Category Archives: Business Improvement Districts

Hollywood BID Patrol, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

More Buffoonery from Big Bitchin’ Boss of the Bogusly Bad-Ass BID Patrol Part 12: Attack of the “Self-Proclaimed Anarchists”!!

November 5, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Steve Seyler and posse in 2014 doing something somewhere for some reason.

It’s been a while since last we focused on Big Bad Steve Seyler, bogusly bad-ass boss of Hollywood’s own bitchin’ BID Patrol. Let’s get back to work with a smokin’ little number known as BID SUMMARY 3-2-15-3-29-15.pdf. This is one of the huge collection of Seyler reports that our faithful correspondent has obtained for us over the years.

A not-so-young marine steps forward to kill and dismember a big-ass cake with a sword! What did you do in the war, daddy?!

Anyway, we can’t describe the situation on the Boulevard on March 7, 2015 any better than the Big Kahuna himself can do. Read well!:

On 3-7-15, our bike officers were on patrol at 6801 Hollywood Blvd. A large group of self-proclaimed anarchists were screaming and drawing all over the sidewalks with chalk. The group approached our officers and did their best to provoke them. Our officers showed great restraint and even backed into the street in order to avoid a confrontation. We called the LAPD. One of the people shoved one of our officers and then fled the scene as the LAPD arrived. A young marine stepped forward and commended our officer’s [sic] for their restraint. He also offered to be a witness regarding the anarchist’s actions if that was needed.

You should read the rest of the report for more mockable goodness and rapport-building in the inimitable style of the great Seyler hisself, but this is all we have time to mock tonight, so read on!
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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 →

Announcements, Central City East Association

Downtown Industrial District BID / Central City East Association Documents Now Available

October 30, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

White skin and red blood on Skid Row.

I recently started requesting documents from the Central City East Association (CCEA), which runs the Downtown Industrial District BID. I’m not sure why, it was just a whim, but the executive directrix, a lady named Raquel Beard (who long-time readers may remember for her stunningly weird remarks about sidewalk vending), turned out to be so delightfully trollable that I’m just going to keep it up for a while. I can already see a couple of ways it might develop into a long game, but I’m keeping schtum about that for now. Meanwhile, take a look at what I got today. You can begin with CCEA in the Documents menu above. Also, here is a page for the new subdirectory. After the break I describe things in more detail, if you’re interested.
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Hollywood BID Patrol, Lawsuits

Acting on Behalf of Street Vendors National Lawyers Guild LA Sues City, Fashion District BID Over Illegal Confiscations, Color-of-Law Abuses. PDF of Initial Complaint Available

October 29, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Another street vendor arrested, shackled, jailed, and abused by the Hollywood BID Patrol

Yesterday, the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles filed suit in Federal Court against the City of Los Angeles and the Fashion District BID on behalf of the Union Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes. First of all, I set up a page to collect filings. I managed to track down a copy of the initial complaint (OK, I mean I bought it from PACER for $1.70, you’re welcome!), and you can read about it in the LA Times here if you want.

The title of this file claims that it's abandoned property and that it was donated to Blessed Sacrament. It's obvious from the context, though, that it's really stuff that was confiscated from a street vendor by the BID Patrol or else abandoned when the vendor ran away because the BID Patrol was threatening to arrest him. In any case, it did not belong to them and they stole it when they took it to give to the church. — The title of this file claims that it’s abandoned property and that it was donated to Blessed Sacrament. It’s obvious from the context, though, that it’s really stuff that was confiscated from a street vendor by the BID Patrol or else abandoned when the vendor ran away because the BID Patrol was threatening to arrest him. In any case, it did not belong to them and they stole it when they took it to give to the church.

There’s an excerpt from the complaint after the break, but it’s really worth reading the whole thing.

One of the main points is that the LAPD and the BID conspire to not only cite and/or arrest the vendors, but to destroy their stuff. We’ve written before about how the Hollywood BID Patrol does the same thing. They not only arrest the vendors, but without any kind of due process, they ruin all their stuff, or even worse, appropriate it and steal it. You can see an example of this in the photo somewhere near this sentence. I would imagine that, now that the Fashion District BID is being sued, the HPOA is getting a little nervous. Turn the page to hear why!

