contended that the transition “is not good for the city as a whole.”

Raggio travels frequently to technology parks throughout the country and said he has carefully researched the development of such parks, including one owned by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute near Troy, N.Y. The Rensselaer park, opened in 1981, is considered to be one of the best “incubator programs” in the nation for helping new high-tech firms get started, Raggio said.

That park is expected to provide 9,000 new jobs in an area with a population of less than 60,000, said Michael Wacholder, acting director. Industry that once thrived in the upper Hudson River Valley virtually died out years ago as iron smelters and clothing mills moved elsewhere. The new park has brought back prosperity--and jobs--to the community, he said.

Raggio concedes that he may have difficulty winning support from the traditionally conservative community leaders. His ideas, such as the one to create a central park by covering a subterranean section of the Ventura Freeway between Louise Street and Pacific Avenue, are unconventional. He advocates building automated parking garages that operate by computer to store cars in slots; such garages can hold twice as many automobiles as conventional ones.

But Raggio pointed out that local governments traditionally are among the slowest to use technological advances. He said, “There has to be people like me on the City Council, just to stir up the juices.

“Like it or not, we live here in the midst of a technological demography. The industry is here, the technology is here and we’re in the right spot.”