Marketing LA to Angelenos

Los Angeles City Controller Laura Chick is bringing up one of LAist's favorite topics: Los Angeles. The once City Councilwoman (and probably future City Councilwoman when she runs and probably wins) wanted Los Angeles to be tourist friendly and not just for tourists, but for residents.

"When I first got elected, I asked why we weren't doing more to market Los Angeles," Chick was quoted saying in the Daily News. "I recently went to Chicago and saw what they're doing and asked myself, `Why can't we do that here?' We just take the tourism industry for granted because of Hollywood and the weather. We don't really do anything to market ourselves and take advantage of all we have here."

Chick is worried that Los Angeles is not ready, especially with the could-be onslaught of tourist from China in future years. She wants greeters at the airport (in Chicago, they have a blues band playing at the luggage bays), neighborhood tours and a festival guide telling people what's going on every weekend.

But the city's Cultural Affairs Department does a printed festival guide book every year, but hardly markets it and still doesn't publish it on the web, save for old-school PDF downloads. And Metro, the city and various other agencies helped fund ExperienceLA, a mecca of a cultural calendar for the region, yet the the very same agencies do little to promote the web resource. Step one should be using what we have, not keeping it secret from the public.

Photo of R2D2 visiting the Walt Disney Concert Hall by jslander via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr