Once and future queen of the Central City East Association, Ms. Estela Lopez herself yammering on about something to someone.I have a couple new sets of documents to announce tonight. First there are tax returns from the Central City East Association from 2014 and 2015, and you can get them:
There’s a little puzzle hidden away in the two new ones. If you can spot it, drop me a line before I write a post on it1 and win a prize! I won’t approve any comments that give it away, though. No spoilers!
Also, in the face of the incredible, probably illegal, intransigence displayed by CD11 Councilmember Mike Bonin and his weirdo staff with respect to CPRA requests, I am making requests of the BIDs in CD11 for emails to/from lacity.org. Most of these are likely to be with Bonin or his staff, which will let us keep track of what’s going on in the District Office even if CD11 just actually won’t answer CPRA requests at all. It might be interesting, it might be useful, but there’s no way to know until we get the goods. The very first installment of this material comes from the Westchester Town Center BID, specifically from its Executive Director Donald Duckworth.2 Just tonight he handed over minutes and agendas from 2016, with a promise of a lot of emails to follow. For now this is only available on Archive.Org. Continue reading New Documents: Central City East Association Tax Returns 2012-2015, Westchester Town Center BID Agendas and Minutes→
Why do lawyers always think that saying my name is enough to impeach my testimony? At least I’m not freaking Rumpelstiltskin!For background take a look at this excellent article from the Times on this lawsuit.
This is just a brief note to memorialize the fact that, in response to the big pile of stuff filed over the weekend by plaintiffs’ attorney Victor Otten in the Lunada Bay Boys suit, Brant Blakeman’s attorney Richard Dieffenbach has filed this reply, which is written with a certain je ne sais quoi, as they say. For instance, in his interrogatories to the plaintiffs, Brant Blakeman propounded3 the following question:4
IDENTIFY ALL PERSONS that have knowledge of any facts that support your contention in paragraph 18 of the Complaint that BRANT BLAKEMAN “sell[s] market[s] and use[s] illegal controlled substances from the Lunada Bay Bluffs and the Rock Fort” and for each such PERSON identified state all facts you contend are within the PERSON’s knowledge.
And after more than a page of objections as to why this question is improper and they don’t have to answer it and so on, the plaintiffs say they’re gonna answer just a little bit anyway, and here’s what they answer:
In addition to each defendant named in his individual capacity and other person identified in Plaintiffs’ Initial and Supplemental Disclosures, and the evidence submitted in support of Plaintiffs [sic/ motion for class certification, Responding Party identifies the following individuals: and individual that is goes [sic] by the name The Weasel.
“Blakeman looked possessed or possibly on drugs. His behavior got more bizarre throughout the morning.”For background take a look at this excellent article from the Times on the suit.
Well, when I decided to start collecting the pleadings in Spencer v. Lunada Bay Boys, I had no idea how much material it was going to involve. By the way, the full collection is available here on Archive.Org. In any case, a bunch more stuff hit PACER last night. It consists of allegations by Victor Otten, plaintiffs’ attorney, that Bay Boys defendants Brant Blakeman and Alan Johnston are stonewalling court-ordered discovery and that “there is a clear pattern emerging that the individual defendants are withholding and/or destroying evidence and misusing the discovery process.”
There are links and brief descriptions of the new material after the break, as always, but first I have some interesting details about defendant Alan Johnston’s cell phone. It seems that on December 12, 2016, the magistrate judge, Hon. Rozella Oliver, issued an order to compel defendant Alan Johnston to hand over two cell phones and corresponding passwords to the plaintiffs:
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED THAT that Mr. Johnston overnight his cell phone(s), both his old, water damaged phone and his current phone to his counsel. Mr. Carey5 is directed to hand over the cell phone(s) to Todd Stefan at Setec Investigations, 8391 Beverly Blvd #167, Los Angeles, CA 90048, the party chosen by Plaintiffs to conduct the examination of the phone.
Mr. Otten and Mr. Carey shall reasonably cooperate to agree upon a set of search parameters to guide Mr. Stefan’s forensic investigation of the phone(s), including text messages, contacts, photographs, and videos by December 14, 2016. If the parties cannot agree upon a set of search parameters, they shall submit their proposed search parameters to the Court by December 14, 2016. Mr. Johnston is ordered to cooperate as necessary with Mr. Stefan with respect to passwords. Defendant Alan Johnston is ordered to pay the cost of the forensic investigation within 10 days of his attorney being sent a statement.
Tara Devine in City Council Chambers at the Venice Beach BID Hearing Take 2 on November 8, 2016.Check out this interesting series of emails from August 2016. It begins when Yo! Venice reporter Melanie Camp writes to Mike Bonin’s communications director David Graham-Caso, stating:
Hi David,
I have several questions regarding the BID. The information you provided, coupled with the information/misinformation flying around raises a couple of issues that need clearing up.
I’m interested in Mike’s opinion, as well as your own, on any or all of these.
Less than 40 minutes later, David Graham-Caso forwarded the email6 to Debbie Dyner Harris along with a terse note that said:
Can you please send this to the BID consultant to get her help with the answers?
