All posts by Mike

Lunada Bay Boys Judge Otero Grants City Of Palos Verdes Estates And Former Chief Jeff Kepley’s Motion For Summary Judgment, Meaning They Are Out Of The Case!

February 13, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

For background take a look at this excellent article from the Times on this lawsuit. Also see here to download all pleadings in this case. You can also read all my posts on the case.

This is a very short note to announce the breaking news that James Otero, judge in the Lunada Bay Boys case, filed an order last night granting the motion of the City of Palos Verdes Estates and Jeff Kepley for summary judgment. Thus these two defendants are out of the case at this point. The plaintiffs’ theory with respect to these defendants was that they conspired with the Bay Boys to keep outsiders from surfing Lunada Bay.

Plaintiffs alleged two means by which this happened. First, that the City enforced laws, e.g. traffic laws, more harshly against outsiders than against locals. Second, that the City refused to protect outsiders from harassment by locals. The basic finding in the order is that the plaintiffs don’t have enough evidence to support the first kind of claim and that the City as a matter of law has no affirmative duty to protect anyone from harassment or attacks. I apologize for the fact that I don’t have time this morning to transcribe even part of the order, but I recommend it as very interesting, if disappointing, reading.

Lunada Bay Boys Judge James Otero Accepts Magistrate Judge Rozella Oliver’s Report And Recommendation With Respect To Defendant Brant Blakeman, Thereby Putting Him On The Hook For Monetary Sanctions To Plaintiffs, A New Deposition On His Dime, And Plaintiffs Will Be Allowed To Present Evidence At Trial About Blakeman’s Missing Texts

February 12, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

For background take a look at this excellent article from the Times on this lawsuit. Also see here to download all pleadings in this case. You can also read all my posts on the case.

Listen, I really apologize for the fact that the last you, my audience heard, the Lunada Bay Boys trial was scheduled for February 6. In December Otero cancelled this trial date and has not yet set a new one. I’m not sure why I didn’t write about it, but I didn’t. As soon as a new trial date is set I’ll let you know, and will do my very best to keep on top of announcing cancellations.

The last time we heard from the Bay Boys or their attorneys was in January of this year, with Brant Blakeman mouthpiece Thomas Stobart arguing against Rozella Oliver’s report and recommendation for sanctions against Blakeman for his failure to preserve a bunch of his text messages. His argument essentially consisted of putting scare quotes around everything Oliver wrote in her report, possibly intending to make her recommendations against his client seem silly or something.

That her recommendations were not silly was and is completely obvious to anyone who read Oliver’s report, and thus it was in some sense no surprise that this morning, Judge James Otero filed an order accepting Oliver’s report and recommendations for sanctions against Brant Blakeman. There’s a transcription of this PDF after the break.

In short, though, it requires Blakeman to pay plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees and costs for the motion for sanctions against him and to submit to another deposition about the text messages he did not preserve (and to pay plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees and costs for the deposition). It also allows the plaintiffs to present evidence at trial about the missing text messages. It’s not the entire war, but it’s a significant tactical victory for the plaintiffs. Turn the page for a transcription of Otero’s order.
Continue reading Lunada Bay Boys Judge James Otero Accepts Magistrate Judge Rozella Oliver’s Report And Recommendation With Respect To Defendant Brant Blakeman, Thereby Putting Him On The Hook For Monetary Sanctions To Plaintiffs, A New Deposition On His Dime, And Plaintiffs Will Be Allowed To Present Evidence At Trial About Blakeman’s Missing Texts →

Lawsuits

Amicus Briefs Filed In Orange County Catholic Worker Case In Support Of Injunction Against Evictions, Hearing On Tuesday Morning, February 13

February 11, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

For background, see Luke Money‘s excellent coverage in the Times, starting with this January 29 article on the Lawsuit and continuing with this article on the February 13 hearing. You can also download selected pleadings in the case from our Archive.Org site.

