Minority Owned Business

California's seven largest investor-owned utility companies still have a way to go to meet a state mandate to buy 20% of their supplies and services from minority and women contractors by 1993. But legislative and industry watchdogs, although skeptical of some of the companies' figures, are meanwhile praising their efforts to meet the goals. Last year, of a total $4.958 billion in purchases, the companies spent $823.2 million--or 16.

Heat, dust and the whining of saws did little to dim the smiles Thursday as Taco Bell and a coalition of minority contractors announced that a new Compton store was being built by a black-owned contractor employing community residents. But underlying the goodwill was continuing frustration that black and other minority contracting firms have won far too little of the construction work that resulted from the riots' devastation and the subsequent pledges of rebuilding from large corporations.

Six of California's largest utilities entered into an agreement Friday setting a goal to give 20% of the dollar value of all contracts they award to minority-or women-owned firms within five years. The agreement, to be administered by the state Public Utilities Commission, was worked out by Assemblywoman Gwen Moore (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee.

In a decision that could undermine a deal to create the nation's largest minority-owned cable TV company, the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday voted to eliminate a longstanding tax credit designed to increase minority ownership of media properties. The committee's vote comes only a few weeks after Intermedia Partners, a San Francisco-based minority-operated cable company, agreed to buy the cable franchises of Viacom Inc. for $2.3 billion.

It's the returned phone call, no matter how late the hour. It's the special gift, the shoulder to lean on. Touches like these have helped make Terrie Williams' reputation as a public relations expert and trusted adviser in the entertainment industry and beyond. People who have benefited from Williams' skills range from neophyte job-seekers to big names such as Eddie Murphy, Nelson Mandela and Sally Jessy Raphael.

In the columns of black smoke that rose from Los Angeles during three days of rioting, some of the city's most powerful symbols of racial tension and community disenfranchisement disappeared from the landscape they once dominated. For decades, the cramped and faded liquor stores of South Los Angeles were a flash point of conflict over issues that have drawn, in many ways, from the same well of emotions that overflowed in the days of rioting.

In the wake of charges that it has been guilty of racial discrimination at several of its Denny's restaurants, the chain's parent company on Thursday signed an agreement with the NAACP pledging to hire and promote minorities and increase purchases from minority-owned businesses.

A prominent member of Orange County's Korean-American business community has proposed that the Garden Grove City Council set aside several blocks of mostly undeveloped property for an international cultural center and a shopping mall. Ho Young Chung, a former president of the county's Korean American Assn.

Shortly after losing his job in 1993 because of downsizing in the aerospace industry, Oxnard entrepreneur Fernando Perez woke up one night and decided to chase a dream. The Mexican-born father of three wanted to tap the family's savings to launch his own company, drawing on nearly three decades of defense industry experience to open a lab that calibrates instruments for the medical and aerospace fields. To his wife, it sounded like it could be a risky nightmare. But the gamble paid off.