Category Archives: Downtown Center BID

Downtown Center BID, Public Records Act Pragmatics

Suzanne Holley Of The Downtown Center BID Redacted All The Email Addresses Of Her Frickin’ Board Of Directors Before She Coughed Up Emails In Response To My CPRA Request ‐ Not Only Is This Completely Unjustified Under The Law, But I Have The Damn Email Addresses Anyway And I’m Publishing Them Here In Case You Want Them Too!

March 25, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Of course you will recall that recently I published a huge dump of records from Carol Schatzenstein’s monster, known in the vernacular as the Downtown Center BID. The bulk of these came to me as MSG files, which is by far one of the three most useful formats in which to receive emails.¹ Those emails are available here on Archive.Org. On the other hand, Ms. Suzanne Holley, who is Chief Operating Officer of the BID,² for reasons known only to her and her lawyer, felt the need to heavily redact some of the emails, and these she provided to me as PDFs with the usual black bars through the putatively sensitive information.

Now, superficially this is all in accordance with the requirements of the California Public Records Act. The law defines certain categories of information that are exempt from disclosure, but also, at §6253(a), requires redaction rather than withholding the entire document when possible: Any reasonably segregable portion of a record shall be available for inspection by any person requesting the record after deletion of the portions that are exempted by law.

Now take a look at this little puppy, which down in the chain contains an email from Board member Cari Wolk to the rest of her unindicted co-conspirators announcing that she’s gonna be attending the upcoming conspiracy meeting. The content is not nearly so interesting as the redactions, which include all the email addresses of all the board members. Turn the page for a picture of the redacted portion as well as the usual sarcastic commentary and as an extra-special bonus, all the redacted email addresses which, as common sense would tell anyone who thought about it for a second,³ are not actually exempt after all.
Continue reading Suzanne Holley Of The Downtown Center BID Redacted All The Email Addresses Of Her Frickin’ Board Of Directors Before She Coughed Up Emails In Response To My CPRA Request ‐ Not Only Is This Completely Unjustified Under The Law, But I Have The Damn Email Addresses Anyway And I’m Publishing Them Here In Case You Want Them Too! →

Downtown Center BID, Hypocrisy

Despite Law-And-Order Obsession Of Central City Association With Respect To E.G. LAMC §41.18(d) And Other Homelessness-Criminalizing Measures It Seems That Lawlessness Flourishes And Is Tolerated Internally In The Form Of Unauthorized Use Of FedEx Account For Personal Shipping By CCALA Office Manager Lena Mulhall, Reimbursed Only Upon Discovery, Which Hardly Counts As Contrition At All

March 20, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

So the other day I got a metric doodieton of emails from the Downtown Center BID, published them all right here on Archive.Org, and have been gradually writing about item after item. Today’s item is, from one perspective, inconsequential albeit entertaining. From another point of view, though, it illustrates the utter flamingly shameless flagrancy of the Downtown zillionaire establishment’s hypocrisy when it comes to law and order.

These parasites¹ expect everyone, especially the homeless population of our City, to follow the law to the very freaking letter while they themselves, it turns out, are somehow allowed to steal from their employer and only make retribution months later when their crimes are discovered and that, it seems, settles the issue. Homeless people are caught with stolen bicycles all the time. Just imagine if all they had to do at that point was tell the cop that they would return the bike to the owner and that act of contrition, even if it was only contrition after apprehension, would make everything be just fine!

Why aren’t Carol Schatz and Jessica Lall advocating for this kind of policy, since it’s evident that it’s what they use internally at the CCALA and the DCBID? Oh, right, I haven’t told you the story! Well, TL;DR is that it seems that on March 30, 2017 at 2:00 p.m. precisely, DCBID staff accountant Joan Noble emailed CCALA office manager Lena Mulhall and was all like “WTF?! What did you spend this $31.39 on??!” and Lena Mulhall was all like “Sorry! I’ll pay it back! Just tell me who to write the damn check to!!”

Naturally turn the page for transcriptions, more emails, and the full and complete story of how Lena Mulhall charged $31.39 worth of FedEx to her employer’s account to return some cosplay supplies to a retailer and didn’t reimburse the funds until more than three months later and then not until she actually got caught!
Continue reading Despite Law-And-Order Obsession Of Central City Association With Respect To E.G. LAMC §41.18(d) And Other Homelessness-Criminalizing Measures It Seems That Lawlessness Flourishes And Is Tolerated Internally In The Form Of Unauthorized Use Of FedEx Account For Personal Shipping By CCALA Office Manager Lena Mulhall, Reimbursed Only Upon Discovery, Which Hardly Counts As Contrition At All →

Downtown Center BID

Lobbyists Are Made, Not Born — How Carol Schatz, The Zillion Dollar Queen Of Downtown, Is Raising Up Her Newly Anointed Little Princess Jessica Lall In The Methods And Practices Of The Influence-Peddling Trade

March 19, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Yesterday I loosed mere anarchy on the world in the form of about 3500 emails between the Downtown Center BID and the seething stew of evil goop known to the world as the Central City Association. The release came in two parts, the unredacted and also the redacted.

Now, I know that not everyone in the world is obsessed with these BIDdies as I am, so let me just remind you all that in September 2016, Queen of Downtown and Zillion Dollar Woman Carol Schatz retired from her lofty post as supreme commanderette of the CCALA. She subsequently anointed the former big bad bossietta of the South Park BID, Jessica Lall, as Princess of Downtown and Schatz’s successorette at CCALA, effective January 3, 2017.

With this background in mind it turns out that this little gem from February 6, 2017, is not, by far, the least interesting item in the new release. In short, what happened is that on January 13, 2017, just ten days after she assumed the throne, Jessica Lall made an appointment to go to City Hall on February 9, 2017 with Carol Schatz, presumably to get shown the ropes and be introduced personally to the tame Councilpets by the master Counciltamer herself.

Of course, February 9, 2017 was a Thursday, which revealed Jessica Lall to be the inexperienced ignoramus that everyone Downtown mostly knew that she was.¹ Carol Schatz, though, as much as this faux pas might have made her wish she’d elevated anybody but Ms. Jessica Lall to the crown, gritted her teeth and decided to teach her error-prone little protégé a lesson. Fortunately for us and for history, she did this via an email.

Now, if you are, as I am, a normal human being, those last sentences may well be completely unintelligible to you. Turn the page for transcriptions of everything along with the details of why you should never go to City Hall on a Thursday and how Carol Schatz schooled the newly-minted Princess in the inscrutable folkways of those who are paid to influence!
Continue reading Lobbyists Are Made, Not Born — How Carol Schatz, The Zillion Dollar Queen Of Downtown, Is Raising Up Her Newly Anointed Little Princess Jessica Lall In The Methods And Practices Of The Influence-Peddling Trade →

Announcements, Downtown Center BID

Downtown Center BID Sunday Afternoon Document Dump! Thousands Of Pages Of Emails To/From The Central City Association! Zillionaire Secrets, Such As They Are, Laid Bare For All To See!

March 18, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

This is just a short note to announce that I recently received a ton of records from Suzanne Holley of the Downtown Center BID. These are ostensibly all non-exempt emails between the Central City Association of Los Angeles and DCBID staffers from July 1, 2016 through January 31, 2018. You can get most of them here on Archive.Org. That set includes a bunch of PDFs I exported as well as an MBOX file that will give you access to the attachments.¹

Suzanne also saw fit to redact 134 of these emails. She supplies them as MSG files, which I guess are binaries of some sort and not easily edited, so she prints them to PDF and redacts with some kind of PDF editor.² You can find these 134 additional emails here on Archive.Org. There are a bunch of really important items here that I’ll be writing about over the next week³ but I just want to leave you with one hilarious item about music streaming. Turn the page for a transcription.
Continue reading Downtown Center BID Sunday Afternoon Document Dump! Thousands Of Pages Of Emails To/From The Central City Association! Zillionaire Secrets, Such As They Are, Laid Bare For All To See! →

Downtown Center BID

Press Relations Master Class With Flying Copy-Pasta Monster Carol Schatz And Her Pet Editor-Slash-Fluffer Jon Regardie As Well As About A Thousand Mostly Useless Emails From Her Weirdo Fiefdom, The Downtown Center BID, With Special Bonus Showing Self-Proclaimed Downtown News Senior Reporter And World’s Most Journalistic Attack-Labradoodle Eddie Kim Pleading For Access!

December 16, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

First the substance. I just uploaded about a thousand emails between the Downtown Center BID and either Kindel Gagan or the Downtown News. There are a few other kinds of items in there as well. This material came to me as MSG files and I converted it into an MBOX and also exported the emails individually as PDFs. If you have trouble getting the attachments out of the MBOX file drop me a line and I’ll get you started. Now on to the mockery!!

First of all, take a look at this item from February 2017: Nicole Kuklok-Waldman and Kate Hennigan Join Kindel Gagan. A run-of-the-mill announcement that two more urbanist-capitalist-developerist plague-carrying zombies have sold what passes for their souls by becoming partners at Kindel Gagan, a lobbying firm that’s so deeply fucked up that I can’t even think of nasty names to call it because none of them are even close to nasty enough:

Kindel Gagan is pleased to announce that prominent land use attorney Nicole Kuklok-Waldman and City Hall and public affairs veteran Kate Hennigan have joined the firm. Nicole and Kate bring a combined 20 years of successful land use and public affairs consulting experience, greatly expanding the firm’s capacity to serve our clients.

Really makes you want to read on, does it not?! Turn the page for Carol Schatz’s deeply professional response to this nonsense, as well as some foofraw about Jessica Lall’s takeover of the Central City Association and also some trivial bullshit from putatively journalistic attack puppy Eddie Kim.
Continue reading Press Relations Master Class With Flying Copy-Pasta Monster Carol Schatz And Her Pet Editor-Slash-Fluffer Jon Regardie As Well As About A Thousand Mostly Useless Emails From Her Weirdo Fiefdom, The Downtown Center BID, With Special Bonus Showing Self-Proclaimed Downtown News Senior Reporter And World’s Most Journalistic Attack-Labradoodle Eddie Kim Pleading For Access! →

Announcements, Business Improvement Districts, Downtown Center BID

More Than Ten Thousand Emails! Downtown Santa Monica BID And Downtown Center BID! Two Unbelievably Rich Sets Of Records!

October 2, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

This is just a short note to announce two massive sets of emails that I’ve obtained over the last couple weeks. There’s so much material here that it’s taken an unusual amount of time to get it processed and published. I will be writing about this material over the next few weeks. There’s so much, and it’s so rich, that it’s going to take me a while to get it all sorted out, so I thought it’d be best to make it available to you right away:

Downtown Santa Monica BID — Emails between the City of Santa Monica and the Downtown Santa Monica BID from January 1 through September 8, 2017.
Downtown Center BID — Assorted emails from the Downtown Center BID, mostly from 2017.

Like I said, there’s so much here that it will take a while to get it sorted through. Meanwhile, though, turn the page for some interesting stuff you can begin to look for on your own.
Continue reading More Than Ten Thousand Emails! Downtown Santa Monica BID And Downtown Center BID! Two Unbelievably Rich Sets Of Records! →

Announcements, Business Improvement Districts, Downtown Center BID, Fashion District BID

Sunday Morning Document Dump: Emails From Fashion District, Figueroa Corridor, North Hollywood, Downtown Center, Also Fashion District Transactions February Through April

May 14, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

Greetings, friends! If you’ve been wondering what you were going to do this morning after finishing off the Times crossword¹ here are a bunch of new public records for your reading pleasure. There’s no single document here that’s mind-blowingly important, but, as I have mentioned many and many a time, we all are strong believers around here in the Mosaic Theory of Intelligence Gathering, and these are just more puzzle pieces, some of them quite important qua puzzle pieces!²

Assorted Fashion District Emails 2017 — These are emails to/from people at the Fashion District BID and various other correspondents. There are no real blockbusters here compared to, e.g., last month’s momentous release of Skid Row Neighborhood Council emails, but there is some interesting stuff. Perhaps most interesting is this set, which includes a bunch of conspiratorial nonsense from the Central City Association as well as a detailed report-out from the BID’s Board retreat in March. This latter document will certainly turn out to be essential in at least one project I’m pursuing in relation to lobbying by BIDs, a sadly and almost surely illegally unregulated activity.
Fashion District Transactions February through April 2017 — More transaction reports. These are essential in ways that are hard to predict in advance. The big surprise here is that the Fashion District has recently spent $1647³ consulting with downtown legal beagles Bradley & Gmelich, the same law firm that the criminal conspiracy known as the South Park BID seems recently to have hired to (mis)handle its CPRA affairs and practices.⁴

And turn the page for more emails: North Hollywood BID, Figueroa Corridor BID, and our old friends, the Downtown Center BID!
Continue reading Sunday Morning Document Dump: Emails From Fashion District, Figueroa Corridor, North Hollywood, Downtown Center, Also Fashion District Transactions February Through April →

Announcements, Downtown Center BID

November 2016 Email From Suzanne Holley To Officer Eugene Shin Confirms That The Downtown Center BID’s Security Guards Were Already Registered With The Police Commission, Proving Yet Again That Major Criminals Strictly Follow Minor Laws To Divert Attention Away From Their Serious Transgressions

April 29, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

Here’s a brief summary of the background: Late last year, on the basis of my complaint to the Police Commission, the City of LA resumed enforcement of LAMC 52.34 against BID security forces.¹ Since then I’ve been tracking the progress of this massive project via various CPRA requests. In November 2016 the Police Commission informed all BIDs of the registration requirement. In December 2017 the Police Commission told the BIDs to quit whining and comply with the law.

Yesterday, after numerous failed attempts on her part,² Suzanne Holley of Carol Schatzie’s baby-doll of a Downtown Center BID, sent me a bunch of emails between her staff and the LAPD. You can get all of these at Archive.Org in various useful formats.³ Amongst these was yet another copy of Eugene Shin’s email to all BIDs directing them to get their security patrols registered with the Police Commission.

