The face of unemployment in California apparently are NFL players pulling down six to seven figures and pro team owners who milk the egos of elected leaders for even fatter profits.

The only real job creating initiative of note that cuts through California’s web of bureaucratic red tape involves action being taken this week by the state legislature.

Democrats and Republicans alike are falling over each other to exempt major sports arenas proposed in Santa Clara, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and possibly San Diego from a costly component of the environment review process that the legislature created.

Senate Bill 292 would allow those projects to bypass a time consuming and costly three-year process in the courts when anyone challenges environment impact reports. Given cutbacks in funding the court system, such challenges going forward could take four to five years. Instead the legislation calls for all challenges to go directly to an appeals court. It also has a mandated175-day period for a ruling to be rendered after an environmental impact report is filed.

No one is going to argue that the EIR process isn’t costly, time-consuming and has at times killed business investment and jobs alike.

But why the exemption for multi-billionaires that benefit the most from sports arenas? We are told people will be employed part-time in Los Angeles hawking hot dogs and beer, taking tickets, and cleaning up after events. In other locales where new stadiums would replace old ones the legislation would save similar part-time jobs

It is curious why the same express service isn’t being granted to those concerns that would create employment California needs the most - permanent full-time blue collar jobs ranging from $12 to $20 an hour.

Lathrop has challenged Manteca’s CenterPoint project that has a number of firms interested in locating directly across from the Union Pacific intermodal facility. They are firms that want to take advantage of proximity to the UP facility to tear apart rail shipments and repackage them. It has a potential to create 800 permanent jobs plus trucking jobs as well.

Backers of the LA stadium dismiss air quality concerns from traffic on game day. They say the environmental review break is well-deserved by the fact they intend to build the most energy efficient stadium in the nation to offset the greenhouse effect of all of those fans’ vehicles.

The CenterPoint project will drastically reduce truck trips by putting distribution centers right across from where truck trailers are placed and taken off trains.

There is little doubt the maze that is California’s environmental review process needs to be streamlined. There is no justification, though, to let mega billionaires play by different rules.

California is thoroughly criticized as not being business friendly.

That isn’t the case.

California is leadership challenged.

Politicians can’t resist creating new laws to soothe constituencies that they need to get elected. At the same time they refuse to put in check monsters that have spawned from legislation either passed by their predecessors or by them.

If the streamlined stadium environmental process is a surefire way to generate jobs, then why not simply bypass the EIR process as it now sits and make it possible for every development to go from final receipt of the environmental review document to unobstructed green light to proceed in 175 days?

The unemployment rate in California is at a stubborn 12 percent.

If an express environment review process for building a $1.2 billion stadium in LA can put part-time beer hawkers to work, imagine what such a 175-day cap for posturing over environmental studies would do for creating fulltime jobs that pay decent wages.