All posts by Mike

California State Government

Assemblymember Laura Friedman Introduced AB700 Yesterday — Would Add Exemption To Public Records Act For Information About Public College Profs In California — Including Their Calendars And Appointment Logs — This Is A Really Really Bad Idea — Is Possibly Pushback Against Animal Rights Groups And Other Activists — But Too Early To Tell

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California State Assemblymember Laura Friedman introduced AB700 yesterday, which would add an exemption to the California Public Records Act allowing public colleges to withhold specified information about faculty members. The to-be-exempted information includes home addresses and telephone numbers, calendars, office assignments, and room assignments.

The fundamental principle of the CPRA is that all records are subject to release unless specifically exempted, which is why this bill is necessary to prevent the release of this information. But the exemptions that this bill would add are either unnecessary or very, very wrong.

First of all, sure, don’t tell people where the professors live or what their phone numbers are. But this is already covered by §6254.3(a), which tells us that “[t]he home addresses, home telephone numbers, personal cellular telephone numbers, and birth dates of all employees of a public agency shall not be deemed to be public records and shall not be open to public inspection…” We don’t need a new law to allow that information to be withheld.

And the rest of the information that would be exempted here absolutely ought to remain public. I don’t know but I’m reasonably sure that this bill is in response to various groups and individuals, including PETA, as well as other people critical of faculty research that have used CPRA to obtain information about professors.

Some professors have been targets of violent protests, so I suppose that seems like a reason to exempt their appointment calendars. But it really isn’t. Appointment calendars are an essential tool in understanding what public employees are up to. Who they’ve met with, how long and how often they’ve met with them, and so on, are quintessential public information. Professors are subject to influence by interest groups just like anyone is, and this information must be available so that that influence can be analyzed.

And it’s not just professors’ schedules at stake here. If we exempt these using security as an excuse it won’t be long before all public employees schedules are exempted. Just for instance, ultra-corrupt Los Angeles City Councilmember Jose Huizar famously ordered his staff to alter his calendars in response to CPRA requests from the LA Times. How much more expedient for him would it have been to have an actual exemption written into the law?

Also, this bill is far too broad. It would exempt “records relating to the physical location of faculty members.” Again, I suppose the idea is to protect the security of the faculty. But faculty teaching schedules, office assignments, and so on are typically posted on the open internet. The CPRA at §6254.5 requires the release of all previously released information, and publishing information on the open internet is about as released as information can get. So most exemptions for this information will have been waived. What a logistical nightmare for universities to comply with.1

So yeah, I’m against AB700. Stay tuned for further developments. And turn the page for the legislative counsel’s digest and the proposed text to be added to the law.
Continue reading Assemblymember Laura Friedman Introduced AB700 Yesterday — Would Add Exemption To Public Records Act For Information About Public College Profs In California — Including Their Calendars And Appointment Logs — This Is A Really Really Bad Idea — Is Possibly Pushback Against Animal Rights Groups And Other Activists — But Too Early To Tell →

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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, LAPD

Reefer Madness Is Alive And Well In The Hollywood Entertainment District BID! — Between 2016 and 2018 73% Of All Citations For Public Marijuana Use In the Entire City Of Los Angeles Were In the Hollywood BID — The Venice BID Is A Distant Second Place With 8% — Leaving A Mere 19% — Which Is Only 170 Citations — For The Entire Rest Of The City Of Los Angeles

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Even though marijuana use in California was formally legalized recently, it’s still against the law to use it in public per the California Health and Safety Code at §11362.3. And apparently Lolita Lopez, investigative reporter at NBCLA, is doing a story on how this plays out in Los Angeles, because on February 2, 2019 she filed a CPRA request with the City for a list of citations under this law from 2016 to the present. Her request was successful, and a few days later the LAPD handed over this spreadsheet, organized by reporting district.1

And public marijuana use is one of those laws that’s custom-made for differential enforcement against homeless people. Thus it occurred to me to take a look at this data in conjuction with BIDs, which are one of the main engines of differential enforcement in Los Angeles. And the data revealed something really interesting. There were 887 citations in the two years covered by the data. Of these citations, 645 occurred in only 6 reporting districts, which precisely cover the Hollywood Entertainment District BID. Also 71 occurred in two others, which precisely cover the Venice Beach BID. The other 171 were spread out pretty evenly across the whole rest of the City.

