Category Archives: Los Angeles City Government

Business Improvement Districts, Municipal Ethics

Kosmont Invoices For Gateway To LA BID Reveal How Much Time It Takes To Get A BID Renewed, And It Doesn’t Look Good For BID Consultants, Like Tara Devine, Like Urban Place Consulting, That Are Not Registered As Lobbyists With The City

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Larry Kosmont handled the Gateway to LA BID’s 2014-5 renewal and was, very properly, registered as a lobbyist while doing so.
You may recall that the Los Angeles Municipal Lobbying Ordinance requires qualified lobbyists to register with the City Ethics Commission and also disclose a bunch of interesting information about their clients and their income. Also, the process of establishing or renewing a BID is fairly complex, and most property owners’ associations1 hire a consultant to guide them through the process. These consultants are regulated and recommended by the City Clerk’s office.

The process of getting a BID established or renewed, it turns out, looks an awful lot like the definition of lobbying activity to be found at LAMC §48.02, which is essentially preparing information and discussing it with City officials as part of influencing the passage of municipal legislation. The law requires anyone who’s paid for thirty or more hours of this over three consecutive months to register as a lobbyist, and it’s generally extremely hard to prove that someone’s met this criterion. You may, e.g., recall that earlier this year, in order to make a reasonably convincing case that Venice Beach BID consultant Tara Devine had passed this threshold, I spent months piecing together more than a hundred pages of evidence regarding her BID consultancy work.

But recently it’s occurred to me that these consultants have contracts with the BIDs they service, and that at least in the case of BID renewals, the contracts will be accessible via the Public Records Act.2 The contracts will contain some information about how much time the consultants spend on the project, and thus should be useful as evidence in reporting consultants to the Ethics Commission for lobbying without a license.

The project started to produce results at the end of February, when the incomparable Laurie Hughes of the Gateway to LA BID supplied me with her BID’s contracts with Larry Kosmont, who was handling the renewal process.3 Well, late last week, Laurie Hughes gave me an absolutely essential set of documents, consisting of detailed monthly invoices from Kosmont to the BID during the 15+ month renewal process. These are fascinating,4 containing as they do detailed inventories of every individual task involved in the renewal process broken down into fifteen minute billing increments. Turn the page for more descriptions, discussion, and speculations.
Continue reading Kosmont Invoices For Gateway To LA BID Reveal How Much Time It Takes To Get A BID Renewed, And It Doesn’t Look Good For BID Consultants, Like Tara Devine, Like Urban Place Consulting, That Are Not Registered As Lobbyists With The City →

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Announcements, Fashion District BID, Los Angeles City Government

We Applaud Randall Tampa’s (Weirdly) Professional Reaction To Ongoing Police Commission Registration Of BID Patrol Officers — He Thinks It’s A Good Thing For All The Right Reasons! (And 500+ More Emails From The Fashion District BID Courtesy Of Also-Highly-Professional Exec Direc Rena Masten Leddy!)

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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.

Meanwhile, the latest piece of evidence in the ongoing saga of the registration of BID Patrols with the Police Commission comes from a huge release of emails by the Fashion District BID2 These span the time from July 1, 2016 through January 31, 2017 and are mostly between BID staff and the City of Los Angeles.3

There is an awful lot to write about here, but today I just want to highlight this interesting December 2016 email from FDBID operations director Randall Tampa to Eugene Shin, who’s the Police Commission investigator who’s handling the registration project. Randall Tampa sees the bigger picture here. It’s not a loss for BIDs who want to be free of any kind of oversight by the City, but a win for higher quality governance for everyone in Los Angeles:

I totally agree and support the police commission (and you) in your efforts to assure that only qualified personnel are patrolling the streets of Los Angeles.

In his email, Randall Tampa explicitly relates this opinion to his own experience as a police officer, proving yet again that people with experience in matters usually are much saner and have much more robust insights into how to regulate them. Most of the BIDs in our fair City are run by a bunch of cop-loving wannabes4 who are essentially see City governance as some kind of bizarre role-playing game, like Zillionaires versus Homeless, or whatever, rather than as an arena where wisdom and experience are far more essential than zillionaire-itude.

