Carol “The Queen of Downtown” SchatzPerhaps you recall that I recently put a bunch of transaction records from the South Park BID up on Archive.Org because they’re both intrinsically interesting and also exceedingly useful in estimating how much shadowy BID consultant Tara Devine gets paid to drop yet another BID on our fair City; about $80,000, if my chain of inference is correct. Well, just recently I received SPBID’s transaction log from July 1, 2016 through January 31, 2017, which adds another $17,635 to Tara Devine’s running total. This makes more than $95,000 that the South Park BIDdies have paid Tara Devine. It’s probably not all for their BID renewal, though. As I reported the other day, the two South Park BIDs1 are evidently merging into one big bad BID, and Tara Devine is shepherding them through the sausage factory City Clerk’s office, so probably that’s mostly what she’s being paid for at this point. I have more requests in that may help us sort out the details.
Carol Schatz being crowned queen of Downtown by the LA County Board of Supervisors in October 2016.We still have not had time to read through the vast dump of Fashion District BID emails that I recently published on the Archive, but we’re working on it. This morning, though, while reading through the endless bitching and moaning, I happened to notice this little gem from January 2016. It’s an email about her impending retirement as president and CEO of the nightmare horror show Central City Association, in which she states: Here’s another famous queen who vowed never to relinquish her title, depicted in the act of having it forcibly explained to her that it’s not always possible not to relinquish such things.
Lastly, while there will be some changes in my responsibilities, there is one title I will never relinquish: I will always be the Queen of Downtown. Make no mistake about that!
Dan Halden of CD13 forwards links to MK.org around to his colleagues and tells them not to reply. What’s up with THAT, we wonder, although we could certainly make a guess!Last Wednesday our faithful correspondent and a small contingent of other MK.org staffers hit the 704 Eastbound on SMB to the Echo Park Office of Hollywood’s own Mitch O’Farrell, where he had an appointment with Hollywood Field Deputy Daniel Halden to look at both oodles and scads of very highly miscellaneous emails and other goodies.
It was our intention to follow our traditional course of conduct after such missions and hit up the loveliest Brite Spot at the corner of Sunset and Park, but ’twas not to be. For some reason known only to them and their accountant they’re closing at 4 pm throughout the Summer. One can only hope and pray that they’ll get back to normal hours later. But we digress. The Brite Spot in May 2016. This is your brain on diners.Here is a link to the raw scans, which we’ve barely had time to sift through. Some are renamed, but most are not. Extraneous blank pages have mostly not yet been stripped. If you’re interested in reading hundreds of pages of emails from her highness, Queen Laurie Goldman about random multi-use monstrosities in Hollywood and why Robert Silverstein is pretty much Satan incarnate we’ll hook you up! There’s even a letter from Silverstein to someone about something in there somewhere. We got a few emails about recent anti-nightclub conspiracies between Mitch O’Farrell and the cops (recall that we reported on this a lot last year). But the real gems (that’s sarcasm, of a sort) we’ll reveal below the fold! Continue reading Dan Halden and Mitch O’Farrell’s Staff are Among the Readers of this Blog and Other News from a Batch of Highly Assorted Emails from CD13→
TL;DR BID Quarterly Report: Bitch, moan, self-aggrandize, bitch, moan, self-aggrandize, whine, repeat if necessary.As a follow-up to Tuesday’s release of all Hollywood Entertainment District and all Sunset & Vine BID Quarterly Reports I’m pleased to announce today that I have bunches of these reports from other BIDS. Although these collections aren’t (yet) complete, they’re nevertheless essential. You can access them through the menu structure above, and here are links:
These are also available on the Internet Archive, which is useful because you can download them via torrent, they have OCR versions, and so on. Links are after the break. Continue reading A Vast Panoply of BID Quarterly Reports→
We’re out here having fun in the warm California sun!It’s been a while since I’ve announced a pure, old-fashioned document dump, but the records just keep pouring in, and I have loads of them to lay on you this evening. First, from our friends at the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, we have pretty much all their Quarterly Reports, even going back to the 1990s. I also put these on the Archive:
BIDs are required to send these reports to the City Clerk, who keeps them on file. They contain detailed narratives of the BIDs’ activities and are invaluable for understanding what’s going on. I have a ton of these from other BIDs as well, but they’re not quite ready for prime time. If there’s something you need urgently, though, drop me a line and I will try to fix you up.