But much more interesting than that was DCBID Executive Directrix Suzanne Holley’s response, sent precisely 59 minutes later, informing Eugene Shin that…well, I’ll let Suzanne Holley tell you in her own words, right after the break!
Continue reading November 2016 Email From Suzanne Holley To Officer Eugene Shin Confirms That The Downtown Center BID’s Security Guards Were Already Registered With The Police Commission, Proving Yet Again That Major Criminals Strictly Follow Minor Laws To Divert Attention Away From Their Serious Transgressions →

Business Improvement Districts, Downtown Center BID, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy, Los Angeles City Council, Street Vending

The Actual Mechanism By Which Suzanne Holley And The Central City Association Strangled The Incipient Street Vending Ordinance In Its Cradle By Sneaking In Unilateral Councilmember Opt-Out On Behalf Of BIDs, The Role In This Debacle Played By Criminal Conspirators Jessica Borek and Matt Rodriguez, And How The Council Messaged It To BIDs

March 27, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

The Wicked Witch of the Southeast corner of Wilshire and Hope giving instructions to her flying monkeys.

Recall that I’ve been tracking the hysterical, irrational opposition of LA’s business improvement districts to the ongoing process of legalizing (some aspects of) street vending in the City since the Spring of 2015. A truly astonishing level of bitching and moaning in 2015 stalled out the whole process for most of 2016 because, I believe, everyone was too freaking sick of the whining and the carefully orchestrated lying on any number of occasions and the City just needed a rest.

A man arrested, transported, and handcuffed to a bench by the Andrews International BID Patrol in Hollywood for selling umbrellas on the street. At least it appears that this horror show is over, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there are even more loopholes and it’s not over at all.

Until the November election of Donald Trump and his subsequent threats to deport essentially anyone, U.S. citizen or not, who’d ever smiled while thinking of eating a taco spurred the Council into action on at least the small part (small but in no way insignificant) of the plan to decriminalize illegal street vending so that, no matter how much trouble the zillionaires might cause the heladeros, at least they wouldn’t be subject to arrest and subsequent deportation. That bit seemed urgent enough to pass Council outright, and even the anti-vending forces of the zillionaire elite seemed to realize that they were just going to be exposed as the nasty little mean creeps that they are if they fought back on this particular issue. However, the Council put off acting on an actual legalization framework until later.

But recall, as I reported in January, the instructions for the report-back were altered from the original, and quite sensible,¹ request for

A process to create special vending districts to be initiated by Council, the Board of Public Works, or petition (with signatures from 20 percent of property owners or businesses in the proposed district), based on legitimate public health, safety and welfare concerns that are unique to specific neighborhoods with special circumstances.

to a request for language

Providing the City Council the ability to opt out of certain streets by Council action.

At that time I didn’t understand yet how this had all taken place, but now I’ve accumulated enough documentary evidence that it’s possible to sketch out a picture. The short version is that in December 2016, Suzanne Holley, at that time acting Executive Director² of the Schatzian horror show known as the Central City Association of Los Angeles, wrote a letter to the City Council telling them to make the change. This was distributed to the BIDs via the BID Consortium. They all told their pet Councilmembers to change it. It got changed, and all the BIDs rejoiced, some of them quite publicly. The consequences of this are going to be horrific, and whatever street vending framework gets put in place will be DOA. Details and evidence after the break.
Continue reading The Actual Mechanism By Which Suzanne Holley And The Central City Association Strangled The Incipient Street Vending Ordinance In Its Cradle By Sneaking In Unilateral Councilmember Opt-Out On Behalf Of BIDs, The Role In This Debacle Played By Criminal Conspirators Jessica Borek and Matt Rodriguez, And How The Council Messaged It To BIDs →

Announcements, CD13, Downtown Center BID, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Los Angeles City Government, Venice Beach BID

So Many New Documents! CD13 and HPOA Emails, Arts District BID Shenanigans, Miranda Paster In The Ivory Tower, Carol Schatz’s Pet Baby BID Gets Audited, Venice Beach BID And The State Of California!!

February 16, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

Deputy Dan Halden thinking about breakfast with Kerry and the boys at the Brite Spot. If you don’t want to be depicted as a cartoon, stop acting like a cartoon. It’s that simple.

Good Lord, there’s too much to describe, but this is a rich, rich set of documents. I spent more than two hours at City Hall this morning scanning this nonsense, and here it is, in the rawest possible form. There are gems in that mine, friends, but until I have time, you’ll have to scratch them out your own self. For now they’re all up on our Archive.Org account. There’s stuff about the Venice Beach BID, and Carol Schatz‘s lil baby, the Downtown Center BID got audited in 2013, Daniel Halden and Kerry H. Morrison are up to their usual dimwitted antics, Miranda Paster collaborated on a grant with a bunch of longhair sociologists at TAMU, and the freaking Arts District freaking redux!! Here’s a list with links and brief descriptions:
Continue reading →