True, the Fashion District BID is presently having the stuffing sued out of it in federal court for its malfeasance and illegal conspiracies with the LAPD, and rightly so. They will lose this suit if there’s justice in the world, and be forced to pay endless amounts of money, but while they’re losing that suit, while they’re criminally conspiring with the cops, at least they’re putting up a professional front. At least they’re not a fricking embarrassment to themselves and others. (Turn the page for a complete transcription of Randall Tampa’s email and some musings on the nature of evil and frontery.)
Continue reading We Applaud Randall Tampa’s (Weirdly) Professional Reaction To Ongoing Police Commission Registration Of BID Patrol Officers — He Thinks It’s A Good Thing For All The Right Reasons! (And 500+ More Emails From The Fashion District BID Courtesy Of Also-Highly-Professional Exec Direc Rena Masten Leddy!) →

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Skid Row Neighborhood Council

News Flash: General Jeff And Katherine McNenny Blow The Lid Off Of DLANC’s Shameful Covert Campaign Against Skid Row Neighborhood Council!

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Recall that just last week the proposed Skid Row Neighborhood Council was narrowly defeated in a hotly contested, deeply controversial election. I reported at the time that CCEA voodoo queen Estela Lopez seemed to be deeply involved in some as-yet-unclear way in the anti-SRNC campaign. This is bad and creepy, but probably not illegal, as lobbying the City seems to be in the job description of business improvement districts.

Well, just tonight it’s come to my attention that General Jeff and Katherine McNenny have discovered that Patti Berman, chief boss-lady of the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, or anyway someone with access to DLANC computer accounts, evidently used City resources to campaign against the SRNC. You can watch them here explaining the proof. It boils down to the fact that DLANC used their Mailchimp account to send out email blasts, which incorporated the City logo, urging people to vote against SRNC. This is bad and creepy and probably illegal. General Jeff promises in the video to use it to challenge the outcome of the election.

Not only that, but an anonymous group calling itself “United Downtown LA” hired former City attorney Rocky Delgadillo to write to the City Council urging them to adopt online voting for the SRNC election even though it has not been used in most other NC certification elections. Online voting, of course, is what did in the SRNC, as the paper ballots were overwhelmingly in favor of formation. You can read the whole Council file here and Delgadillo’s letter in particular here. Well, you can also see in the video that General Jeff and Katherine McNenny have made that DLANC was using the name “Unite DTLA” to carry on their covert campaign. Whether these are the same shadowy anonymous entity remains to be seen, of course.
Continue reading News Flash: General Jeff And Katherine McNenny Blow The Lid Off Of DLANC’s Shameful Covert Campaign Against Skid Row Neighborhood Council! →

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Announcements, Central City East Association, Skid Row Neighborhood Council

300-Ish Pages of Estela Lopez’s Emails From The Last Few Months, Including Discussions Of Homelessness, Skid Row NC, Why The Freaking LAPD Doesn’t Bust More Protest Marches Like BIDs Want Them To, Operation Clean Streets, The California Public Records Act, And So On And On And On…

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I just recently received a few hundred pages of emails from Estela Lopez, voodoo queen of the Central City East Association, and they are available on Archive.Org and also directly from static storage. Most of it is the unmitigatedly tedious bullshit with which these BIDdies fill their lives and their inboxes, but, as usual, there are a few interesting items. I already wrote the other day about Estela Lopez’s aggressive foray into CPRAlandia, and here are a few other items that are worth looking at individually:

And turn the page for two more examples, and to learn why, which I bet you didn’t even know that they were doing, the LAPD was praying for rain in January!
Continue reading 300-Ish Pages of Estela Lopez’s Emails From The Last Few Months, Including Discussions Of Homelessness, Skid Row NC, Why The Freaking LAPD Doesn’t Bust More Protest Marches Like BIDs Want Them To, Operation Clean Streets, The California Public Records Act, And So On And On And On… →

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Business Improvement Districts, Hollywood BID Patrol, Los Angeles City Government

February 2, 2017 Email From Eugene Shin Of The LA Police Commission To Nicole Shahenian Of The East Hollywood BID Confirms Continued Progress Of BID Patrol Registration Project But Leaves Unanswered Question Of Whether Or Not The EHBID Has A BID Patrol

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You may recall that 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 it’s been possible to track the progress of this massive project via various CPRA requests. So in November 2016 the Police Commission informed all BIDs of the registration requirement and, at the same time, told them that their BID patrollies would be subject to arrest if they didn’t submit. In December 2017 the Police Commission told the BIDs to quit whining about it because the law is the law.