Last week Judge Carter issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting Orange County, the City of Anaheim, and anyone else who might be minded to do so from arresting anyone on the bed of the Santa Ana River for trespassing, camping, and similar anti-homeless offenses. Prior to this, on February 4, in the order setting the fast-approaching February 13 hearing¹ on the plaintiffs’ original application for a restraining order, Carter invited a broad range of non-parties to appear at Tuesday’s hearing:

The Court also welcomes attendance at the hearing and written briefing by any amicus groups, which may include veterans’ organizations, service providers, abused women’s protection and housing organizations, and other cities affected by the homelessness crisis in Orange County that are not named as Defendants in this case.

Well, beginning last Friday and continuing on through tonight, a number of amicus briefs were filed. You can find a list and links to the actual pleadings after the break. Also, although I’m not really committing myself to covering every aspect of this case, it’s been really interesting so far, so I went ahead and set up a page on the Archive to collect pleadings.
Continue reading Amicus Briefs Filed In Orange County Catholic Worker Case In Support Of Injunction Against Evictions, Hearing On Tuesday Morning, February 13 →

Business Improvement Districts, Public Records Act Pragmatics

An Unforced Error By Self-Proclaimed Hollywood Superlawyer Jeffrey Charles Briggs Provides Unique Insight Into The Thoroughly Cynical, Thoroughly Bogus Nature Of BIDs’ Use Of The Deliberative Process Exemption To The California Public Records Act — They Even Used It In One Case To Cover Up A Blatant Brown Act Violation

February 8, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

One of the biggest flaws in California’s Public Records Act is that the various local agencies that constitute our government are trusted to search their own records, decide without oversight what’s responsive to requests and, worst of all, decide what’s exempt from production. My general feeling about BIDs and record searches is that they purposely don’t find everything, about their exemption claims that they’re mostly lying.

Unfortunately, without a lawsuit, it’s not realistically possible to get a look at records for which they’ve claimed exemptions.² Hence it’s not usually possible to check how closely this feeling corresponds to reality. However, due to an interesting confluence of events, I recently obtained a number of emails between various people at the Hollywood Media District BID for which their lawyer, Jeffrey Charles Briggs,³ had claimed exemptions, thus making it possible to compare his claims with the actual records. Unsurprisingly the exemption claims turned out to be $99\frac{44}{100}\%$ pure and unadulterated nonsense. You can find the emails and some analysis after the break, but first I’m going to ramble on a little about some tangentially related issues.

Like many policies, this default assumption of honesty on the part of local agencies no doubt works when it works, but when it comes to the BIDs of Los Angeles, who are staffed, for the most part, with the most unscrupulous bunch of pusillanimous chiselers ever to engorge their bloated reeking tummies at the public piggie trough, it doesn’t work at all.⁴ They lie, they confabulate, they delude themselves and others, and generally display utter and overweening contempt for the rule of law.⁵

And nowhere does their misbehavior reach a more fevered pitch than in the use of the so-called “deliberative process” exemption to the CPRA. In short, this is an exemption that courts have built up out of the “catch-all” exemption to CPRA, found at §6255(a), which says:
Continue reading An Unforced Error By Self-Proclaimed Hollywood Superlawyer Jeffrey Charles Briggs Provides Unique Insight Into The Thoroughly Cynical, Thoroughly Bogus Nature Of BIDs’ Use Of The Deliberative Process Exemption To The California Public Records Act — They Even Used It In One Case To Cover Up A Blatant Brown Act Violation →

Lawsuits

In Response To Emergency Motion Filed Yesterday By Plaintiffs, Last Night Federal Judge David Carter Issued Temporary Injunction Forbidding Orange County From Arresting Homeless People On The Santa Ana Riverbed Pending The Scheduled Hearing On February 13

February 7, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

For background, see Luke Money‘s excellent coverage in the Times, starting with this January 29 article on the Lawsuit and continuing with Monday’s article on the February 13 hearing.