This means that 72.7% of all citations for public marijuana use in the entire City of Los Angeles since 2016 were issued in the Hollywood Entertainment District BID. And 8% were issued in the Venice Beach BID. It doesn’t take any kind of fancy statistical analysis to prove that this is a really significant result, almost certainly linked to Kerry Morrison and her BID’s well-known tactic of arresting every homeless person that they can lay their hands on for the most trivial possible matters, such as drinking in public or urinating in public. Evidently now we can add smoking marijuana in public to this list of homeless-criminalizing tactics employed by the BID.

The HPOA BID Patrol is famous for its aggressive arrest policies. In 2013 they were responsible for more than 7% of the arrests of homeless people in the entire City of Los Angeles. Their arrest rate has dropped precipitously in the last few years, but it is still unbelievably high. But since 2016 they have refused to provide data on their individual arrests in response to CPRA requests, so it hasn’t been possible to tell who they were arresting and why.2

However, each arrest that the BID Patrol makes results in some kind of action by the LAPD. And given that the LAPD doesn’t seem to expend much effort in arresting anyone for public marijuana use outside the BID, it’s not unreasonable to assume that these figures are a proxy for the BID’s interest in the differential enforcement of this law. If they’re not making these arrests themselves then the arrests are the result of some BID policy.

The situation in Venice is a little less clear, as the Venice Beach BID only started its security work sometime in 2017, and the Boardwalk is a likely place for the LAPD to practice its own style of selective enforcement without needing a BID to encourage it. But the moral of the story is still very clear. It’s illegal to smoke marijuana in public in Los Angeles, but effectively it’s illegal only if you’re homeless and only if you’re in the Hollywood BID. Turn the page for maps and charts!
Continue reading Reefer Madness Is Alive And Well In The Hollywood Entertainment District BID! — Between 2016 and 2018 73% Of All Citations For Public Marijuana Use In the Entire City Of Los Angeles Were In the Hollywood BID — The Venice BID Is A Distant Second Place With 8% — Leaving A Mere 19% — Which Is Only 170 Citations — For The Entire Rest Of The City Of Los Angeles →

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California State Government

State Legislators Connie Leyva And Patrick O’Donnell Introduce SB126 — To Clarify That Charter Schools In California Are Subject To The Public Records Act — And The Brown Act — And The Political Reform Act — This Will Formalize And Extend Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s Recent Published Opinion On The Matter

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You may recall that California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra issued an opinion in December 2018 stating that charter schools in California were subject to the Brown Act and the Public Records Act. And recently, despite some ill-founded pushback, I was able to use the CPRA to get some pretty interesting information out of a local charter school, New Los Angeles.

But AG opinions aren’t law, and evidently there is still some uncertainty about the matter, for instance see this article by Tony Butka in CityWatch LA. So yesterday, state legislators Connie Leyva and Patrick O’Donnell introduced SB126, which states explicitly that charter schools and the organizations which run them are in fact subject to the Brown Act, to the Public Records Act, to the Political Reform Act of 1974, and to certain ethics laws.1

If this passes into law, and why should it not, it will be an incredibly useful tool for activists, the fruits of which you’ll be reading about here and elsewhere for the foreseeable future. Turn the page for the legislative analyst’s description of what the bill would do.
Continue reading State Legislators Connie Leyva And Patrick O’Donnell Introduce SB126 — To Clarify That Charter Schools In California Are Subject To The Public Records Act — And The Brown Act — And The Political Reform Act — This Will Formalize And Extend Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s Recent Published Opinion On The Matter →

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Los Angeles City Council

Annals Of Utter Abject Mind-Numbing Shamelessness — Morrie Goldman Wants To Know If Gil Cedillo Will Be At PLUM Next Week — Cause He Needs Him For A Quorum — Cause Englander Is Gonna Be Out — Debby Kim Has Nothing More To Say Beyond “He Will Be There :)” — Yes, The Smiley Face Is Part Of The Quote — Even The Damn Rats Are Embarrassed At This Point

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Background first. There’s Morrie Goldman. Lobbyist who runs Urban Solutions LLC, a lobbying firm. Famously caught up in the slow motion putrefaction of what was, at one time, known as Jose Huizar’s political career. Well-known friend of Gil Cedillo, at least as the word is understood at 200 N. Spring Street. Favor asker. Supplicant. Then there’s Gil Cedillo. Career politician. Wielder of vast power. Mover. Shaker. Favor granter. Supplicatee.

