Other recent switchovers are the Downtown Center BID, the Historic Core BID, and both South Park I and II. Also the HPOA switched its cleaning contract to StreetPlus last year. This company is turning out to be a crucial player in the LA BID game, so I’ll be focusing some attention on them from now on. The first fruits of this are the 2016 proposal and resulting contract between StreetPlus and the SLAIT BID. There are some ancillary materials included there as well. This material is not only intrinsically interesting, but it has a lot to tell us about security in other BIDs. There’s some discussion and some more links after the break.
Also, I have 29 emails between Lisa Schechter of the Hollywood Media District BID and Kerry Morrison/Devin Strecker of the HPOA. These are mostly negatively interesting for their extreme lack of content. I’m guessing this is due to them switching as much of their communication as possible to phone calls and other off-the-record media. This, in turn, demonstrates, I’m still guessing, the feeling that my constant CPRA requests have engendered amongst local BIDs that they are operating in a minefield.
Well, good. They are. And the fact that they laid these mines themselves with their arrogance, disrespect for the law, and generalized idiocy, but still for some reason manage to act surprised at the negative consequences of stepping on the mines speaks volumes of their assumptions of privilege and delusions of immunity. There are, however, a few positively interesting items, and there are links and discussion after the break.
The StreetPlus stuff from SLAIT is available:
- On Archive.Org
- Via the new SLAIT page that I put up this morning in the menu structure. I have pretty much miscellaneous unpublished stuff that I’ve accumulated and which I hope also to publish there over the next few weeks.
- Directly from static storage
The most interesting item in this batch is the Proposal, especially for the light it sheds on StreetPlus’s activities in other BIDs, the structure of their company, and their theories on BID security work. I hope to write a post about this document quite soon, but it’s worth your time to read it if you’re interested in the future of BID security in LA.
And the emails are available en masse only via Archive.Org, but here are some highlights:
- April 2016 email from Kerry Morrison to Lisa Schechter advising her on how to get the DMV on Cole Avenue in the Media District to pay its assessments. The problem is that the State of California is very assertive about not paying assessments that are used for services which don’t benefit the property, e.g. branding and tourism promotion and so on. The other thing is that there’s effectively nothing that BIDs or even the City of Los Angeles can do to make them pay. Except, of course, to bitch and moan about it in letters. Here are the three attachments:
- May 2014 letter from Kerry Morrison to Miranda Paster about how the state won’t pay its assessment for the Hollywood Courthouse and asking her to deal with it. I wrote a post about this in November 2014 but at that early stage of my BID investigations I didn’t actually understand what was going on so much.
- September 2014 letter from Kerry Morrison to State Controller John Chiang about the same issue and asking him to deal with it.
- April 2015 letter from Judicial Council to Holly Wolcott agreeing to pay back assessments from 2011, but threatening that if the assessments for the courthouse are not adjusted at BID renewal to reflect the fact that the courthouse doesn’t benefit from significant parts of the BID’s activities, they will protest the renewal. This is probably a fairly serious threat, but one that is easily resolved by the City. As I discussed at great length recently, the Property and Business Improvement District Law of 1994 at §36624 explicitly allows the City Council to reduce assessments to reflect specific benefits if the BID itself doesn’t reduce them. Why wouldn’t they do this for the freaking State of California? Especially when they actually have no recourse if the State won’t pay. It’s worth watching, certainly.
- Devin Strecker to Lisa Schechter telling her in response to her attempting to share some files with him that “…we do not use drop box in our office, so I am unable to download.” Of course, this is freaking hilarious, and I will explain why in a full-scale post on the subject as soon as possible. Meanwhile I just wanted to toss it up here mostly to see who clicks on this link!
(Note: I actually managed to write that full-scale post already!)
Image of StreetPlus logo is available for use here for more than 16 different reasons, precisely none of which I’m going to enumerate, thank you very much.