UPDATE: The Times (finally) got around to covering this development this afternoon. Here’s their story on the temporary restraining order.

I’m not really covering the lawsuit, filed on January 29, by the Orange County Catholic Worker and Carol Sobel’s law firm against Orange County for civil rights violations incurred against homeless human beings living on the bed of the Santa Ana River.⁶ You can read the initial complaint here to get an idea of what’s going on.

Yesterday afternoon the plaintiffs asked the County when they were going to start arresting people living on the riverbed and the County replied at 5:31 p.m. that arrests would begin today, February 7. Read the entire email exchange here:

Consequently, beginning tomorrow morning, OCSD personnel will begin advising people remaining on the District Santa Ana Riverbed property that they must vacate or may be cited and/or arrested for trespassing.

This prompted the plaintiffs to file an Emergency Request to Stay Arrests with the court. The metadata of that PDF suggests it was written at 5:59 yesterday, about half an hour after the County’s reply. There is a transcription after the break.

This, in turn, prompted the court to issue an Order Granting Temporary Restraining Order forbidding the County from arresting homeless human beings on the riverbed for trespassing, loitering, or camping, until the hearing on February 13. The metadata of that PDF suggests that it was written at 11:11 p.m. yesterday. There is a transcription after the break.
Continue reading In Response To Emergency Motion Filed Yesterday By Plaintiffs, Last Night Federal Judge David Carter Issued Temporary Injunction Forbidding Orange County From Arresting Homeless People On The Santa Ana Riverbed Pending The Scheduled Hearing On February 13 →

BID-Free Los Angeles, Featured, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Los Angeles City Council, Street Vending, The Race Card

Tamales Nos Cuidan: Social Cleansing, Kerry Morrison, Donald Trump, And The Battle For Legal Street Vending In Los Angeles And Beyond

February 2, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Tamalera on Hoover Street, South Los Angeles, January 2018.

Recently, a little after 7 a.m. on a fine cool Los Angeles Winter morning, I found myself on Hoover Street a little South of Vernon. If you know the area, or areas like it, you won’t be surprised to hear that at that time of day there were tamaleras everywhere. At major intersections, of course, and also near schools, selling tamales y champurrado for breakfast. You can see a picture somewhere near this sentence that I took while waiting my turn in line.

The whole scene is entirely social. There are grandmothers buying a dozen at a time to take home, people on their ways to work buying two or three for breakfast, maybe for lunch too, and schoolkids buying singles to eat while they walk.⁷ The tamalera creates a little bubble of warm sociability around her, momentarily protecting those inside from the chill of the foggy damp onshore flow.

This doesn’t happen only on the streets of South Los Angeles, of course. Last month Gustavo Arellano published a lovely article in the New Yorker entitled The Comfort of Tamales At The End Of 2017 about the significant social role of this ancient food⁸ in Mexican-American culture. And you can feel that sociability strongly while waiting in line to buy tamales on an L.A. street in the morning.

But as you’re probably aware, it’s looking more and more likely that the City Council, despite their generally supportive pro-vendor rhetoric, is going to allow business interests and property owners to veto street vending on a highly localized basis for essentially no rational reason at all. One of the most random exclusionary zones recommended in the November 2017 report of the Chief Legislative Analyst is anywhere within 500 feet of Hollywood Boulevard.
Continue reading Tamales Nos Cuidan: Social Cleansing, Kerry Morrison, Donald Trump, And The Battle For Legal Street Vending In Los Angeles And Beyond →

Business Improvement Districts, Homeless Issues, Los Angeles City Council

Report From Yesterday’s Historic Core BID Annual Meeting: Huizar Announces Council’s Support For Revision To State Definition Of “Gravely Disabled” But Is Unwilling To Say Explicitly That The Goal Is To Make It Easier To Lock Up Homeless People — BID Board Member Ed Rosenthal Misses The Point And Asks If This Will Make It Easier To Lock Up Homeless People

February 1, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Well, well, well! The Historic Core BID, third weirdest of the minor Downtown BIDs and the exclusive demesne of batty little fusspot queen Blair Besten,⁹ held its Annual Meeting yesterday in the crown jewel of Michael Delijani’s Broadway empire, the Los Angeles Theatre. The local zillionaires were blessed by the heavens opening and, well, maybe not the angels of God descending,¹⁰ but at least they got José Huizar in all his freaking Councilmanic¹¹ glory.