Or, you know, that’s how I always thought things worked in City Hall. The Councilmembers were in charge and the lobbyists asked them for goodies on behalf of clients and paid them off for their cooperation. But I recently obtained a steaming heap of emails between CD1 staffers and various lobbyists, and amongst them was this email conversation from 2015 between Morrie Goldman and Cedillo chief of staff Debby Kim1 which forces a quantum-level re-envisioning of that narrative, featuring Morrie Goldman as Keyser Soze and Cedillo with nothing more than some kind of walk-on role in his own career.

The whole exchange is just four emails long. Only the first two really matter. A week before the meeting, Goldman emails Kim to ask if Cedillo will be at PLUM on June 23, 2015. He says “We have an item coming to PLUM that day and need him for a quorum. Englander is out.” Kim’s reply? “He will be there :)” So yeah, in case you hadn’t realized, lobbyists don’t only tell Councilmembers how to vote and then deliver payola in return. They also call roll in advance and make sure the reps show up when they’re needed to vote. It’s unexpected and creepy at the same time.

And conceivably it’s also a Brown Act violation, since at that time the entire PLUM committee consisted of Jose Huizar, Cedillo, and Englander. Communications through intermediaries between a majority of the members, which would be two of them, constitutes an illegal serial meeting.2 So Goldman insinuating to Cedillo’s staff that Englander would have voted in favor is probably not OK. The statute of limitations is long gone, though.

And of course, the question of what issue Goldman needed Cedillo present to vote on is an essential one. I don’t yet know for sure, but here’s the PLUM agenda from June 23, 2015. The only matter on there of any consequence is CF 15-0721, which has to do with a CEQA appeal against the AMPAS project on Wilshire, which is likely to be the vote Goldman was worried about. Oh, one more thing! Notice how Goldman doesn’t even have to ask how Cedillo’s voting? That’s all been settled already.

And that’s the sordid little story of who’s calling the shots in the relationships between lobbyists and their pet councilmembers. Turn the page for a transcription of the emails themselves, so ordinary and yet so shocking.
Continue reading Annals Of Utter Abject Mind-Numbing Shamelessness — Morrie Goldman Wants To Know If Gil Cedillo Will Be At PLUM Next Week — Cause He Needs Him For A Quorum — Cause Englander Is Gonna Be Out — Debby Kim Has Nothing More To Say Beyond “He Will Be There :)” — Yes, The Smiley Face Is Part Of The Quote — Even The Damn Rats Are Embarrassed At This Point →

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Los Angeles City Council

A Tale Of Two Lunches! — How Gil Cedillo Invited Then-USC-President Max Nikias To Lunch In 2017 “To Catch Up On All Things” — And They Were Gonna Eat At The California Club — But USC Staffer Catherine Kuriyama Told Cedillo’s Chief Of Staff Debby Kim About Gift Reporting Laws — And Debby Kim Was All Like Don’t Wanna Report That Lunch! — And No Wonder I Guess Since Cedillo Has Accepted More Than $10K In Gifts From Lobbyists During His Time On The City Council — Including Another Lunch With Max Along With Debby Kim And Jay Cortez Which Did Get Reported — Cause Cedillo Only Paid Two Dollars For It

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When lobbyists spend money on officials in Los Angeles the LAMC at §48.04 requires them to report it to the Ethics Commission.1 And for any number of reasons lately I’ve been really interested in Gil Cedillo. So here’s a list of all reported expenditures that benefitted Cedillo since he took office in 2013, total $10,229.39.2 Sadly, these disclosure forms don’t require any detail really, so if we want to learn what went on we have to request records.

But, as you know, that’s what we live for around here! It’s a slow process, though, and we won’t understand everything on that list for a while yet. However, I did recently acquire a bunch of emails between CD1 and the University of Southern California, and these shed some interesting light on two lunches enjoyed over the years by Cedillo in the company of then-USC-president Max Nikias, now no-confidenced right out the door.3 One of them is on the disclosure form and the other is not. This is the story of those two lunches.

