For whatever reason I haven’t yet requested many documents about BIDs from the City Clerk, but I’m making up for it now. I’ve started a page here to collect the material. This morning I have minutes from L.A. BID Consortium meetings from 2007 through 2015:
And this material is also available on the Archive.
These may or may not be complete minutes,1 but either way, they’re fascinating both intrinsically and as a starting point for further CPRA requests (I made 12 just yesterday based on clues in these documents). I’ll be writing much more about this material in the future, but one thing that really stands out is the extent to which Miranda Paster, who’s in charge of BID oversight at the Clerk’s office, has been co-opted by the BIDs she’s supposed to regulate. They pay for her to travel to conferences, they pay for her registration fees, and she feeds them information they might find useful and refuses to consider reports that they may be in breach of their contracts.2 This is yet another egregious example of regulatory capture.
It’s been known for a long time that the Clerk won’t oversee the BIDs. I wrote about this recently, quoting the L.A. Times in 2004 to the effect that the Clerk’s office “‘believed their role was limited to assistance in organizing’ the districts, collecting money and gathering reports” and that then-clerk Michael Carey claimed that his office “did not have the staff or the inclination to manage the districts.” These minutes show that that situation is absolutely unchanged. However, the Clerk’s office pretty clearly has some kind of duty to make sure that BIDs abide by the terms of their contracts, so this whole scene is at least a potential point of failure of the Clerk/BID-dustrial complex if the contradictions are sufficiently heightened.
City Clerk logo is a public record and is therefore in the public domain.