And a mere 13 minutes after that, Debbie Dyner Harris forwarded the email7 to Tara Devine, stating:
Hi Tara. Can you please respond to her? Thanks
A really pretty archetypally Californian road in the really pretty archetypally Californian City of Palos Verdes Estates, which is a really pretty archetypally Californian example of the kind of hell on earth that gets created around here when zillionaires are allowed to own entire cities and operate them according to customary zillionaire practices.This is just a short note to memorialize the fact that a bunch of paperwork was filed in the case of Cory Spencer v. Lunada Bay Boys. I have added the new material to the Archive.Org page (look for docket numbers 204 through 207). There are links to and brief descriptions of the new material after the break. Don’t forget to look at the plaintiffs’ responses to the defendants’ interrogatories, which aren’t always available to the public via PACER. In this case they were put on the record as part of a lawyer’s declaration. And also don’t forget that there’s an upcoming hearing on the plaintiffs’ motion to certify the case as a class action, scheduled for Tuesday, February 21 at 10 a.m. in Judge Otero’s courtroom 10C in the First Street Courthouse downtown. Continue reading City Of Palos Verdes Estates Tells Federal Court That One Of The Plaintiffs’ Experts Ain’t Expert Enough, Other Documents Filed Including Many Responses To Interrogatories→
Looking south along Vermont Avenue from Russell Avenue in 1974 (with a good old triangular RTD sign in the foreground!). The trees are bigger now, but otherwise is Los Feliz Village really better off 43 years later?Long-time readers of this blog will recall that the locus classicus of operational BID policies in the City of Los Angeles is to be found in Council File 96-1972, which is too old to have actual documents online, but I scanned and published a number of them last year.10 Therein may be found the City’s BID Policy and Implementation Guidelines, which are meant to provide an L.A.-specific implementation of the Property and Business Improvement Law of 1994.
Chapter 2 of that law describes the process for establishment and renewal of a BID,11 and it’s remarkable how tentative, how conditional the process is. It’s well-known by this point that in order for a BID to be formed it’s necessary that property owners representing more than 50% of the assessed value be in favor.12 It’s necessary, but it by no means sufficient. Section 36625(a) very clearly leaves the question of formation up to the Council:
If the city council, following the public hearing, decides to establish a proposed property and business improvement district, the city council shall adopt a resolution of formation…
The only mandatory requirement with respect to BID establishment in the whole Chapter is found in Section 36623(b), which says that if owners holding 50% or more of the assessed value are opposed to the BID, not only can it not be formed, but no further attempts can be made to form it for a year.
And the discretionary nature of the process is reflected in the City’s BID Policy and Implementation Guidelines as well. Therein it states:13
The City Council can proceed with the BID if the protest is less than 50%. However, BID proponents are cautioned that they should not expect a favorable vote from the City Council with a significant number of protests.
From the context it’s clear that the policy means that there is some threshold of protest less than 50% with respect to which the Council will not establish the proposed BID even though the Property and BID Act would allow them to do so.
The Venice Post Office; zoned commercial. Now it’s in the BID! Now it’s out of the BID! Now it’s back in the BID!I recently wrote in excruciating detail about how everyone involved with the BID formation process denies, almost certainly wrongly, that they have any power at all over which parcels are included in a BID. Thus, e.g., did Tara Devine inform unhappy property owner William Kuel in this email from August 2016 that his property, which is zoned commercial but used for residential purposes, must be included in the Venice Beach BID. She went so far as to tell him explicitly that “neither the Engineer nor I can remove your parcel from the proposed BID.” This phenomenon has been hugely controversial in the formation of the Venice Beach BID, and is the basis of a lawsuit filed against the City by Venice residents upset over the inclusion of their property in the BID. Tara Devine leaving the lectern at a 2016 Los Angeles City Council meeting.
So what a surprise it was to find, buried amongst thousands of pages of nonsense in this latest pile of emails between Tara Devine and various employees of the City Clerk’s office, this June 30, 2015 missive from Tara Devine to a bunch of people, stating that she was unilaterally removing a commercially zoned property from the BID for, seemingly, no particular reason:
I will also re-send the database as we made one tiny change. After a discussion with Ed, we removed the federal USPS parcel (Venice post office.) It was on the edge of the BID and was not required for a contiguous boundary, so we just removed it from dbase and other docs.
Leaving aside the evident fact that Tara Devine doesn’t know the difference between contiguous and continuous, isn’t this interesting? She “just removed” a piece of property from the BID. And then a year later she was telling property owners that she didn’t have the power to remove parcels, and some of those property owners are now suing the City partially on the basis of this claim she17 has been pushing about her powerlessness. It will be interesting to see if this turns out to be evidence in the lawsuit!18 It’s extremely interesting to see that she told a bunch of City Clerk employees that she’d done this and not one of them questioned her ability to do it, which is in stark contrast to Holly Wolcott’s 2016 assertions that no one was empowered to remove properties.