The first lunch, which took place on September 28, 2017 at the California Club, was instigated by Cedillo himself. The story is told in this extraordinarily disorganized string of emails. And when USC informed Cedillo staffer Debby Kim4 that the lunch was worth $39 and that they would have to report it to the Ethics Commission unless Cedillo reimbursed USC for the food, Kim flipped out to some extent and asked to change the venue to some place where it wouldn’t have to be reported. USC told her that if Cedillo reimbursed them for it they wouldn’t have to report, which she said CD1 would do. Evidently CD1 did, or something, because this lunch doesn’t appear on the disclosures linked to above.

The second lunch, in April 2018, was at the request of Nikias himself, and is revealed in this also-scrambled email conversation. Cedillo planned to bring along Kim and his communications director Jay Cortez. USC told Kim that the lunches were worth $34 each, so that the three of them would be valued at $102. There’s a limit of $100 per calendar year,5 so USC also told Kim that they’d have to pay back $2 to keep it legal. Charmingly,6 neither Kim nor USC wanted to bother Max Nikias with these street-level legalities nor to dirty his august hands with cash money, so that even though Kim brought the money to lunch, no one was there to accept it and she evidently had to mail it in later. This lunch does in fact appear on the disclosure list with a value of $100, so evidently the money did dirty someone’s hands, maybe august, maybe not.

That’s the short version, and turn the page for the long version along, of course, with transcriptions of the essential parts of the conversation, helpfully rearranged into a sensible order for ease of reading!
Continue reading A Tale Of Two Lunches! — How Gil Cedillo Invited Then-USC-President Max Nikias To Lunch In 2017 “To Catch Up On All Things” — And They Were Gonna Eat At The California Club — But USC Staffer Catherine Kuriyama Told Cedillo’s Chief Of Staff Debby Kim About Gift Reporting Laws — And Debby Kim Was All Like Don’t Wanna Report That Lunch! — And No Wonder I Guess Since Cedillo Has Accepted More Than $10K In Gifts From Lobbyists During His Time On The City Council — Including Another Lunch With Max Along With Debby Kim And Jay Cortez Which Did Get Reported — Cause Cedillo Only Paid Two Dollars For It →

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Announcements

BIDs Unmasked! — I’m Speaking On BIDs Next Saturday — 3-5 p.m. — UTLA Building — 3303 Wilshire — Graciously Hosted By The Democratic Socialists Of America Los Angeles — And NOlympics Los Angeles

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I’m speaking about BIDs on Saturday, February 16, from 3-5 p.m. at the UTLA building at 3303 Wilshire (just west of Vermont), hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America — Los Angeles and NOlympics Los Angeles.

It’s an introduction to BIDs for activists, focusing on how they collude with the City to oppress, to privatize, and to weaponize pretty much every aspect of public life that they can’t destroy.

It seems also that this is also on the Facebook. I hope to see you there!

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Los Angeles City Council

How Huizar-Connected Lobbyist Tony Cabral Helped Ultra-Corrupt Beverly Hills Zillionaire Michael Delijani Lobby Gil Cedillo In 2017 To Encourage Amazon To Build Their Ruinous HQ2 Project In CD1 — Where Delijani Evidently Owns A Bunch Of Land — Which, According To Cabral, “Would Represent The Best Site For Such A New Campus”

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Man, it’s been a while since I’ve thought about über-corrupt Beverly Hills zillionaire Michael Delijani, who, in early 2017, you may recall, proudly took a place along with his Downtown gentrification buddies in the front lines of the bloodthirsty covert battle to subvert the Skid Row Neighborhood Council. Delijani is also famous for his criminal friends, like for instance disgraced jailbird former LA County tax assessor John Noguez, for whom Delijani hosted actual bribe-giving parties at his secret zillionaire lair in Beverly Hills.

Now, think back to September 2017, when Amazon announced a national contest whose prize would be Amazon’s auxiliary headquarters and zillionaires and their pet politicians in metropolitan areas all over the country were all afroth with their ante-hatch egg counting while visions of gratuitous tax incentives, overflowing entitlements, gentrification, and less affordable housing danced in their greedy little heads like so many sugar-PLUMs.

And Delijani, who is one of those guys who owns stuff for a living, evidently owns a lot of land in Gil Cedillo’s racketeery fiefdom, CD1. And Delijani has a notoriously greedy little head, notoriously vision-dancing-achock, wherein wet dreams of Amazon’s headquarters could evidently flourish. Or that’s the news revealed by this newly obtained set of emails betweed CD1 staffers Debbie Kim and Gerald Gubatan and various lobbyists working for Michael Delijani.