Also, courtesy of the much-more-helpful-lately-than-she-has-been-in-the-past Suzanne Holley of the Downtown Center BID we have a massive pile of Central Area Crime Control stuff from the LAPD. This is valuable because getting it out of the LAPD would be practically impossible, and yet here it is. See what Compstat output looks like and much else of interest.
Here are a bunch of documents that I published on The Archive this morning. There’s some interesting stuff in there as well as the usual boatloads of chaff:
Emails between HPOA and Andrews International from 2015. This is supposed to be all of them. It may be all that the HPOA has on hand, but it’s certainly not all that were sent. I’ll be writing on this soon, I hope. I had to redact these lightly because they included a number of social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and a home address. Not cool!
Emails between Carol Schatz and Mike Oreb of the LAPD. Part of the same project. This is supposedly everything from January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2015. I don’t see how that could be right, but I also don’t see how to prove it. There’s some moderately interesting stuff in here, but nothing momentous.
Carol Schatz’s duplicity laid bare by Venn diagrams!UPDATE (3/17 9:40 a.m.): Just now the City Clerk sent out the agenda for a special meeting of the City Council tomorrow morning, amended to include the very change described in this post, requested by Carol Schatz only yesterday. Now THAT is political juice. Disgusting.
Carol Schatz, she of the zillion dollars an hour paycheck, just this evening with respect to Council file 14-1656-S1, on homeless people’s property, had a letter to the Council appear, advocating a change in conjunction from “and” to “or” in the proposed statute. Here’s what Carol Schatz had to say about the current proposal:
The ordinance from the City Attorney transmitted to the PWGR committee4 only leads to a violation if a person refuses to remove a tent and obstructs removal.
And why is this bad, Carol? Pray, do tell:
This is unreasonable in light of limited city resources. It would require the continued involvement of the LAPD to have tents deconstructed on a daily basis, which is not practical or the best use of resources. It also does not meet the City’s goal of decriminalizing homelessness.
And not only that, but look:
This is unfair to homeless individuals, business owners, residents and other community stakeholders.
You read it here second, friends! Carol Schatz is concerned that some City law is unfair to homeless people.5 Carol Schatz, the homeless people’s friend! Well, anyway, that line about the proposed law not decriminalizing homelessness is true, at least. Arresting homeless people because they won’t remove their tent and obstruct its removal “…does not meet the City’s goal of decriminalizing homelessness.” After all, it provides a way to arrest people, and only homeless people are affected. So what’s her solution? We are glad you asked! Read on for details: Continue reading Shame, Shame on Carol Schatz: The Zillion Dollar Woman’s Duplicity is Revealed by Propositional Logic Even Though She Just Wants to be Fair to “Homeless Individuals”→
Well, getting records out of the Downtown Center BID is like pulling teeth from a fricking hippopotamus,6 but after almost four months and one exceedingly detailed complaint to the Los Angeles City Clerk about their general bloody-minded uncooperative stonewalling, they have released a bunch of records relating to their public relations firm, Macy + Associates.7 You can find this material here on the Archive. Note that they’re, as usual, mercilessly and certainly illegally redacted. I’m working on this, but I don’t expect any results quickly.
Also, the big prize, obtained yesterday, is 2007 arrest reports and daily activity logs from the Andrews International BID Patrol. These are also on the Archive:
Carol Schatz, how big was your salary in 2012?!Our recent post on how much the Downtown Center BID paid Carol Schatz in 2012 has been so popular that we thought (we don’t live in Hollywood for nothing!) that we ought to publish a sequel. See the headline for the content. You can read the tax return here or click on the image below. Note that with the money the DCBID paid her in 2012, she grossed more than $3.5 million that year. This works out to more than $100,000 per year for 35 years.
Image of Carol Schatz was produced by the office of Jose Huizar, making it a public record.
Carol Schatz in January 2008 at Bringing Back Broadway.I have a number of interesting documents to announce this morning. There are emails to and from Eric Garcetti’s office in 2015:
