Just a quick note to link to huge piles of records I’ve received over the last few days. These include:

• 2016 emails between Wilshire Center BID, the City of Los Angeles, and Tara Devine
• Brentwood Village BID Board minutes
• East Hollywood BID by-vendor transaction reports
• Emails between the Media District, the City of LA, and the HPOA, December 2016 and January 2017

And you can turn the page for some comments on each of these sets of goodies.

• 2016 emails between Wilshire Center BID, the City of Los Angeles, and Tara Devine — Mister Mike Russell, the WCBID’s executive director, worked incredibly hard to get this material to me in the highly desirable, highly functional, absolutely best-in-show, mbox format. They’re up on Archive.Org as PDFs, which are easy to read but hard to search and don’t include attachments, and as .emls, which are hard to read but easy to search and do include attachments. The attachments are super-important. Just for instance, during 2016, shadowy BID consultant Tara Devine was working for the BID Consortium on the (annual?) State of the BIDs report. She worked closely with Mr. Mike on this, and there are a bunch of drafts attached to these emails.¹
• Brentwood Village BID Board minutes — This is an incredibly sporadic set of minutes from Mike Bonin’s baby doll BID in Brentwood Village. You might recall that Bonin aid and point lady for the universally reviled Venice Beach BID, Debbie Dyner Harris, once tried to use the BVBID as an example of all that is good and holy in BIDworld only to have it aggressively line-edited away by Clerk staffer Miranda Paster for reasons that weren’t clear at the time but are starting to become clear from looking at these minutes.² Now if only I can convince BVBID bossdude Tim Byk that he’s actually required to comply with the law and send me the rest of these minutes, we may get a complete picture of what’s going on out there in West Zillionaireville.
• East Hollywood BID by-vendor transaction reports — Nothing leaps right out from this stuff at this point in time, but it has happened before that even years later the value of records like this becomes clear.
• Emails between the Media District, the City of LA, and the HPOA, December 2016 and January 2017 — Jeffrey Charles Briggs is handling my requests for emails super-smoothly at this point! I haven’t had a chance to upload the actual emls yet, but I will soon, so that attachments become available. If you know what a “contractor placard” is in relation to the City of Los Angeles, drop me a line.

Highly modified image of Mister Mike is highly modified.

1. If you need help getting the attachments out of the emls drop me a line. I plan to write a guide to this soon, but it may be a while. The short, not-for-beginners version is that you should install Mozilla Thunderbird and the most recent version of ImportExportTools, which for some reason isn’t up-to-date on the official Mozilla plug-in repository, so has to be installed manually. Use ImportExportTools to import the emls into the client, and the attachments can then be accessed in a normal manner.
2. I’m being purposely vague because I don’t want to scoop my own upcoming post, but if you read through these you’ll see what I’m talking about.