Yesterday I received a bunch of new records from Hollywood BIDboy attorney Jeffrey Charles Briggs, acting on behalf of the East Hollywood BID and also the Media District BID. Some of the stuff had to do with the Media District’s early renewal, which I wrote about yesterday, and today I’m mostly just announcing the balance of the material, which is available from our Archive.Org collections. In particular, we have:

• East Hollywood BID quarterly reports 2012-2016 — BIDs are required by their contracts with the City to submit quarterly reports with updates on how they’ve been spending their money.¹ These are useful to have on hand for reference. There’s nothing in these that stands out right now, but I haven’t read them carefully yet nor even looked at all of them.
• Media District emails with the City of LA — And also a few from the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance folks, although nothing substantial. Again, it’s essential to have this material on hand for reference. There doesn’t seem to be much of special interest here, although there’s a lot more evidence of Rita Moreno’s uncharacteristically activist style as a BID analyst with the Clerk’s office, which is abstractly a good thing, although certainly she’s not going to be an activist if it upsets the BIDs too much.
• Media District emails about Andrews International Security contract — The Media District BID is in the process of hiring infamous private security monolith Andrews International as its security provider, to begin July 1. These are some emails about the process. The most interesting things here are the attachments, which include A/I’s standard contract as well as proposed pricing matrices and so on. Andrews International famously runs the infernal Hollywood BID Patrol for the even-more-infernal Hollwood Property Owners Alliance just North of the Media District, so everything about them is interesting. There is much more material to come regarding this matter, and I will write about it in detail as it comes in, but it’s essential enough that I thought I’d better publish what I had immediately.

So that’s the new stuff, all except for one little email which didn’t exactly fit into any of those categories. It appears to constitute attorney/client communications, and perhaps it was handed over in error. But legally handed over it was, so I’m publishing it, and you can see a copy and read all about it after the break!

The context is that the Media District, like a lot of BIDs, has hired Jeffrey Charles Briggs to deal with my PRA requests.² So when I made a request for records to do with Andrews International at the Media District, he evidently sent this email to Laurie Goldman, president of the Media District’s board of directors, Lisa Schechter, the Media District’s famously criminal executive directrix, and Jim Omahen, operations director for the Media District and one of the very, very few sane people in BIDlandia.³ He listed my various requests and told them to search. Here’s my request concerning A/I:

All communications from and to Jim, Lisa, and Laurie (and any other Board member who might have had communications and not shared them with Jim, Lisa, or Laurie) relating to Andrews International. (This should include emails to/from/cc/bcc andrewsinternational.com, emails that contain the term “Andrews,” and any non-email communications.) this should also include any materials submitted to the BID by such as proposals, bids, draft contracts that have been retained, actual contracts, negotiations, etc., from January 1, 2017 to the date you send them to me

And, uncharacteristically, to this particular item, Jeffrey Charles Briggs appended a note to his clients, stating:

NOTE: I was not aware we had spoken with Andrews about possibly coming aboard — we probably should discuss this before you start searching for records, it might help me understand why Kohlhaas⁴ is after these documents. It might also explain some of the other requests below.

And really, I’m very curious about this. Why does he want to know my purpose in requesting this stuff? It cannot actually be so that he can be sure his clients are responding adequately and compliantly. After all, my purpose does not matter with respect to compliance with CPRA. The law itself, at §6257.5, states explicitly:

This chapter does not allow limitations on access to a public record based upon the purpose for which the record is being requested, if the record is otherwise subject to disclosure.

Well, there’s really no way to be sure what’s going on here. I mean, obviously they’re not going to respond to further CPRA requests about this particular question.⁵

But if I had to guess, I’d guess that Jeffrey Charles Briggs is still smarting from having sent me this email last March, which proved to be the final bit of proof I needed to make a strong case against EHBID ED and Briggs client Nicole Shahenian for illegally lying about pending legislation. Perhaps Briggs figures that if he can figure out what I’m up to he’ll be able to head off any more such debacles. Well, my guess is probably not! Stay tuned, friends!

Oh, P.s.! Don’t forget to take note of Media District head honchoette Laurie Goldman’s answer to Jeffery Charles:

JB – left you a vm a few minutes ago :)

At least someone’s learned to minimize their paper trail!

Image of Hollywood Lawyer Jeffrey Charles Briggs started its life journey as this piece of work from the L.A. Times and ended up in its present backwater retirement community proudly bearing a tattoo on its metaphorical forehead reading, in glowing neon letters, the device ©2017 MichaelKohlhaas.Org.

1. It’s not clear to me whether these are required by law rather than just by contract. My initial sense is that they are not, but I don’t know enough yet to say for sure.
2. They seem to pay him a flat $500 per month. I think he’s up to around 7 BIDs by now, which might add up to $3,500 per month I’m earning for him. However, despite what the evidence suggests, we are NOT colluding on this!
3. The most notable other sane person is Laurie Hughes of the Gateway to LA BID. I’m hard-pressed to think of another one right now.
4. Name changed to protect the…well, not the innocent. After all, none of us is really innocent, amirite? But to protect… well, to protect what’s protected by changing the name. We can all agree on that much, I assume.
5. By “respond” here I mean they’re not going to hand over any records. Obviously they’re going to respond as required by law, stating something along the lines of “forget it, friend, we’re not handing anything over to you!”