Just what you have all been waiting for, friends! More tales from the massive DCBID document dump of a couple weeks ago. It truly is the gift that keeps on giving!1 And yeah, from one point of view this is yet another inconsequential bit of floof like our recent story about Lena Mulhall, CCALA office manager, using the office UPS account to ship various personal cosplay-linked merchandise hither and yon. But from another, it’s more than consequential, it’s essential evidence of … but of course, you have no idea what I’m talking about cause you haven’t seen the damn email.
You can read the whole chain here or, as usual, turn the page for a transcription. Anyway, remember Laura Mecoy? She’s the hotcha lobbyist who runs a shady little op out of the South Bay known as Mecoy Communications2 who got Kerry Morrison and Carol Schatz a sitdown with the L.A. Times Editorial Board over the street vending issue, giving them an opportunity to spew their poisonous puke all over the table at First and Main.3
And of course, she don’t do that kinda jive for free. After all, she’s a storyteller! A professional storyteller!! And the workman is worthy of her hire, ain’t she? So who’s going to pay her damn bills!? Well, of course, turn the page to find out!
It seems that in February 2017 Laura Mecoy sent a couple months worth of invoices, one unpaid, to Suzanne Holley at her CCALA email address, and the accompanying note read:
From: laura@mecoy.net
Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2017 1:22 PM
To: Suzanne Holley CCA
Subject: Invoice for Coalition to Save Small Business
Dear Suzanne:
Attached please find the hours worked for the Coalition in January and the bill for January. The invoice also includes the December bill. If that check is already in the mail, please disregard. I’ve just not received it yet. If these bills should be going to the DCBID instead, please let me know.
I did receive the $2,000 deposit for the Treasures scripts.4 Thanks so much for that and for all the other work!
Laura Mecoy
President, Mecoy Communications
P: 310.546.5860 |C: 310.529.7717
Anyway, as usual, Suzanne Holley had no freaking idea what to do,5 so she emailed the Queen of Downtown and zillion dollar woman herself, Ms. Carol Schatz:
From: Suzanne Holley CCA
Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2017 7:24 PM
To: Carol Schatz
Subject: FW: Invoice for Coalition to Save Small Business
Carol – what was the agreement on this? Was BID going to pay for all or a percentage of Mecoy? Rodriguez?
Thanks.
Suzanne
By the way, in case you just joined us in the last year or so, the “Rodriguez” she’s referring to is sinister boutique West Los Angeles lobbying firm Rodriguez Strategies, which was hired by a few BIDs in the Spring of 2015 and evidently, it now appears, CCALA as well, to torpedo any reasonable version of the street vending regulations then being weighed by the City Council. They did such a good job of this that by January 2017, when the first semi-concrete proposal hit the agenda, the whole thing was so totally fucked over and unworkable by humans that, naturally, it was everything that Carol Schatz and her flock of flying BID-monkeys could desire.6
And de natch, count on Schatz! She didn’t get to be Queen of Downtown for nothing:7
I think this should be split 50/50—there was no formal agreement and Jessica was out of town.
Carol E. Schatz
President & CEO
Downtown Center Business Improvement District
626 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 200 I Los Angeles, CA 90017
Call: 213-416-7534 I Fax: 213-624-0858
And what the hell, right? Didn’t they have this all worked out before they started their conspiracy? Who hires a bunch of shady hall-lurkers like these crews and doesn’t work out the funding in advance? And what does Jessica being out of town have to do with anything? Like she didn’t answer her phone so they decided to charge half of it to her? Just another crazy slice-O-life from Zillionairelandia!
Image of Laura Mecoy, who in fact is not nearly as sympathetic as we’re making her out to be in this picture, is not only ©2018 MichaelKohlhaas.Org, but it’s also a transformative recombobulating of this lil pupper right here.
- Get off my case, amateur copy-editors! This is national cliché week and I am just celebrating it like the cat i’ the adage ! As they say in my native country, though this be madness, yet there is method in it, or at least that’s what we tell Mom when we get grounded for doing it!
- One of the services she offers is evidently “WEBSITE, CONTENT AND COLLATERAL DEVELOPMENT.” (Shouting is quoted from her website). But note even the lack of a freaking favicon anywhere on her darned website. Not gonna hire her, no ma’am!
- Resulting in this sketchy, noncommittal little piece of crapola deluxe.
- Here she’s referring to the famous CCALA event known to all and sundry and their cousins as Treasures of Los Angeles, which seems to be essentially an excuse for everyone to dress up in formal clothes, drink too much champagne, and stuff large bills into the panties of our esteemed City Council members. Laura Mecoy does something to facilitate this process, for which Carol Schatz has given her a glowingest testimonial, stating breathlessly that “Laura Mecoy delivers! The Annual Treasures of Los Angeles luncheon is the city’s most celebrated civic event, and Laura has become an integral part of its success. She knows the city and its leaders. She understands our audience. And she can deliver – no matter how tight the deadline.”
- Which is why she ended up only being the Assistant Queen of Downtown rather than the freaking princess like Jessica Lall.
- Ironically, they did such a good job trainwrecking the discussion of street vending that they inadvertently set the stage for State Senator Ricardo Lara’s intervention in the form of a proposed bill to take the power to regulate street vending away from cities in California, mostly because L.A. politicians have shown themselves to be absolutely incapable of separating themselves from the pernicious crapola pushed by Carol Schatz and her flunkies.
- These BID people are freaking crazy for embedding images in their emails. I don’t usually include them when I transcribe things here in html because it’s too much work. But I put this one in because it’s interesting. See, they don’t usually embed them as attachments to their emails, but as remote links. This particular one is hosted here: https://www.downtownla.com/email/DCBID-Lockup_Red-RGB-email6p.png. But there’s no reason whatsoever to host that image remotely. It’s only 5.9Kb, so it’s not going to slow down even a super-cheap android phone on a lousy 3G connection. It’s super-easy to set up an email client to attach these signature images if you like that kind of jive and, as I mentioned, boy and how do these BIDdies like it! So we really gotta wonder what does a remotely hosted image provide that an attached one does not? Well, for one thing, it’s a freaking surveillance tool! This is why the smart money (cliché week, like I already said!) has its email clients set not to fetch remote images unless specifically directed to do so.