See in particular this lengthy exchange between Debbie Kim, who is Cedillo’s chief of staff, and Tony Cabral, who’s some kind of high voltage zillionaire minion, also famous for being thanked by Jose Huizar his own self on the Twitter on the occasion of Ms. Jose’s announcing her short-lived candidacy to replace her soon-to-be-indicted hubby-pie. The unctuous Cabral kicked it off with an email seeking a meeting between Delijani and Cedillo, the subject of which was to be:

Amazon’s search for a new 2nd major headquarters where they are looking to accommodate up to 50,000 new employees. Michael Delijani believes that his existing property, along with other land around it, all within the 1st District, would represent the best site for such a new campus.

And with the recent news that activist opposition to Amazon’s death-star-landing-zone plans for Brooklyn may have succeeded in provoking them to reconsider their choice of location, perhaps Delijani will get another chance to consummate his erotic land-use fantasies. I’ll be here with the goodies if so. Meanwhile, turn the page to read a transcription of the whole nauseating discussion. And, while reading, just imagine yourself trying to get an appointment to meet with Gil Cedillo. It’s not gonna work out like this, I promise you that!
Continue reading How Huizar-Connected Lobbyist Tony Cabral Helped Ultra-Corrupt Beverly Hills Zillionaire Michael Delijani Lobby Gil Cedillo In 2017 To Encourage Amazon To Build Their Ruinous HQ2 Project In CD1 — Where Delijani Evidently Owns A Bunch Of Land — Which, According To Cabral, “Would Represent The Best Site For Such A New Campus” →

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LAPD, Lawsuits, Public Records Act Pragmatics

Los Angeles Police Department Sued To Enforce Compliance With California Public Records Act — At Issue Are Two Classes Of Records — Both Of Which LAPD Claims Are Investigative And So Exempt From Release — First Are Private Person’s Arrest Forms — Necessary To Track BID Patrol Arrests — Second Are Reports From RPPICS — Some Kind Of Top Secret Cop Tracking And Discussion System — Putatively For Anti-Terrorism

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The LAPD has been notoriously bad at complying with the California Public Records Act. So much so that in 2017 the ACLU sued them for systemic violations of the law, which is in addition to any number of small-scale suits based on individual violations, like e.g. Stop LAPD Spying has had to sue them twice, once in 2015 and again in 2018.

These suits were based on the LAPD’s longstanding habit of completely ignoring CPRA requests, often for years at a time. However, since the City of LA started using the NextRequest CPRA platform the LAPD has gotten quite a bit more responsive, although they can still take a maddeningly long time to respond and produce records.

This welcome improvement in LAPD responsiveness does not mean that all is well in Cop-CPRAlandia. They will still arbitrarily deny requests and then cut off the conversation, and they did this to me twice in 2018. Sadly, the CPRA provides no recourse at all for arbitrary unjustified denials beyond the filing of a lawsuit,1 which is what the path I was forced to follow by the LAPD’s extraordinary and unsupportable intransigence. You can read the complaint here, written by the incomparable Abenicio Cisneros, and/or see transcribed selections below the break.

There are two issues at stake. In the first place, remember back in 2016 when Kerry Morrison and her merry gang of curb-stomping thugs at Andrews International Security altered their contract to be able to withhold public records from me? That left me with no way to tell exactly who said curb-stomping thuggie boys arrested, information they naturally wanted to obscure from me because they tend to arrest the wrong people and rather than mend their ways they prefer to cover up their misdeeds.

But last year I discovered that every time the BID Patrol arrests someone they fill out a form for the LAPD. Here is an example of one. As it’s essential to find out not only how many arrests the BID Patrol makes2 but who they’re actually arresting, I requested that the LAPD give me all of these forms from Hollywood from 2018. They refused, and that is my first cause of action.

The other issue has to do with some Orwellian slab of web app crap known as the Regional Public Private Infrastructure Collaboration System. I learned about this from some emails I got from the Downtown Center BID in response to a CPRA request. You can see the emails here on Archive.Org, but they’re not that interesting. They mostly just announce that new information is available on RPPICS, and since they won’t give up the goods, there’s no way to tell what that is.

