Category Archives: Announcements

Tempers Flare in Federal Court as Voluminous New Filings in LACW, LACAN v. City of LA, CCEA Case Reveal Inside Story of Lengthy, Painful Discovery Process

December 10, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

On Tuesday (December 8) a bunch of new documents related to the discovery process were filed in the ongoing lawsuit filed by Los Angeles Catholic Worker and the Los Angeles Community Action Network against the City of Los Angeles and the Central City East Association, which runs the Downtown Industrial District BID. I don’t have the competence to comment usefully on most of this stuff, but, interestingly, there’s a lot of discussion of how the city of Los Angeles deals with public records. This, I do know something about.

Anyway, you can find all of the new pleadings here in the subdirectory, dated December 8, 2015. First there is a brief motion to compel discovery from the city of LA, necessary because getting camels through the eyes of needles is easier than getting documents out of the city of Los Angeles. This was foreshadowed by something I missed in the the joint stipulation, discussed in my post the other day:

The City and Plaintiffs have met extensively regarding Defendants’ responses to Plaintiffs’ Requests for Production and will likely require Court intervention to resolve their disagreement

It seems that, however, as I recently reported, the CCEA at least is complying with discovery requests. There’s a little bit more detail after the break, including some sample prose laden with negative feelings in a manner not so commonly found in pleadings. I hope to write on a number of specific items later today or quite soon, especially the controversy over production of emails, an area where the city of Los Angeles is infamous for flouting the law.
Continue reading Tempers Flare in Federal Court as Voluminous New Filings in LACW, LACAN v. City of LA, CCEA Case Reveal Inside Story of Lengthy, Painful Discovery Process →

Announcements, Lawsuits

LACW, LACAN Lawsuit Against CCEA, City of LA, NOT Continued Until July Due to Successful-ish Ongoing Settlement Talks. Trial Still Set for April 26, 2016

December 8, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Ammon Hennacy in Santa Monica in July, 1966.

NOTE: Clearly I can’t read. This is wrong. The joint proposed motion filed by the parties was DENIED by the court. Trial is still set for April 26, 2016.
According to pleadings filed on November 30, 2015, settlement talks in the lawsuit filed by Los Angeles Catholic Worker and the Los Angeles Community Action Network against the City of Los Angeles and the Central City East Association, which runs the Downtown Industrial District BID, are proceeding well. The parties filed a joint stipulation stating that they

…continue to engage in settlement negotiations and are actively exchanging proposals. The parties believe future talks will continue to be productive and are amenable to participating in further sessions with Judge Woehrle [the magistrate judge in the case]. Because these early settlement conferences indicated a potential for resolution of this case, and because all parties are non-profits and government entities, the parties have attempted to delay incurring significant litigation expenses from discovery and motion practice while the parties have been actively engaged in settlement negotiations.

And there’s more of that kind of thing in the stipulation. Well, as the man said, “if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them.” On December 2, 2015, Judge Gutierrez filed an order pushing the trial date back three months to July 2016 to give the parties time to work everything out.
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Announcements, Central City East Association

New Emails from CCEA: Raquel K. Beard, Ed Camarillo, Estela Lopez (!), Etc.

December 8, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Photograph attached to one of the emails I received recently from the CCEA.

Yesterday I got about a hundred pages of emails from CCEA Executive Director Raquel K. Beard. These are from September 1, 2015 through September 8, 2015 and supposedly comprise all nonexempt emails sent or received by anyone at the CCEA during that period. I haven’t read them carefully yet, so there may be undiscovered gems. One interesting thing is that there are a number of emails between Raquel and Estela Lopez. Estela was formerly Executive Director of the CCEA and Raquel was the Managing Director. Raquel left in 2012 to run Downtown Long Beach Associates, which, among other things, seems to manage a BID there.
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Announcements, Fashion District BID

Now Sashaying Down the Runway for your Délectation de la Haute Couture: A Preview of our Winter Collection of Fashion District BID Documents

December 3, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

This is what the Fashion District looks like on the Fashion District BID's instagram page and in its fevered imagination. The reality is quite different and, frankly, way much more simpático. — This is what the Fashion District looks like on the Fashion District BID’s instagram page and in its fevered imagination. The reality is quite different and, frankly, way much more simpático.

I’m pleased to announce the arrival of the first batch of documents from the Fashion District BID. Mostly I decided to start collecting documents from them because of the recent lawsuit against them. I’m not collecting documents specifically about the lawsuit, but rather records which will allow researchers and interested parties to form an accurate understanding of the BID itself. There’s not much that’s super-interesting here yet, but links to what I have may be found after the break.
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Announcements, Central City East Association, Downtown Center BID

DCBID Shift Summaries, Carol Schatz Emails, CCEA Safety Team Materials

November 24, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Carol Schatz about to grasp and crush someone or something and making the guy behind her on the right a little queasy.

This evening I have the pleasure of announcing a big bunch of new documents, mostly from the DCBID, but a couple of choice bits from the CCEA as well.

• Over 500 shift summaries prepared by Universal Protection Service between January 1, 2015 and early October, 2015. You can browse them directly from here where you’ll also find a zip archive of the whole batch, or look for that same directory in the menu structure above at Documents/DCBID/Universal Protection Service/UPS Shift Summaries. No one here has had the time to look through these in detail yet.