Continue reading Acting on Behalf of Street Vendors National Lawyers Guild LA Sues City, Fashion District BID Over Illegal Confiscations, Color-of-Law Abuses. PDF of Initial Complaint Available →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

World-Renowned Magazine The New Yorker Confirms in Current Issue that Our March 2015 Reporting on Carol Massie’s Self-Delusory Misrepresentation of her Business Model Was 100% Accurate

October 28, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Jittery little psychopath and Hollywood McDonald's queen Carol Massie who, in direct contradiction to high McDonald's corporate-level mucky-mucks, thinks her business is not all about the bucks. — Jittery little psychopath and Hollywood McDonald’s queen Carol Massie who, in direct contradiction to high McDonald’s corporate-level mucky-mucks, thinks her business is not all about the bucks. Despite its appearance this is not a surveillance picture. It’s just a picture with that surveillance aesthetic!

Remember back in March 2015 when we reported on the weirdly racist meanderings of Hollywood Chamber of Commerce flunky Marty Shelton as filtered through the unrepressed id of jittery little psychopath and Hollywood McDonald’s queen Carol Massie, who, in a surprising-even-for-her outburst at a meeting of the Sunset-Vine BID Board blamed Hollywood nightclub owners for ruining everything because they run “…these businesses who don’t really care about anything except that they make a profit.”??

At that time, we responded, quite reasonably even if we do say so ourselves, to the effect that:

Carol, here’s a newsflash: your company destroys rainforests, destroys the health of the world’s people, exploits its employees, destroys everything, because it doesn’t “really care about anything except that [it] make[s] a profit.” That’s what McDonald’s does.

Well, now it’s time for us to confess. We didn’t really know that for sure. We were just guessing. For all we knew at that time the corporate overlords of the mighty McDonald’s machine were all sitting around back in good old Oak Brook, Illinois, where they have pitched their mansion, just not caring at all about money cause money can’t buy them love or whatever. We just made a claim that sounded plausible and kept our fingers crossed that we wouldn’t end up in trouble. Well, we were right!
Continue reading World-Renowned Magazine The New Yorker Confirms in Current Issue that Our March 2015 Reporting on Carol Massie’s Self-Delusory Misrepresentation of her Business Model Was 100% Accurate →

Selma Park

Selma Park Smoking Gun! HPOA Revealed to be Fully Responsible for Tragic Parkicidal Transformation into Children’s Play Area Based on Kerry Morrison’s Pathos-Laden Misunderstanding of Life, Reality, and Everything

October 26, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

The HPOA just after destroying Selma Park in order to save it.

If you’ve been following the Selma Park story you’ll recall that, even as we’ve discovered that the park was illegally made off-limits to all but adults with children, even as we’ve uncovered a stinking, sordid history of both roustings-out and illegal arrests, it hasn’t been exactly clear who was actually, explicitly responsible for this ugly situation. Well, amongst the documents laid on you the other day by our faithful correspondent we found the actual smoking gun in an email written on January 22, 2008, by Kerry Morrison to Heather Repenning and Helen Leung, then-council-president and CD13 representative Eric Garcetti’s District Director of Community Development and Hollywood Field Deputy respectively.

Heather Repenning in 2003, when she worked for Eric Garcetti as a "Community Organizer" which, on first hearing, sounds like some kind of lovely, angelic, Saul Alinsky kinda job, but a mere five years later she was conspiring with Kerry Morrison to steal away our freaking park! Times change and people change with them — Exceedingly crazy-looking Heather Repenning in 2003, when she worked for Eric Garcetti as a “Community Organizer” which, on first hearing, sounds like some kind of lovely, angelic, St. Saul Alinsky kinda job, but a mere five years later she was conspiring with Kerry Morrison to steal away our freaking park! Times change and people change with them

Heather — wanted to see if you had an idea as to how we might be able to communicate with the families located around Selma Park…As you may know, with the help Helen [sic] and the rest of your team at CD-13, we’ve been able to designate the entire park as a children’s play area.

So that settles that. HPOA and Eric Garcetti’s staff illegally excluded everyone without kids from Selma Park at some time before January 22, 2008.

Kerry Morrison! You just illegally banned everyone from a public park, starting off a chain of at least 46 illegal arrests and God only knows how many color-of-law civil-rights violations. Are you going to Disneyland?! Nope.
Continue reading Selma Park Smoking Gun! HPOA Revealed to be Fully Responsible for Tragic Parkicidal Transformation into Children’s Play Area Based on Kerry Morrison’s Pathos-Laden Misunderstanding of Life, Reality, and Everything →

Announcements, Selma Park

New Documents About Selma Park From the HPOA, New Document Storage System

October 24, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

An official BID Patrol photo of the Selma Park playground on April 27, 2011, entitled SELMA PARK VANDALISM. Because everyone knows that drawing on a playground with freaking chalk is vandalism. Fucking savages.