But this kind of public/private collaboration sharing between police and security is famous for being misused for political surveillance and other illegal and antihuman activities. The LAPD and private security already get up to enough of this in open emails, as does the freaking BID Patrol. Imagine what they’re doing in secret. But we don’t have to imagine, we can make CPRA requests! Which is what I did, asking LAPD for a year’s worth of postings so as to learn what the heck these people were up to in their little secret world. Again, they denied my request, and this is my second cause of action.

And turn the page, if you will, for a few technicalities about the LAPD’s exemption claims and transcribed selections from the petition itself.
Continue reading Los Angeles Police Department Sued To Enforce Compliance With California Public Records Act — At Issue Are Two Classes Of Records — Both Of Which LAPD Claims Are Investigative And So Exempt From Release — First Are Private Person’s Arrest Forms — Necessary To Track BID Patrol Arrests — Second Are Reports From RPPICS — Some Kind Of Top Secret Cop Tracking And Discussion System — Putatively For Anti-Terrorism →

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Business Improvement Districts, Public Records Act Pragmatics

Los Angeles Business Improvement Districts Held A Seminar In July 2018 To Talk About How To Deal With My Requests For Public Records — The World’s Angriest CPRA Lawyer Carol Humiston Was The Main Speaker — Gave A Bunch Of Bogus Feel-Good Advice That Evidently Didn’t Include Just Complying With The Law Since None Of Her Clients Will Do That — BIDs Reveal That They Want The Law Changed In Their Favor — May Hire A Lobbyist To Facilitate This — Miguel Santiago Is Helping Them Out Yet Again

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Around the turn of the century, thanks to brave and successful litigation by property owner Aaron Epstein against the demonic forces of Ms. Kerry Morrison and her Hollywood Entertainment District BID, it is the supreme law of California that business improvement districts are subject to the California Public Records Act. It is this fact that, of course, has made possible the very existence of this blog.

Without actual copies of actual records, what credibility would we have? We would we be but yet another gang of basement-dwelling neckbeards ranting about injustice on the internet?1 And the fact that their BIDs are subject to the CPRA drives the BIDdies absolutely wild with rage.

They just cannot understand how it is that every law on the books has been carefully crafted to allow zillionaires and their minions to curbstomp anyone who interferes with their interests, and yet this law seems to work against zillionairity by e.g. exposing them to public mockery and contempt.2 They just cannot believe that the law says what it says. What, they seem to be muttering, have we been paying all those damn legislators for?

And so they have consistently ganged up to fight any improvement3 to the CPRA and to develop and utilize methods for evading their CPRA-imposed duties. We saw this recently when they hired a lobbyist to thwart, gut, and render meaningless AB-1479, Rob Bonta’s modest 2017 proposal to strengthen the CPRA by making it possible to actually sanction violations, a sinister project in which they were aided by the sleazy backroom machinations of would-be Huizar successor Miguel Santiago.

And newly obtained evidence shows that in July 2018 the BIDdies continued these CPRA-thwarting efforts by holding a seminar on my CPRA requests, convened by Rena Leddy, executive director of the Fashion District BID, currently being sued for egregious CPRA violations, keynoted by Carol Humiston, the world’s angriest CPRA lawyer, and attended by circa 35 BIDdie representatives, many of whom are also being sued for egregious CPRA violations, all there to discuss me and this blog and how not to follow the law!

In particular, the records, obtained, ironically, via the CPRA, include a powerpoint presentation given by Humiston and a set of notes taken by one of the attendees.4 The powerpoint thing is tedious nonsense, although it gains some interest from the fact that the South Park BID wouldn’t give me a copy, claiming attorney/client privilege, a stance that’s hard to maintain in the face of the fact that Humiston presented it to 35 people, many of them not her clients. Fortunately not every BID is so moronically mulish.

However, the set of notes is pure gold! It outlines Humiston’s strategies for delaying or obstructing access to records, including suggested bogus fees to impose, when to delete emails to thwart requesters, and so on. Most crucially, though, it reveals that the BIDs have at least discussed changing state law to relieve them from their CPRA duties and hiring a lobbyist to help them do so.

