Did Mike Bonin lie about his ability to remove properties from the Venice Beach BID? Or did he just not care enough to read the law governing BID formation? Or both?One of the most contentious issues in the very, very contentious formation of a business improvement district in Venice has been the existence of properties with commercial zoning that are used solely for residential purposes that were included in the BID and therefore assessed. This is the basis of a recently filed lawsuit against the City as well as a significant number of other protests against the BID.
For instance, in May 2016, Venice homeowner1 Louis Traeger wrote to the City protesting the inclusion of his home in the BID. On June 1, 2016 Los Angeles City Clerk Holly Wolcott answered him, stating:
In address of your request to remove said property from the proposed Business Improvement District, the City Clerk does not have the authority to remove or add properties in a Business Improvement District. However, we will forward your request and this information to the Engineer conducting the survey and analysis for the creation of the Venice Beach Business Improvement District.
Further, you requested notice of any hearing concerning the approval of the Venice Beach Business Improvement District in order to submit your written opposition. If your property is ultimately included within the Business Improvement District boundaries, a notice of the City Council hearing date will be mailed to you. At the hearing, an opportunity will be provided to protest the establishment.
Los Angeles City Clerk Holly Wolcott whispering secrets to Councildude Mitch Englander on November 8, 2016. She tells the truth, and nothing but the truth, but no how, no way, are you telling the whole truth, Ms. Holly.
As far as I can tell2 what Holly Wolcott says is the truth and it’s nothing but the truth, but it is in absolutely no way at all the whole truth. Her statement that “the City Clerk does not have the authority to remove or add properties in a Business Improvement District” is true. When she follows it up with a statement that she will “forward your request and this information to the Engineer conducting the survey and analysis” she is certainly creating the impression that ONLY the engineer is empowered to remove properties. This is not true. It’s really badly not true, as I will demonstrate below.
Photograph of busted light in the Media District taken by Media District BID Executive Director and preconviction malfeasant Lisa Schechter.This is just a quick announcement of some new documents from the Hollywood Media District BID. We have the BID’s 2014 and 2015 tax returns as well as minutes from all Board and Committee meetings from February through December 2016. I also got a ton of emails from Laurie Goldman and Lisa Schechter to and from the City of L.A. They’re not ready to make available yet, though. The Media District BID, alone among all BIDs of whom I request records,4 provides emails to me in native .eml format. This is absolutely ideal for my own research for a number of reasons, but it does create some obstacles in distribution.5 Hence I’ll be making those emails available as necessary and will put them all on the Archive if I ever manage to get a batch eml to PDF converter working properly.6
Mitch O’Farrell in a strip-mall somewhere yelling about something.Our work on Selma Park has been getting a lot of action over the last couple days since the L.A. Times published this editorial criticizing a recent motion of O’Farrell’s. The Times puts it thus:
City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell has proposed barring adults unaccompanied by children from entering playgrounds. It’s an effort, he said, to keep city parks “free of creepy activity.” Who wouldn’t want to ban creepy activity or creepy people from playgrounds?
This editorial prompted a massive ongoing freakout on Reddit, followed by O’Farrell’s feckless denial on Twitter and moving from there to a blog post by the incomparable Lenore Skenazy, then on to Slate, and then everywhere. And the way the Times describes the issue is certainly frightening:
But what O’Farrell is proposing goes far beyond targeting worrisome activities that, in most cases, are already outlawed. It would bar any adult from sitting on a bench, exercising or otherwise enjoying public space near [a] playground unless he or she brought a child along. Is this really necessary?
One of the legitimate, Recreation and Parks Commission approved, signs at Selma Park stating that use of the playground is restricted to children and caregivers. The sign cites LAMC 83.44 and Penal Code section 653g, neither of which actually exists.
According to the Times, Mitch O’Farrell proposed this motion because Hollywood residents complained about drug dealers in some park. But Mitch O’Farrell is famous for confusing Kerry Morrison and her dimwit BID buddies with residents of Hollywood. He thinks they’re his constituents even though none of them live in Hollywood. He’s made this error with respect to tour bus regulation, and also street characters, and also Hollywood nightclubs. In each of these cases, “Hollywood residents” has turned out to be code for “Kerry Morrison.”
So even though I don’t yet have documentary evidence to back it up, my best guess is that this story about Hollywood residents complaining about a park is O’Farrell-speak for something like the following chain of events: Kerry Morrison and her armed flunky Steve Seyler bitched and moaned about the HPOA’s illegal signs being removed from Selma Park.7 O’Farrell then probably asked the City Attorney how to ban grownups from the park again. Probably the City Attorney told him at that point that it wasn’t possible, because it’s not, and probably it also came up at this point that the City’s official signs banning adults without kids from actual demarcated playgrounds were really outdated, given that neither LAMC 83.44 nor Penal Code section 653g actually exist.
