Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, 99 years ago in 1916. Her truth, like that of John Brown, goes marching on in Los Angeles in 2015.Today I’m pleased to announce the availability of a bunch more documents, some of them really interesting, and none of them of the sort we’ve usually featured here. First of all we are adding the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to our list of scrutinizees, albeit in a fairly desultory manner. Documents we obtain will be available from the usual menus above, and here is a link to that page. We kick things off with a couple years worth of form 700s from the Commissioners and the Executive Director. For almost certainly nefarious reasons, the city of Los Angeles, unlike other more enlightened cities in California, does not require BID board members or high-level employees to file financial disclosures (although this may be changing soon, fingers crossed!), so obtaining these forms was the only way to get any insight into Kerry Morrison’s finances insofar as they relate to her work for the HPOA. And now, like Jesus Christ hisself, we have saved the best for last, so the good stuff is after the break! Tom Waits is watching you, white people!
Finally, I’m going to start publishing materials from lawsuits by, against, and related to LA BIDs. The top-level page is here and also, of course, in the menu structure above. The first two items we have are an April 2011 suit, Producers Center v. Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition and, most importantly, and the reason for that picture of Dorothy Day gracing this post, a September 2014 suit, LA Catholic Worker and LACAN v. Central City East Association and City of LA. This last one has the BIDs running scared, and for good reason, cause they’re worried that they’ll have to stand naked at the bottom of the cross and tell the Good Lord what they did. My colleagues and I will be writing about it (and the rest of this stuff) in some detail soon enough.
Image of Dorothy Day is in the public domain and we got it via Wikimedia. Painting of Tom Waits is by Brendan Mruk, who has kindly released it under the CC BY-SA 3.0 and made it available via Wikimedia. As far as I know neither he nor Tom Waits himself endorse any of the views expressed on this blog or elsewhere. Neither do I know that they don’t so endorse, a course!