First of all, I reorganized our documents. I think the new system will make it easier for you to find things. I know it’ll make it easier for me to add new material, and I have a lot of stuff coming in soon. The “Document” menu in the header now leads to a link and an iframe pointing at this page, which is just a raw files and directory set-up. For now I’m only allowing http access, but I might set up ftp access in the future. In any case, have at it! The only problem left unsolved is how to host the 15+ gigs of photos I have on hand. I’m working on a solution involving dropbox, since archive.org has turned out to be pretty slow for that many images and Flickr seems complicated for bulk uploads and metadata editing. I could be wrong about this, though. More news soon. Second, there’s a bunch of new stuff about Selma Park. Read on for details.
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Announcements, Business Improvement Districts

Media District BID Tax Returns for 2011 Through 2013 Now Available

October 22, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

As the mohel said about the knick-knacks displayed in the window of his storefront: "So, what do you want me to put there?" — As the mohel said about the knick-knacks displayed in the window of his storefront: “So, what do you want me to put there?”

This is just a brief announcement that I have the Media District BID’s tax returns for tax years 2011 and 2012 and 2013. Nonprofits have to put quite a bit more information down than do private parties, so these are not only intrinsically interesting, but they are a little bit like menus for public-records-act-requesting banquets.

In any case, you can get them from the links above, from this page in the header menu structure, or direct from our static storage.

Image is released under the CC BY 2.0 by its creator Tim Pierce and is available via Flickr.

Selma Park

At Least 46 People Arrested for Being in Selma Park Without Children Since July 1, 2008, All 46 Cases Rejected for Prosecution by LA City Attorney

October 20, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Man without children enjoying Selma Park freely, as befits a free citizenry, on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon in October

We have today a list of all cases referred to the City Attorney for prosecution for arrests in Selma Park for violating 653b(a) PC which, as you may recall, is the statute referenced on the recently removed and completely phony signs forbidding adults without children in the park. The list is an excel spreadsheet which we’ve edited from the original spreadsheet obtained today by Mike. That document lists everyone arrested in the park for any reason, and if you want it, you can get it from the city attorney’s office, or even just drop us an email.

On July 1, 2008, Jesse Gutierrez became the first human being in history to be (falsely) arrested at Selma Park for violating 653b(a) PC and having his case referred to the city attorney for prosecution, subsequently rejected for who knows what reason.

There are 46 people on the list, which means that at least that many were arrested, possibly more. We can’t tell yet who arrested all of these people, but since the arrests started in July 2008 (the list we obtained began in 2002) we’re guessing it’s the BID Patrol rather than the LAPD who’s responsible. Some of them we can be sure were arrested by the BID Patrol because we have their pictures. In any case, note the fact that every single one of the 46 case numbers begins with the letter “R.” The ever helpful Mike Dundas, who’s the CPRA contact over there, tells us that that means the case was rejected for prosecution. Unfortunately records which explain why cases were rejected are exempt from production. Oh well.
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

LA Times Reporting on Mitch O’Farrell’s All-by-his-Lonesome Pitchfork-and-Torch-Wielding Assault on Hollywood Nightlife Continues to Make No Goddamned Sense Whatsoever

October 19, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Mitch O'Farrell, cleverly photographed so as to render HPOA's marionette control strings invisible. — Mitch O’Farrell, cleverly photographed so as to render HPOA’s marionette control strings invisible.

We reported recently on media coverage of CD13 Councildude Mitch O’Farrell’s recently inaugurated hysterical campaign against nightclubs in Hollywood which, if you read the coverage prior to today, seemed to come out of nowhere. Of course, as we said, it almost surely came from the HPOA, seeing as they are not only exceedingly prone to racist anti-nightclub hysteria but additionally are in no way above complex multi-agent conspiracies with Leron Gubler of the Hollywood chamber and Peter Zarcone of the LAPD.

Well, today the Times ran yet another gap-filled, info-deficient story on the subject. At least this one said one relevant thing:

The new attention from O’Farrell is not the result of an increase in complaints. In fact, Zarcone said complaints against clubs remain flat.

So that’s what O’Farrell’s attention is NOT a result of. Could the Times be bothered to find out what it IS a result of? No, they could not. What does O’Farrell have to say about this? Something stupid:

“Hollywood must be a neighborhood that is safe, clean and hospitable to its residents,” O’Farrell said.

The residents aren’t complaining. Zarcone himself said so. So who is complaining? It’s the BIDs, ain’t it? And what does Leron Gubler have to say? Something else stupid:
Continue reading LA Times Reporting on Mitch O’Farrell’s All-by-his-Lonesome Pitchfork-and-Torch-Wielding Assault on Hollywood Nightlife Continues to Make No Goddamned Sense Whatsoever →