Look, kids, I know you appreciate what I do to provide you all with the freshest possible news about our fair City’s business improvement districts, but I don’t think anyone who doesn’t go to meetings with me really truly understands the pain involved.¹ Or at least that’s how I felt after sixty freaking five minutes² of the Fashion District BID‘s annual stakeholder extravaganza this morning. But I made it out alive and now you can watch the whole thing on YouTube or here on Archive.Org if you prefer.

José Huizar was the headliner, but there was a surprise appearance by Assemblymember Miguel Santiago which was very revealing, and a long spiel from City planner Bryan Eck, which was too technical for me to follow, but I am sure is of great interest to those who’re interested in that stuff. Huizar’s talk was loaded with his usual weirdo revelations, and I’m going to have to wait till Saturday to write about it because I surely don’t have time right now.

Miguel Santiago had a lot to say about the legislature’s current BID-endorsed effort to gut protections against the abuse of conservatorship, which BIDdies all over the state are salivating over as it will make it so everybody with a uniform, up to and including parking enforcement officers, will be able to take homeless people into custody and lock them up somewhere far, far away from here, for e.g. smelling funny or scaring the nice shiny customers or whatever. Of course, the City Council is all over this issue as well.

He had the nerve to thank the freaking Fashion District BID for their “advocacy around the issue of homelessness..”³ He also mentioned offhandedly that, as part of last year’s BID-induced gutting of AB-1479, which would have amended the California Public Records Act in a number of excellent ways, the Fashion District BID had phoned his office for help and he had helped them. Which is despicable in any number of ways, although not surprising.

As I said, I don’t have time to do justice to most of this material tonight, but if you turn the page, you’ll find links to the various speakers and a transcription of Miguel Santiago’s reprehensible little spiel.

• Miguel Santiago — See transcription below.
• José Huizar — This guy is horrible — beyond horrible.
• Questions for José Huizar — Independently interesting — see the seething id of the zillionaire elite of Los Angeles exposed as they beg and whine to José Huizar — We already have most of it! Why can’t we have the rest?!
• Bryan Eck — Do the words “10:1 TFAR” make you cream your jeans? This bit is for you!

Transcription of Miguel Santiago’s spiel:

Thanks for letting me drop by at the last minute. I’m very grateful for that. Thank you for [unintelligible] Downtown Los Angeles a lot better. Particularly for your advocacy around the issue of homelessness. And I’m grateful because [unintelligible] your BID you’ll be helping us to round up a bunch of necessary support. Some of you guys might have seen it in the [unintelligible]. We’re trying to change the definition of what conservatorship means. And this is really important. You guys know it, right? When somebody has medical necessity you want to help that person. And this is now with the homeless population. Cause currently you can’t help somebody because the threshold of conservatorship is pretty high. They either can’t feed themselves, clothe themselves, or house themselves. But we’re trying to change it to be medical necessity. So that if an agency, yourselves, the county, or any nonprofit, can help get somebody some services they need when we know they’re on your doorstep and we want to give them those services, get them off the street, out of [unintelligible] recovery. So we’re very grateful that you’ll help in taking the lead role in trying to help us to change the law in the state. We’re also very grateful with communication that we’ve had. And it’s really important, I’ll tell you, that last year we received a phone call from your BID about a bill running through the legislature to make public records requests available for BIDs and we knew that we had to stand up and we had to fight for you folks. Those are the kind of things that are incredibly important. Next week we’re looking at a significant package on homelessness funding. Some of you guys [unintelligible], so we look forward to your support given the rest of our colleagues in Los Angeles and up and down the state to prioritize [unintelligible] bigger issues. We know that it’s the existential crisis that we are facing in our lifetime, the issue of homelessness. I see Councilmember Jose Huizar in the back, staunch champion of eradicating homelessness, if you could give him a round of applause. So we look forward to partnering with you folks and continuing to work on some of the good work that we’ve been doing. I appreciate being here today and helping to continue a long term relationship. Thank you, and we’ll keep [unintelligible]!!

Image of assemblyboy Miguel Santiago is ©2018 MichaelKohlhaas.Org and was klopped up outta this little Miguel Santiago right here.

1. Seriously, though, I’d love to have you come along to one. If you think you have the stomach for it, drop me a line and I’ll haul you off to as many as you can stand. It’s well worth it and the more of us there are the more nervous the damn zillionaires will be. And rightly so; they hate being watched. Makes ’em nervous. Easy to see why.
2. That’s just the part I got on tape. I also had to sit through the longest 40 minutes of my life watching them network and gobble “small bites,” which phrase I heard said by an actual human being (of course it was Ariana Gomez on the microphone, friends!) rather than reading it in yet another ubertwee restaurant review for the very first time in my life, before they started the actual meeting and I could start recording.
3. Yet another example of the way BIDdies are promoted by politicians as compassionate advocates for saintly homelessness policy, when in reality their one and only goal is to get homeless human beings moved out of their districts entirely. This is the kind of thinking that gets Kerry freaking Morrison and batty little fusspot Blair Besten of the freaking Historic Core BID appointed to the HHH oversight committee despite their self-evident conflicts of interest, gets them quoted in newspapers, politicians take their tours, and so on. Everybody wins from this charade except homeless people and anyone with a soul. In other words, BIDdies and their tame politicians are doing quite well from it.