In February 2020 Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Marshall Beckloff denied the Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation Committee petition against the City of Los Angeles over the City’s years-long egregiously illegal conspiracy to deny the residents and other stakeholders of Skid Row their own neighborhood council, separate from the famously corrupt Downtown Los Angeles NC. Here’s a copy of his judgment.
I planned to report on this at the time but historical circumstances intervened and I never got around to it. Which didn’t stop the case, of course. The SRNC-FC filed a notice of appeal on time last year. The wheels continued to turn, as wheels do, and then, two days ago, on April 16, 2021, they filed their opening appellate brief. The City’s response is due in 30 days.
I understand basically nothing about how the appeals process works, so I’ll spare you my amateur thoughts on technical legal issues,1 but as a matter of justice, as a matter of requiring the City of Los Angeles to follow its own laws, there’s no question that the SRNC’s arguments are strong and Beckloff’s judgment was wrong.2 Let’s see what happens!
- A little self-flattery. I have no thoughts on this.
- I don’t understand his ruling perfectly, and it seems technical also. Is it possible that he decided the case mostly on purely procedural grounds and didn’t rely on the City’s violations of the ordinance? He did say a number of times that SRNC was misreading the subdivision ordinance, but it seems pretty clear that Beckloff’s the one who’s misreading it, which I guess is the right kind of argument to make on appeal?