• Fifty-three emails from/to Carol Schatz of the DCBID. These are available directly from here, and there’s also a zip archive of all of them. You can also get to them from the menu structure above if necessary. These are redacted mercilessly and almost certainly illegally (I’m working on that), but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. These are purportedly all of Carol Schatz’s DCBID emails for the third quarter of 2015, but, you know, I don’t think everything’s here. I’m working on that too. You’ll be hearing much more about this material in the near future.

And turn the page for the latest from the Downtown Death Star BID itself!
Continue reading DCBID Shift Summaries, Carol Schatz Emails, CCEA Safety Team Materials →

Announcements

New Los Angeles BID Wiki and also Some Media District Documents

November 22, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Amongst the many photos taken by the BID patrol we find four different images of this "officer" helping this blind guy across the street. It goes to show something. In fact, it goes to show many things. Probably none of them are what Steve Seyler meant it to show. Is this relevant to the subject of this post? Not especially. — Amongst the many photos taken by the BID patrol we find four different images of this “officer” helping this blind guy across the street. It goes to show something. In fact, it goes to show many things. Probably none of them are what Steve Seyler meant it to show. Is this relevant to the subject of this post? Not especially.

Today I have one ordinary announcement and one extraordinary announcement. First there are some new documents from the Media District BID. In particular, there are a bunch of policies, whistleblower, document retention, conflict of interest, and so forth. These seem to be essentially city boilerplate but I haven’t looked at them that closely. You can find them here or directly from storage here or from the menus above. The really big news is after the break!
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Announcements

Many New Documents: CCEA, Media District, and HPOA.

November 19, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Suzanne Holley, Chief Operating Something-or-Another with the DCBID and the Central City Association as well. This image adorns this post for no reason whatsoever. I don’t even have any new documents from the DCBID.

Today is all documents, minimal commentary, no analysis:

2009 emails from HPOA about Sesame Street characters. See tag archive for context.
Some new Universal Protection Service internal reports from the Media District. We already wrote about one of these. Here are a couple more.
Many, many years worth of Board of Directors minutes from the CCEA provided by the ever-helpful-in-bizarro-world Raquel K. Beard. As always these people take no thought for making files sort properly in directories. I’ll fix this when I have time.
A minimal number of CCEA committee minutes. According to Raquel K. Beard, “Committees do not meet monthly or quarterly, more so as needed,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. If you want a little puzzle to work out until someone around here gets time to write about it, you can think about why this item plus this email chain might add up to very, very bad news for the CCEA.

Image of Suzanne Holley is from a screenshot of this DCBID newsletter which, being a California public record, is in the public domain.

Announcements

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is to a Thousand Philistines as the East Hollywood BID Contractor Responsibility Ordinance Agreement is to the Jawbone of an Ass

November 10, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Even very strong people sometimes need the right tool with which to smite their enemies. And sometimes they just reach out their hand and there it is. Sometimes it happens like that.

I’m just announcing a few new documents today. When I requested them it was almost an afterthought. I didn’t expect much of them. But one has turned out to be really interesting and potentially really important.

These are just routine Contractor Responsibility Ordinance pledges of compliance. Today I have three:

Now, one of these things is really not like the others.
Continue reading The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is to a Thousand Philistines as the East Hollywood BID Contractor Responsibility Ordinance Agreement is to the Jawbone of an Ass →

Announcements, Downtown Center BID

Multi-Megabyte Treasure Trove of DCBID Documents: UPS Use of Force Manual, Beaucoup Board Minutes, Finance Committee.

November 6, 2015 Mike 2 Comments

If you're the kind of person to whom diagrams such as this have meaning, this one certainly has meaning to you. — If you’re the kind of person to whom diagrams such as this have meaning, this one certainly has meaning to you. Click to see full size.

I just got a ton of stuff from the ever-helpful (and, relatively speaking, surprisingly sane) Suzanne Holley of the DCBID. The most amazing item, and one which no one here has yet had time to read carefully enough to appreciate, is the 64 page PDF of the Universal Protection Service Use of Force Manual. This is an amazing piece of evidence. What it is evidence of, as always, remains to be seen. If you notice anything important in it, please drop me a line. No doubt my colleagues and I will be mining this for a long time. It is the source of the cryptic yet creepy diagram which adorns this post. There are also a bunch of slightly more pedestrian-on-their-face documents, described after the break.
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Announcements, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Retraction: Documents Attesting to More than a Decade of Tragically Futile HPOA Support for Public Toilets in Hollywood Show Conclusively that City of Los Angeles is 100% to Blame for their Lack

October 30, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Screenshot of LA City Approval for a public toilet at Hollywood Blvd and Orange Drive.

Well, long-time readers of this blog will recall a number of shrill screeds on our part about how the BID Patrol keeps arresting people for public urination but the HPOA doesn’t do anything to get public toilets installed. And aren’t we embarrassed now. We had assumed that the HPOA had so much political juice that they could get anything they wanted out of the city, so the fact that Hollywood has no public toilets, we wrongly assumed, was proof that the HPOA was opposed to them.

It turns out that we were dead wrong about that. The HPOA has been trying for over a decade to get the city to put public toilets around Hollywood without any success. Just mere moments ago our faithful correspondent received documents that demonstrate this in great detail, and we apologize for our hasty leaping at conclusions. You can browse through the documents via the new Public Toilets subdirectory of the HPOA directory in the menu structure above.
Continue reading Retraction: Documents Attesting to More than a Decade of Tragically Futile HPOA Support for Public Toilets in Hollywood Show Conclusively that City of Los Angeles is 100% to Blame for their Lack →