They have also, it states, talked to a legislator, who is obviously that nefarious little twerp Miguel Santiago, who has amplified their wickedness before. This is an essential glimpse into the red, bloody, seething ids of the zillionaire minions who run this City’s BIDs. Turn the page for excerpts, commentary, and finally a transcription of the entire document.
Continue reading Los Angeles Business Improvement Districts Held A Seminar In July 2018 To Talk About How To Deal With My Requests For Public Records — The World’s Angriest CPRA Lawyer Carol Humiston Was The Main Speaker — Gave A Bunch Of Bogus Feel-Good Advice That Evidently Didn’t Include Just Complying With The Law Since None Of Her Clients Will Do That — BIDs Reveal That They Want The Law Changed In Their Favor — May Hire A Lobbyist To Facilitate This — Miguel Santiago Is Helping Them Out Yet Again →

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LAUSD

Emails From New Los Angeles Charter Schools About The UTLA Strike Shine Some Light On Various Interesting Matters — Uncomfortable New LA Charter Co-Location At Baldwin Hills Elementary School Will Probably End Soon Due To Tensions Exposed By Pickets — “We Are Not Welcomed There” Says New LA Charter Boss Brooke Rios — Speaking Of Pickets, New LA Charter Staff Filmed UTLA Strikers At Baldwin Hills Elementary — And Copies Of CCSA Anti-Union Propaganda And Some Info About Astroturf Demonstration — And A Poignant Little Episode — New LA Charter Teachers Quasi-Union Asks Rios If They Might Please Also Maybe Get A Raise Too If UTLA Does — Pretty Please?

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I hadn’t thought much about charter schools in Los Angeles for quite a while, but as happened for many people the dazzling success of the UTLA strike brought them back into my attention. Combine that with the fact that they are subject to the California Public Records Act and the next step was inevitable! And the first of the many many requests I have out came in recently! Part of which I wrote about the other day!

After a little of the usual back and forth about what’s required by the law, New Los Angeles Charter Schools head honcho Brooke Rios actually did hand over the goods. And thus did I drag myself all the way out to the corner of Washington and Burnside, where they have their secret headquarters, and sit in the office of operations director Xochitl Lira and scan a ton of paper! And it’s all available on Archive.Org!1

I chose New LA because of this fine LA Taco article by Daniel Hernandez about the tensions created by that school’s so-called co-location on the campus of Baldwin Hills Elementary School. To summarize Hernandez’s piece is to degrade it, so read it, but co-location, in which LAUSD schools are forced by the 2000 Proposition 39 to yield space to charter schools if it’s not actually being used to house an actual class, is the main site of contention.2

It has really hurt the LAUSD schools who lose space to charters. And the space lost to New Los Angeles Charter was a big issue with UTLA picketers at Baldwin Hills Elementary, who shouted slogans like “Privatization leads to segregation” and “Privatizers take a hike!” And, according to some of the emails I obtained today, it looks like the pickets were successful in that New Los Angeles will be looking for a new space for next year.

The emails also demonstrate the tension there during the strike, with police being called, with New LA staff filming the picketers, and so on. There are links and transcriptions below the break. Also below the break are links to a wide variety of fascinating emails about other strike-related topics. There are propaganda pieces from the California Charter Schools Association, giving talking points, tips for handling worried parents, polemics on how bad it is that everyone hates charter schools, and so on.

There are rumors about charter school kids being targeted on public transportation and so on, leading New LA to suspend its dress code during the strike, there are organizational communications having to do with the astroturf pro-charter rally that the CCSA organized outside the LAUSD board meeting where a recommendation for a charter cap was voted on.

And, most poignant of all, there’s a pleading letter from something called “The Teacher Collective” asking Brooke Rios in a markedly subservient tone if New Los Angeles teachers will also get a raise if the UTLA teachers win one in their strike. Sounds like some folks are ripe to be organized! Turn the page for links to everything and transcriptions of some things!
Continue reading Emails From New Los Angeles Charter Schools About The UTLA Strike Shine Some Light On Various Interesting Matters — Uncomfortable New LA Charter Co-Location At Baldwin Hills Elementary School Will Probably End Soon Due To Tensions Exposed By Pickets — “We Are Not Welcomed There” Says New LA Charter Boss Brooke Rios — Speaking Of Pickets, New LA Charter Staff Filmed UTLA Strikers At Baldwin Hills Elementary — And Copies Of CCSA Anti-Union Propaganda And Some Info About Astroturf Demonstration — And A Poignant Little Episode — New LA Charter Teachers Quasi-Union Asks Rios If They Might Please Also Maybe Get A Raise Too If UTLA Does — Pretty Please? →

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