If you’re a local business watcher, Amgen Inc. might be a source of weariness and frustration for you.

Amgen is kind of like a brilliant kid who keeps getting B’s at school. The company has enormous potential but hasn’t lived up to it, at least not in recent years.

Its stock says a lot. Its price has been stuck in the $50s for a decade now, albeit with a couple of surges and swoons out of that range. To be fair, its stock has increased lately, and is up more than 10 percent year to date. Still, when it closed last Thursday at $61, the price was just about where it was 10 years ago.

As a local corporate citizen, Amgen’s record is kind of the same. Oh, sure, it’s a big employer, and it created the Amgen Tour of California bicycle race that was to conclude Sunday. But somehow, you expect more from America’s largest biotech company, which also is one of the three biggest businesses in the L.A. area. (Amgen is in Thousand Oaks, but we include that part of Ventura County in the Business Journal’s coverage territory.)

Amgen’s recent announcement that it would start paying a dividend this year is more or less an admission that it’s topped out as an enterprise. Big companies that don’t pay dividends (think Apple Inc.) often are exciting and need to keep the money to invest in their growth. Big businesses that do pay dividends (think utility companies) typically are reliable if boring profit producers with limited growth prospects.

Maybe that’s why Amgen’s stock price dipped nearly 5 percent after it made its dividend announcement last month. Dividends may be popular now, but they are still associated with frumpy companies.

But wait. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get some thrills from Amgen yet.

Kevin Sharer, Amgen’s chief executive, last month predicted that by 2015 the company would earn between 40 percent and 67 percent more than the estimated earnings for this year. OK, so those numbers may not make you run to boot up your eTrade account, but they certainly are better than we’re used to seeing from Amgen.

And the company does have its boosters. Ken Fisher, writing in Forbes.com last week, said that “unlike many peers offering only drugs in the research phase, (Amgen) has 10 approved drugs spanning 16 conditions, including anemia, arthritis, colon cancer, kidney failure and osteoporosis, well suited to an aging populace.” He wrote that “the time is right” to buy Amgen stock.

I don’t know if he’s right. Obviously, investors would welcome a resurgent Amgen. And Angelenos generally would sure like to see more leadership and participation from Amgen.

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Think of how Rick Caruso has patiently and expertly overcome his opponents over the years. As mentioned in this space a month ago, Caruso has had to wage campaigns for public votes, fight lawsuits, deal with expensive and changing environmental challenges – and that’s in addition to a mall developer’s usual battles to get city approvals, assemble land, attract and keep tenants, etc.

But in the end, it seems he typically comes out ahead. And residents here are rewarded with nice new shopping malls.

So it’s something of a shock to learn that he’s throwing in the towel at Santa Anita. (See the article on page 1.) The Shops at Santa Anita would have been his biggest mall yet.

On the other hand, the obstacles to this project were more numerous than usual. The original vision of creating a “racino” – a race track with slot machines – failed in a public vote. The nearby mall owner sued, forcing him to redo his environmental report. Caruso had to drop condos from the project. Finally, his partner went into bankruptcy and the two are squabbling in court. This has all unfolded over seven years. It was too much for most anybody.

But for those of us who appreciate Caruso’s malls, we can hope he reconsiders his decision and gets Santa Anita back on track.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].