OK, remember that our friends over at the Hollywood Sunshine Coalition discovered recently that CD13 repster Mitch O’Freaking Farrell has a top secret Gmail account that he uses to conduct City business? And remember how they sent CD13 a CPRA request asking for all public records in this account? And remember how Mitch O’Farrell’s fairly sinister chief of staff, Jeanne Min, was all like no way, friend, go pound sand? And then the brave and untrammeled souls over at the Coalition were all like, way, friend, if sand is to be pounded, you pound it!

Well, apparently some part of that message got through to Ms. Jeanne Min, cause evidently yesterday CD13 supplied HSC with a bunch of emails! And they passed them to us!¹ And in the typically passive aggressive attitude that the City of LA adopts when complying with CPRA requests the PDFs had pages randomly rotated, interspersed with random blank pages, and so on, making them fairly unreadable. But I’m a whiz with PDFs and I cleaned them all up and published them on Archive.Org right here so you can read all 101 pages of them. Here’s a link straight through to the clean PDF and the original files are also available so you can compare if you’re interested.

And there is a ton of good stuff even just in this small selection. I aim to write at least three more posts highlighting various aspects of it, and I’m sure if you read through it you’ll find gems that completely escaped my notice. The episode you’re reading now is particularly timely, given that it has to do with today’s contentious vote on AirBnB regulation. Did you have an opinion on that? Did you communicate your opinion to your Council rep? Well, you didn’t get to communicate it as well as some people did!

It seems that on April 27, 2018 James W. Litz, then working for the sinister-sounding Beverly Hills/Greater Los Angeles Association of Realtors, and himself a lobbyist registered with the City Ethics Commission, sent an email to the usual list of public-facing Councilfolk email addresses ending with lacity.org telling all of them that his employer, the BHGLAAR, supported the AirBnB regulations proposed in CF 14-1635-S2 as long as they didn’t let people living in rent stabilized units rent out their homes and let building owners forbid their tenants from participating if they wanted to. This email is transcribed after the break.

And then, certainly because as you yourself have no doubt suspected, nobody actually reads a damn thing that comes in to those “councilmember.wtf@lacity.org” addresses, less than two minutes later James W. Litz turned around and forwarded the email to Mitch O’Farrell at the secret Gmail address, which is to say mitchof13@gmail.com, with a personal note:

From: “jwlitz@jameswlitz.com” <jwlitz@jameswlitz.com>
Date: April 27, 2018 at 4:42:53 PM PDT
To: Mitch O’Farrell <mitchof13@gmail.com>
Subject: Fwd: Short Term Rentals – Council Filer 14-1635-S2 – Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018

James Litz

And we know Mitch O’Farrell read that email even though he certainly didn’t read any of your emails, or my emails, or any of the damn emails send to his non-personal account. Why, Jeanne Min herself told us that he gets personal emails in that account, and he’s certainly reading those, so obviously he reads everything that comes through. To get his email read is precisely why James W. Litz sent it to the secret account in the first place.

So here’s one thing that Mitch O’Farrell uses the secret Gmail account for. He uses it to let himself be lobbied by lobbyists, who can thereby communicate with him more directly than the rest of us, who are fated to use the ineffective lacity.org email addresses to explain our positions to our elected representatives.

Certainly the Constitution of the United States gives every person the right to petition these electeds for the redress of grievances and so on, but that right is a little attenuated to say the least when there is a multilevel system of communication in which the privileged few have access to channels which the electeds actually attend to.

Anyway, see below for transcriptions of the emails and stay tuned for more stunning revelations from this monumental release!

From: “jwlitz@jameswlitz.com”
Date: April 27, 2018 at 4:42:53 PM PDT
To: Mitch O’Farrell
Subject: Fwd: Short Term Rentals – Council Filer 14-1635-S2 – Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018

Image of Mitch O’Farrell is ©2018 MichaelKohlhaas.Org and if ya got nothin’ better to do take a look at this lil Mitchie right here.

1. And in the note from Jeanne Min accompanying them she was all like I hope you ingrates are satisfied cause the councildude himself, in the spirit of the freaking CPRA, had to look through his own damn emails! Oh c’mon, Jeanne Min! What did he have to do that was better than complying with the law? Sell off another piece of Hollywood to CIM group? Sheesh, he can do that in his sleep anyway. There’s no need to whine about Mr. Mitchie having to follow the law one damn time. It’s not like he’s gone make a habit of it, anyway.