Greetings, friends! If you’ve been wondering what you were going to do this morning after finishing off the Times crossword¹ here are a bunch of new public records for your reading pleasure. There’s no single document here that’s mind-blowingly important, but, as I have mentioned many and many a time, we all are strong believers around here in the Mosaic Theory of Intelligence Gathering, and these are just more puzzle pieces, some of them quite important qua puzzle pieces!²

• Assorted Fashion District Emails 2017 — These are emails to/from people at the Fashion District BID and various other correspondents. There are no real blockbusters here compared to, e.g., last month’s momentous release of Skid Row Neighborhood Council emails, but there is some interesting stuff. Perhaps most interesting is this set, which includes a bunch of conspiratorial nonsense from the Central City Association as well as a detailed report-out from the BID’s Board retreat in March. This latter document will certainly turn out to be essential in at least one project I’m pursuing in relation to lobbying by BIDs, a sadly and almost surely illegally unregulated activity.
• Fashion District Transactions February through April 2017 — More transaction reports. These are essential in ways that are hard to predict in advance. The big surprise here is that the Fashion District has recently spent $1647³ consulting with downtown legal beagles Bradley & Gmelich, the same law firm that the criminal conspiracy known as the South Park BID seems recently to have hired to (mis)handle its CPRA affairs and practices.⁴

And turn the page for more emails: North Hollywood BID, Figueroa Corridor BID, and our old friends, the Downtown Center BID!

• Emails between the North Hollywood BID and the City of LA April 2017 — Just the usual stuff but more of it.⁵ I uploaded both PDFs (for reading) and EMLs (for searching and attachments).
• Emails between the Figueroa Corridor BID and the City of LA for April 2017 — See above comments. Both this BID and the North Hollywood BID are run by Urban Place Consulting, also famous for its BID consultancy, not least in the shocking case of the Fashion District BID renewal.⁶
• Downtown Center BID emails with other downtown BIDs 2016-2017 — This is a highly various collection of over 300 emails between people at the Downtown Center BID and various other downtown BIDs and correspondents. This is chock full o’ nuts, and you’ll be hearing more about material from this set soon enough. Meanwhile, here it is in case you want to pan for gold on your own.

1. For your choice of Times. Around here we can do the LAT Sunday in about 45 minutes and the NYT Sunday in about…well, TBH, we’ve never actually been able to finish one without cheating.
2. The linked-to Wikipedia article on the Mosaic Theory of Intelligence Gathering is particularly feckless, even when judged by the relative standards of its fellow Wikipedia articles. If you’re interested in the Mosaic Theory, and especially in its relation to government transparency, you can hardly do better than to read the following essential paper: The Mosaic Theory, National Security, and the Freedom of Information Act. David Pozen, Yale Law Journal, 115:628 (2005). Pozen gives a particularly useful definition: The “mosaic theory” describes a basic precept of intelligence gathering: Disparate items of information, though individually of limited or no utility to their possessor, can take on added significance when combined with other items of information. Combining the items illuminates their interrelationships and breeds analytic synergies, so that the resulting mosaic of information is worth more than the sum of its parts. Even more interesting and relevant is a bit that Pozen quotes from the Department of the Navy’s Freedom of Information Act regulations: The Mosaic Theory is “[t]he concept that apparently harmless pieces of information when assembled together could reveal a damaging picture.” That, friends, right there, is our CPRA methodology in one short sentence, courtesy of the freaking Navy!
3. This is more than 6.5 times what I recently paid to get some counteradvice on one of B&G or someone’s very poorly thought-out pieces of advice to the FDBID. Stay tuned!
4. South Park is going to be sorry about this, and so, it now appears, is the Fashion District.
5. I’m going out to see Mr. Aaron Aulenta in a couple of days to scan all the emails he thought, after wise consideration or whatever, that he was allowed to redact. Perhaps there’ll be some gems in there?
6. About which I predict you will be hearing a lot more and not so long from now!