Of course I taped the whole damn thing, and you can watch it here.¹² There are a lot of interesting episodes here, not least these slavering remarks from the meanest woman in BIDlandia, President Tara Devine, who’s handling the Historic Core BID’s ongoing renewal.

Oh, and remember that adenoidal twerp who told the SRNC proponents that they needed to get an education? Well, it turns out that that adenoidal twerp has a name, although I can’t recall it right now and I can’t freaking be bothered to look, but here he is at yesterday’s meeting spewing yet another load of his characteristically adenoidal twerpery all over José Huizar’s new suit.¹³

However, the very most interestingest bit was José Huizar’s announcement that he and his colleagues had just dropped a motion allowing the City to seek to have the Lanterman Act¹⁴ amended so that the the definition of “gravely disabled”¹⁵ includes refusing medical services. The whole mess can be found in CF 18-0002-S11.¹⁶ You can watch Jose Huizar talking about it and also there’s a transcription and some more snarky discussion after the break.
Continue reading Report From Yesterday’s Historic Core BID Annual Meeting: Huizar Announces Council’s Support For Revision To State Definition Of “Gravely Disabled” But Is Unwilling To Say Explicitly That The Goal Is To Make It Easier To Lock Up Homeless People — BID Board Member Ed Rosenthal Misses The Point And Asks If This Will Make It Easier To Lock Up Homeless People →

Los Angeles City Government, Skid Row Neighborhood Council

Herb Wesson Introduces Motion In Council This Morning Decrying Donald Trump’s Use Of The Digital Divide To Disenfranchise “Low-Income And Immigrant Communities” While Never Even Mentioning How He And His Demonic Cronies Used Online Voting Against The Skid Row Neighborhood Council To Do The Same Freaking Thing

January 30, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

UPDATE JANUARY 31, 2018: This morning the motion that’s the subject of this post was assigned to Council File CF 18-0002-S8 if you want to track it.

A few days ago, Herb Wesson and his brain-dead gang-of-fifteen cronies at 200 N Spring Street introduced a motion to outlaw civil rights violations in Los Angeles, all without mentioning their dark and bloody work disenfranchising the Skid Row Neighborhood Council formation effort in opposition to everyone’s civil rights. One of the main techniques they used in this nightmarish project was online voting, introduced at the last minute in the face of explicit testimony that electronic politics disenfranchises people who can’t afford computers.

Well, not that anyone who’s paying attention expects consistency out of the Fifteen Lords and Ladies of our City, but when their hypocrisy reaches a certain feverishly hysterical pitch I find there’s nothing for it but to speak up. You see, evidently the Census Bureau in 2020 is going to use online response forms for the first time ever.

And for some reason, the badness of this, the fact of the digital divide and the role it might play in helping the government to erase the presence of the poor, the immigrant, is not lost on our City Council president, Herb Wesson, in this case. That’s why, it appears, that he and Gil Cedillo introduced a motion this morning (transcription after the break) positioning the City to oppose the Census Bureau’s intention to use this new electronic form to ask respondents about citizenship. In particular, saith Herb Wesson:

WHEREAS , the 2020 Census is the first Census that will be performed primarily electronically, which creates additional barriers for low-income and immigrant communities …

