Wilson Gives Business Owners Safety Pledge

Business partners Liong H. Tee and Roylan Hollins, an Asian-American and an African-American, nearly lost their company in last year’s riots. But with help from the state and federal governments, they rebuilt and reopened.

Gov. Pete Wilson says they should not have to do it again.

To make his point, the Republican chief executive met Thursday with the pair--owners of Janus medical laboratories in Inglewood--and several other business owners at an event designed to hammer home this message: Another round of rioting will not be tolerated.

Making his first stop on a two-day Los Angeles visit in anticipation of verdicts in the Rodney G. King civil rights trial, Wilson praised the determination of riot-area entrepreneurs and alluded to the force being prepared in advance of this trial’s conclusion.

The California National Guard, criticized for a bumbling response a year ago, will be ready on short notice, the governor said. Some troops will be waiting in their armories and as many as 5,000 in the Los Angeles area will be available to hit the streets.

“The response will not be the same,” Wilson said. “We are prepared to protect the people of this community. They are entitled to succeed.”

Janus labs, he said, is the kind of success story he would like to see repeated, and defended.

Tee, a Chinese-American who grew up in the Philippines, and Hollins, a Chicago-bred resident of Baldwin Hills, joined forces two years ago and had just opened a lab in the Crenshaw district when rioters angered by the first King trial verdicts swarmed through their neighborhood.

On the second morning of violence, Tee turned on the television and saw the Rev. Jesse Jackson interviewed in front of the remains of a burned down business, which Tee soon recognized as his own. Although the building was rented, Tee and Hollins lost all their equipment and other materials essential to their business.

With the help of a bridge loan from the state and longer-term financing from the federal Small Business Administration, the business moved to Inglewood and reopened less than two months later.

“This is my neighborhood,” Hollins said, explaining why he stayed in the area. “The doctors I serve service patients from this neighborhood. I feel very much a part of the area.”

Wilson said the pair could “easily have packed up and left Los Angeles as so many other businesses have done. But you didn’t,” he told them. “You stuck by this community and this city.”

The other two businesses at Wilson’s gathering were unable to duplicate Janus’ ability to stay in the area and flourish. One moved out. The other stayed but is struggling.

Paul C. Zuniga, co-owner of Miller Printing and Stationery Co., a family business, said his firm was looted and vandalized. All of the firm’s damage was covered by insurance, and government loans helped the company get by as business lagged, he said.

With money left over from the insurance settlement, the Zunigas bought a building in Burbank and moved their shop there. They left the Washington Boulevard stationery store open, but business slowed to a trickle and they closed it after a few months.

“We live in the Valley and we always wanted to relocate,” Zuniga said. “The opportunity came along. We jumped at it.”

Unlike Zuniga, Floretta Love stayed. Although her eyeglasses shop on Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood suffered no damage, her business plunged to less than one-third of what it was a year ago. A small-business loan has helped her survive, but she told Wilson she needs more help and does not know where she is going to get it.

Wilson also was gently confronted as he left the event by the representative of a Latino vendors group, a shoe salesman who told the governor that dozens of his colleagues on Los Angeles’s Eastside are struggling and have been unable to obtain the government assistance they need to stay in business.

Wilson said the businesses he cited were proof that the restoration effort, while far from complete, is working.

“If you are willing and able to work hard and eager to do so, then you will in fact succeed,” the governor said.