Of course, not only is it certainly illegal to cite people for violating repealed laws, but it’s almost certainly illegal for the City to post signs threatening to cite people for violating them in order to keep them out of places that they legally have the right to be. So Kerry Morrison and Mitch O’Farrell, faced with the possibility of the removal of even the official signs,8 settled, I’m thinking, on the very motion that is currently undergoing two minutes hate from the Internet.
Morning in Valley Village in 2007.In September, local activist group Save Valley Village filed suit against the City of Los Angeles and the City Council alleging in their petition that
The Councilmembers of the Los Angeles City Council operate according to an agreement, i.e. The Vote Trading Pact, not to Vote No on any Council Project in another council district and said agreement by its very terms requires reciprocality, also called mutuality, whereby the agreement not to Vote No by one Councilmember is given in exchange for the other Councilmember’s not to vote No on a Council Project in his/her council district.
There’s no place on earth like Venice, so why shouldn’t the destruction of BIDs in California begin in Venice?A couple weeks ago, a group of brave and determined residents of Venice filed a writ petition against the City of Los Angeles and the Venice Beach BID asking the court to set aside the ordinance that created it, to force the City to redraw the BID’s boundaries in accordance with the law, and, most interestingly, to order the City to contest the assessments levied against City-owned properties in the BID. You can read a copy of the initial petition:
Or here — on the new dedicated page, also available through the menu structure above.
Or here — directly from static storage; see the titles better!
They argue that their residential properties will get no special benefits from the BID, which violates the California Constitution. They argue that many of the proposed activities of the BID, specifically the security program, are inherently incapable of providing special benefits. And most interestingly from the point of view of general anti-BID theory, they argue that the City has a duty to its citizens to scrutinize the BID plan to be sure that City-owned parcels included in the BID actually benefit from being in the BID, and that by rubber-stamping the BID proposal, the City has abdicated this duty. If this argument succeeds it will shake the very foundations of BIDs in Los Angeles, which rely to various extents on the automatic yes votes provided by City-owned property. This automatic approval, by the way, was set up in 199813 via Council File 96-1972 which, in pertinent part, includes a directive to:
REQUIRE the City Clerk to sign off on Proposition 218 ballots and support petitions for property-based BIDs, unless the Council directs otherwise.
And none of this is really a secret. For instance, here are more than 30 pages of emails from Kerry Morrison to various coreligionists extolling the virtues of Christian love for one’s City, praying for one’s City, serving one’s City as a “Christ Follower,” and whatnot. And there’s a long and vital tradition of this kind of thing in Christianity, to be sure. E.g. compare Paul’s letter to the Hebrews 11:9-10 on how Abraham’s faith led him to leave his home and live like a stranger for the sake of finding the City of God:
By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
Cory Palka giving a performative demonstration of the fact that Mark Ryavec is not only a slavering psychopath, he’s also either clueless or a liar or both.A few weeks ago, Rory Carroll published an excellent article in The Guardian on how the City of Los Angeles has used gang injunctions as a tool of gentrification in Venice. Of course, this is not news to anyone who’s been paying attention since the injunction began in 2000. Even at the time it seemed clear that the injunction was a response to the wave of gentrification that began in Venice in the late 1980s and underwent unprecedented acceleration through the 1990s. Of course, everyone who’s smelting gold out of the housing stock of Oakwood in a blast furnace fueled by the burning bodies and lives of the poor people, the dark-skinned people, fed into the hopper by the LAPD, denies this every which way.
And these arguments have been repeated so often I have nightmares about them. “The cops would never ever do such a thing.” “There’s no conspiracy to chase out darkies.”16 And so on and on and on. But Venice’s own muse of slavering psychopathy, the very king of the gentrifiers, the universally acknowledged whitest man in Venice, Mark Ryavec himself, has distilled all of them, every last threadbare tin-foil-hat characterization, into one bitter pithy little ball. As Rory Carroll puts it:
For Mark Ryavec, head of the Venice Stakeholders Association, the notion that police act as gentrification agents is “a bunch of radical bullshit”.
Debbie Dyner Harris, uncaptioned.I’ve written before on how the City of Los Angeles arranges for itself to be lobbied by BIDs for various reasons. Now it appears that even this usual arrangement wasn’t enough for Mike Bonin and Debbie Dyner Harris at CD11 with respect to the Venice Beach BID. In particular, during the formation process, in December 2015, Dyner Harris emailed Miranda Paster asking if she could have a voting seat on the BID Board of Directors:
Hi Miranda, how are you? I hope all is well. I am checking on something we had discussed a while ago, but I can’t find in my notes. I wanted to confirm whether or not the City, as 1/3 paying member of the BID,18 is allowed to be a voting member on the BID board.