So it’s on the record now. Herb Wesson and Gil Cedillo are opposed to using online political forms because they tend to oppress low-income and immigrant communities. Unless, of course, it’s necessary to oppress low-income and immigrant communities at the behest of local zillionaires and campaign donors. Then they’re all for it. Turn the page for the complete text of the motion.
Continue reading Herb Wesson Introduces Motion In Council This Morning Decrying Donald Trump’s Use Of The Digital Divide To Disenfranchise “Low-Income And Immigrant Communities” While Never Even Mentioning How He And His Demonic Cronies Used Online Voting Against The Skid Row Neighborhood Council To Do The Same Freaking Thing →

Business Improvement Districts, Los Angeles City Government

Department Of Deja Voodoo: In August 2017 Lorena Parker Interceded On Behalf Of San Pedro Property Owner Linda Jackson To Avert Massive Fine For Illegal Use Of Property As Pet Grooming Facility — And 700 MB Of Other San Pedro BID Emails!

January 29, 2018 Mike 3 Comments

The main thing here is to announce the publication of about 1500 emails between the City of LA and the San Pedro BID. These run through January 25, 2018, and I’m not exactly sure where they start. There is some overlap here with earlier sets I’ve published. There is a lot of interesting stuff here, and I’ll be writing about a few episodes from time to time, starting today.

Perhaps you recall, dear reader, that in August 2016, San Pedro BID Executive Directrix Lorena Parker interceded with Joe Buscaino’s office on behalf of a member of her Board of Directors who was being criminally charged with not keeping his damn dumpsters clean. Now, normal people, like you, like I, tend to assume that it’s easier to not commit crimes than it is to commit them and then later try to fix them with our Council office, but, as the hallowed F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted:¹⁷
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.

And that, quite evidently, has something to do with the fact that the thing with the criminal dumpsters was not a one-off event. Evidently interceding on behalf of the law-flouting zillionaires of San Pedro with CD15 repster Joe Buscaino’s office is something Lorena Parker is called upon to do regularly and often. Turn the page for the details of another episode, this one from August 2017, involving property owner Linda Jackson and some illegal pet-groomers.
Continue reading Department Of Deja Voodoo: In August 2017 Lorena Parker Interceded On Behalf Of San Pedro Property Owner Linda Jackson To Avert Massive Fine For Illegal Use Of Property As Pet Grooming Facility — And 700 MB Of Other San Pedro BID Emails! →

Los Angeles City Council

Wesson, Cedillo, and Martinez Introduce Motion Instructing City Attorney To Write A Civil Rights Law Prohibiting Various Kinds Of Discrimination And Establishing A Commission To Enforce It — Demonstrating Yet Again How Our City Council Members Are Liars Even When Every Word Out Of Their Mendacious Mouths Is True

January 26, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

This is just a quick note to call attention to this motion, introduced in Council this morning by Herb Wesson, Gil Cedillo, and Nury Martinez (there’s a transcription of the PDF after the break). The motion, which has been assigned CF 18-0086, instructs the City Attorney with assistance from some other offices to draft a new civil rights law. The proposed law has two main parts.

First, it would prohibit “discrimination, prejudice, intolerance and bigotry that results in denial of equal treatment of any individual” and would do this by banning discrimination based on:

race
color
ethnicity
creed
age
national origin
citizenship status or perceived status
gender
gender identity or expression
sexual orientation or perceived orientation
disability
marital status
partnership status
employment status
source of income

in the areas of

employment
housing
medical services
businesses
other establishments¹⁸

Second, it would establish a new commission, to be called the Civil and Human Rights Commission, which would enforce the law. Now, I am completely opposed to all these kinds of discrimination, and, as you might have guessed, I’m completely in favor of establishing any kind of new venue for me to complain about BIDs to.¹⁹ However, as is so often the case with our City Council, things are probably not exactly what they seem to be on the surface.
Continue reading Wesson, Cedillo, and Martinez Introduce Motion Instructing City Attorney To Write A Civil Rights Law Prohibiting Various Kinds Of Discrimination And Establishing A Commission To Enforce It — Demonstrating Yet Again How Our City Council Members Are Liars Even When Every Word Out Of Their Mendacious Mouths Is True →