Well, just yesterday, as part of a larger release of records from the East Hollywood BID, I discovered a February 2017 email from Eugene Shin to Nicole Shahenian. Eugene Shin, as you may recall, is the Police Commission investigator that’s heading up the registration project. Nicole Shahenian is the Executive Director of the East Hollywood BID. The email confirms that not only is registration still ongoing, but that the Police Commission is pursuing it fairly aggressively. Turn the page for a transcription and some discussion.
Continue reading February 2, 2017 Email From Eugene Shin Of The LA Police Commission To Nicole Shahenian Of The East Hollywood BID Confirms Continued Progress Of BID Patrol Registration Project But Leaves Unanswered Question Of Whether Or Not The EHBID Has A BID Patrol →

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Announcements, Municipal Ethics

New Documents: Lisa Trifiletti and Omar Pulido Emails, Wilshire Center BID And East Hollywood BID Emails To/From City Of LA From February 2017

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This is just a short note to announce three new sets of documents for your entertainment, your edification, and, if you’re interested, a little puzzle for you to solve.

First we have a couple of monthly sets of emails between BIDs and the City of Los Angeles. This turns out to be a useful request for keeping finger on pulse, often leading to unexpected discoveries, so I make it every month of all my favorite BIDs.1 Perhaps there are some lurking here:

And turn the page for the most interesting item of all for today!
Continue reading New Documents: Lisa Trifiletti and Omar Pulido Emails, Wilshire Center BID And East Hollywood BID Emails To/From City Of LA From February 2017 →

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Skid Row Neighborhood Council

Skid Row Neighborhood Council Tentatively Rejected In Face Of DTLA Neighborhood Council Shenaniganistic Opposition. High-Powered Lobbyist, Criminal Conspirator, And Smoke-Filled Room Denizen Estela Lopez Apparently Uses Or Will Use California Public Records Act To Subvert Democratic Outcome

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General Jeff Page in front of the Skid Row City Limits Mural.
According to the incomparable Gale Holland, writing in the L.A. Times, the initial balloting shows that the Skid Row Neighborhood Council has been defeated by a slim 62 vote margin. The NC election was the subject of extensive and disgusting opposition on Facebook and elsewhere.1 The fix was in, though, as the City Council voted a few weeks ago to allow online voting in this NC election only, according to Gale Holland. In a striking performative demonstration of the digital divide, the traditional paper ballots were 183 to 19 in favor of the SRNC, whereas online ballots were 807 to 581 against.
Screenshot of moronic facebook rants against the Skid Row NC accusing, among other stupidity, the LA Community Action Network of being part of a criminal conspiracy.
The NC proponents also suspect that the Downtown LA Neighborhood Council misused city funds to campaign against the election.2 Anyway, evidently a challenge is planned based on these considerations. The Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, overseer of the City’s neighborhood councils, is notorious for the number, length, and vituperativity of its appeals, so this process promises to be, at least, interesting.

And the other side is gearing up for policy-wonk-based battles as well. It seems that Estela Lopez herself, voodoo queen of the ongoing criminal conspiracy known as the Central City East Association, made a CPRA request to Grayce Liu of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment in January on the subject of the SRNC, evidently to gather materials for the witch’s brew of revanchist zillionaire subversionism that’s presently bubbling, boiling, toiling, and troubling in her hellish cauldron out there on Crocker Street. Turn the page for a transcription and some discussion.
Continue reading Skid Row Neighborhood Council Tentatively Rejected In Face Of DTLA Neighborhood Council Shenaniganistic Opposition. High-Powered Lobbyist, Criminal Conspirator, And Smoke-Filled Room Denizen Estela Lopez Apparently Uses Or Will Use California Public Records Act To Subvert Democratic Outcome →

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Los Angeles City Council

Mitch O’Farrell Endorses Upstart Hipster Bike Rider Joe Bray-Ali In Stunning Vindication Of MK.Org Prediction! Our Editorial Policy Is That Mitch O’Farrell Is Always Wrong!! Therefore We Endorse Gil Cedillo!!!

