Earlier this week, not-so-shadowy BID consultant Susan Levi, who among other things serves as the Executive Director of the South Los Angeles Industrial Tract BID, sent me a copy of the SLAIT BID’s transactions by vendor from January 2013. The most interesting item, or at least the item I’m presently most interested in right now, appears on page 3, under “Edward Henning & Associates.” Edward Henning, of course, is a consulting engineer and seems to have made something of a career of preparing the engineering reports which are mandated by the Property and Business Improvement District Law of 1994 at §36622(n) for BID establishments.¹ A little arithmetic reveals that the SLAIT BID paid Henning $9,000 for their 2015 renewal. This is roughly 10% of the approximately $80,000 which the consultant seems to earn. There’s no moral to this story, at least not yet. It’s merely the latest datapoint I’ve collected in my attempt to understand the finances of BID establishment and renewal.

Also recently I received a bunch of minutes from the Board meetings of the Historic Core BID, and you can turn the page for a link and some brief comments.

Anyway, yeah, the minutes are here on Archive.Org. They’re interesting for what they reveal about staffing over at the HCBID, that second weirdest of the smaller downtown BIDs. For instance, the famed Patti Berman, also of the Downtown LA Neighborhood Council, worked for them for a while but now she doesn’t.² However, there’s not much other info in these things³ because Blair Besten has evidently taken to putting all the juicy details, if juicy details there be, into separate reports, copies of which she did not supply with these minutes. I’ll let you know as soon as I get them!

Image of Blair Besten shamelessly rips off a trope developed by the late, great, Andy Warhol. I started with this picture of Blair Besten with a bunch of cops, shamelessly nabbed from La Blair’s Twitter feed and then sent through the fine-grinding mills of the MK.Org transformativo-imaginactionistic jpeg processing facility to the point where, changed, changed utterly, so that a terrible beauty is born, it is now eligible to be released under the label ©2017 MichaelKohlhaas.org.

1. And elsewhere in the code for BID renewals, which are run in essentially the same manner as establishments, with the (fairly horrific) difference that establishments max out at a five year term, whereas property-based BIDs can renew for up to ten.
2. Which seems to be the occasion for an inordinate amount of whinging from Blair Besten about how understaffed she is. Simple solution? Hire more staff! You’re welcome!!
3. Unless I just haven’t learned how to read them yet, which is highly possible.