What’s so funny, Captain? Peter Zarcone smiling with his eyes at a HPOA Joint Security Committee meeting in April 2015.I spent about three hours yesterday in City Hall and at the LAPD Discovery office scanning stuff. There are thousands of pages of stuff here, some of it quite important. It will take a long time to go through it and write about the highlights, so I thought I’d put it up on the Archive in (very, very) raw form immediately. Here’s what we have today:
More emails from 2015 between Peter Zarcone and the HPOA — What happened is that the first time I made a request for this material, the LAPD IT department somehow missed a number of responsive documents. I could tell that they did because of automatically generated out-of-office responses that they did provide the first time around. However, the emails which had triggered those responses weren’t included, which was evident from the dates. They accepted this argument and reran the search. Consequently many but not all of these documents have already been published, but I have not yet had time to sort out the duplicates. As I said, I want to make the material available immediately.
Emails between Tara Devine and the LA City Clerk’s Office — Here are thousands of pages of emails between Tara Devine and various people in the LA City Clerk’s office. Some of these have been previously published but most of them have not. Interestingly, although most of the material is about the Venice Beach BID, there is also a bunch of stuff about the South Park II BID20 renewal, which Tara Devine was also the consultant for. I will be writing about much of this material, but here’s the raw stuff. Drop me a note if you spot anything that seems especially pressing.
If you don’t like what the street signs say you can just knock them down and ignore them, friend.There are two main reasons why I am not a professional journalist. The first is that on career day at Venice High way back in the 1970s, those of us who ventured east to the venerated southwest corner of First and Spring found, well…never mind what we found,21 discretion prevents me from discussing it, but it sure didn’t make me want to join the ranks despite the fact that the paper was more than a decade into its renaissance under the sainted guidance of Otis Chandler himself. And the second reason is that I have never, ever, in my entire life been able to understand the inverted pyramid — or maybe I understand it and I just have no freaking idea what’s most newsworthy in any given story. This interpretation is borne out by the fact that I’m starting this evening’s tale off with a bunch of half-invented, half-remembered, half-plagiarized, nonsense about my high school career day.22
For instance, does the inverted pyramid suggest that we next analyze the founding principles of BIDs? I have no idea. But the locus classicus of BIDs, their founding text, which is to say the California Streets and Highways Code at §36601(e), tells us that amongst the benefits provided by BIDs are crime reduction, business attraction, business retention, economic growth, and new investments. Note the conspicuous absence from this list of parking ticket fixing for zillionaire BID stakeholders. However, despite the fact that parking violation fines are a major social justice issue in Los Angeles and yet another example of covert regressive taxation, apparently a major use that zillionaires, that is to say those for whom the fine attached to a parking violation is not a significant fraction of their annual income, have found for their BIDs is to serve as a vehicle for interfering on their behalf with the normal statutory operation of the City’s parking enforcement apparatus.
We saw this, e.g., last year when Ms. Kerry Morrison, outraged23 by the fact that her good friend and stakeholder, zillionaire white real estate capitalist running dog lackey Evan Kaizer, was ticketed on Hollywood Boulevard for meter-feeding, fired off an email to LADOT honcho-ette Seleta Reynolds, putatively asking for an explanation but really, as everyone could see, providing an opening for the whole thing to go away. It doesn’t seem to have happened that the ticket got fixed, but that particular toys-from-pram episode ended up interbreeding with a sort of free-floating generalized zillionaire rage over vibrant urban spaces,24 eventually begetting a conceptual exploration, fueled by outraged privilege, of the possibility of using this state-law-mandated meter-feeding prohibition to attack the very existence of food trucks.
Looming reality in the form of the 1st Street Federal Courthouse as seen from the shores of Lunada Bay. Is it getting closer? Is it just an illusion? We will find out on February 21, 2017 at 10 a.m.!See here for yesterday’s post on this matter and if you need background take a look at this excellent article from the Times on the suit.
Well, just one day after I decided to add Cory Spencer v. Lunada Bay Boys to my PACER watchlist, an avalanche of opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion to have the thing turned into a class action suit hit the RSS feed. It’s all pretty interesting, and I have uploaded it all to the Archive.Org page that I made yesterday to host all this stuff on. There is a list of new items with links after the break, but the common theme of many of them, as exemplified in the Objection to Plaintiffs’ Evidence in Support of Motion for Class Certification, a 112 page behemoth with which most if not all of the individual defendants seem to have joined in, seems to go something like this:
There is no such thing as the Lunada Bay Boys.
But if there is such a thing as the Lunada Bay Boys, none of the defendants are members of it.
But if some or all of the defendants are members of it, they didn’t do any of the stuff alleged in the complaint.
But if they did do some or all of the stuff alleged in the complaint, they didn’t do it to the plaintiffs.
But if they did do it to the plaintiffs, there wasn’t really any cognizable damage.
But if there was cognizable damage, it’s not really possible to figure out who was damaged.
The City of Palos Verdes Estates (PVE) along with their Chief of Police take a slightly different tack in e.g. their opposition to the motion for class certification. Their theory seems to be that since one plaintiff said something nice about the PVE cops in 2016, they must be innocent all the way back to 1966. Perhaps that even makes sense (?!)