Miranda Paster replied a few days later, stating:
We opt out of sitting on the Board because it may appear to be a conflict of interest. We can sign the petition for a BID and we cast a ballot for the Prop 218 balloting. However, we do not sit on the boards and vote.
Mike Bonin making kissy-face with Eric Garcetti in 2013 just before laying waste to the canals like Godzilla laying waste to Tokyo.The L.A. City Ethics Commission website is a marvelous repository of fascinating minutiae. It more than repays the kind of obsessive poring-over in which we here at MK.Org specialize. Today’s subject is the quarterly reports that every qualified candidate has to submit detailing their expenditures. You can find all of Mike Bonin’s here.20 In particular, take a look at his 3rd quarter report for 2016. On Schedule E, the list of expenditures, note that some items are labeled “Returned contributions.” No reasons are given for the returns, but at least in some cases it’s possible to track down at least some elements of the story via the Google.
Marisa Tomei: “Please honor this building and its architect, Kurt Meyer, with a Historic Cultural Monument designation.”I reported briefly last week on the whole to-do about the City’s wanton approval of a Frank Gehry megaplex at 8150 Sunset and, more recently, on the extremely weird fact that the Council’s PLUM22 Committee forwarded proposed historic-cultural designation of the Lytton Savings building on to the full Council without a recommendation, even though CD4 Councilmember David Ryu explicitly favors the designation. This is just a brief update with links to more documents.
And please, never forget that I am not a lawyer and I don’t really conclusively know what I’m talking about with respect to legal matters. On the other hand, at least I’m honest, and as I will argue, pretty convincingly at least to myself, many of the lawyers involved in this whole Venice Beach BID fiasco, at least the ones working for the City, are either incompetent, dishonest, or some toxic combination of the two. Which is partly why I don’t feel inclined to refrain from commenting. I may be wrong, but at least I’m trying to be right.
Links omitted.
Except for East Hollywood, but they hardly count, do they?
Mostly that Archive.org doesn’t accept uploads in this format.
I’m trying to get email2pdf running, but the Python 3 dependencies are a little out of my depth on the x386 machine I’m working on right now. If you have advice, please get in touch.
Which seems to be a form of pleading arguing that even if the opposing party’s facts are correct they don’t actually support a cause of action. As much as it pains me to admit it, I think that’s probably accurate in this case.
Which means that it cannot be amended and refiled, so it’s over (barring appeal, I suppose).
It’s easy to mock the victims of the powerful for their seeming craziness, but it’s crucial to remember that (a) the powerful get to define for the most part what are the standards of sanity and obviously they do so in a way to disadvantage their opponents. Speaking truth to power always seems crazy for exactly this reason. Until one day it doesn’t any more. Also (b) the power elite in this City, in this world, are so arrogant, so insulated from the effects of their corruption, that they drive their victims to unhinged behavior.
It’s public information that Kerry Morrison lives in Windsor Square. For instance, see this bit of fluff in the Larchmont Buzz, wherein we, to our everlasting joy, learn that “Kerry Morrison, Executive Director of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance (HPOA*) and a long-time resident of Windsor Square, shared her experience of taking the LAX FlyAway from the nearby pick-up location in Hollywood to and from LAX for her Thanksgiving flights.”
They may say “our less fortunate brothers and sisters of color” or whatever the hell they say, but they mean “darkies.”
It may well be radical, and I’m not just admitting that Mark Ryavec is half-right out of a sense of decency. I’m admitting it because in many cases to be half-right is worse than to be all wrong.
I’m not sure why DDH says that the City holds 1/3 of the property in the BID. The final figure was about 1/4 instead. I’ve previously reported that CD11 staff originally stated that the City’s BID assessment was to be more than $600,000, which is in fact about 1/3 of the total. Perhaps DDH’s use of the 1/3 figure is based on a previous version of the BID assessment roster.
And obviously she wouldn’t be pushing the issue on her own. Mike Bonin must have wanted a voice on the board himself. Why is that?
There’s no reason to suspect that Mike’s antics are significantly more sleazy or interesting than those of his colleagues. I’m just focusing on him this morning because why not?
Note that she gave the money under the name of Castellani but registered under the name of Murphy. The principle of charity leads us to assume that this is a matter of professional name v. personal name. Also, if it was an attempt at covering up something it wasn’t effective at all, so it doesn’t hurt the argument to assume the best of intentions.
Planning and Land Use Management
Yes, it’s true. Not all our readers, in fact, not all our writers, know who this Marisa Tomei person is.