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A few weeks ago we predicted that Mitch O’Farrell was endorsing Joe Bray-Ali for City Council in CD1 based on the fact that O’Farrell’s cowering toady scheduler Dave Cano had donated $125 to Bray-Ali in February.1 Well, today our prediction was vindicated beyond our wildest dreams by the fact that Mitch O’Farrell himself actually made his endorsement explicitly in the LA Times. 2 Our next prediction is that O’Farrell’s toadying staff, who’ve been taught by the charismatic but fecklessly idiotic leader of their cult that money equals love, will all start donating money to Joe Bray-Ali. Stay tuned here for details!
Continue reading Mitch O’Farrell Endorses Upstart Hipster Bike Rider Joe Bray-Ali In Stunning Vindication Of MK.Org Prediction! Our Editorial Policy Is That Mitch O’Farrell Is Always Wrong!! Therefore We Endorse Gil Cedillo!!! →

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Los Angeles City Government

This Is What Domestic Surveillance Looks Like In Los Angeles In The 21st Century: Muslims Lawfully Distribute Pamphlets, Private Security Guards Call The Cops, Cops Read Pamphlets, Pronounce Them Reputable And Acceptably Anti-Terror, Make Report To So-Called Major Crimes Unit Anyway

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The other day the LAPD provided me with a massive release of emails between various Hollywood Boss Cops and CIM Group and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. There’s a lot of stuff, and I haven’t read all of it carefully yet,1 but a couple items stood out for sheer disconcertion.

In short, the story started with private security guards at a Rick Caruso hypermall in Glendale flipping out because someone was taking pictures and not shopping, escalated to an attempt to get the Glendale PD to stop the guy and identify him, and ended up in Hollywood with then Hollywood Station Boss Commander Peter Zarcone reading through legally distributed pamphlets, deciding that they were acceptably critical of bad Islamist stuff, and subsequently reporting the distributors, law-abiding Muslims from the Islamic Institute of Orange County, to the LAPD’s Major Crimes Division.

On the one hand, it’s absolutely ludicrous and surreally kooky that a few Muslims passing out literature on Hollywood Boulevard can lead the LAPD and a bunch of private security to generate dozens of emails at the highest levels, follow the Muslims around videotaping them and writing down their license plates, combing through their pamphlets, and so on. On the other hand, it’s absolutely chilling. That seems to be the world we’re living in, I guess. Surreally ludicrous, surreally chilling. As always, find details and documentation after the break.
Continue reading This Is What Domestic Surveillance Looks Like In Los Angeles In The 21st Century: Muslims Lawfully Distribute Pamphlets, Private Security Guards Call The Cops, Cops Read Pamphlets, Pronounce Them Reputable And Acceptably Anti-Terror, Make Report To So-Called Major Crimes Unit Anyway →

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Business Improvement Districts, CD13

Simple Error In Propositional Logic Defeats Evil, Illegal Anti-RV Scheming of Mitch O’Farrell, Mike Bonin, and the Hollywood Media District BID But It’s Probably Irrelevant In The Real World Anyway

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The sign, located on Lillian Way between Santa Monica Blvd and Melrose, says “and” but it was meant to say “or.” Does this matter in the real world? Probably not.
Last summer, Mitch O’Farrell, at the illegal request of Media District ED Lisa Schechter, supported by anti-RV-crusader-on-steroids Mike Bonin, introduced the despicable Council File 16-0967, seeking to ban oversized vehicle parking in the Media District BID. Of course, the thing passed, because this kind of thing always passes, and the ordinance was approved, and up went the signs.

There was one small problem, though. The ordinance, as do all of these little slabs of class warfare, bans:

…the parking of vehicles that are in excess of 22 feet in length or over seven feet in height, during the hours of 2:00 am and 6.00 am…

For some reason, despite what the ordinance actually passed by City Council says, it is still legal to park things like this in most of the Hollywood Media District.
But the signs, when they went up, said something different.1 They banned vehicles that are in excess of 22 feet in length AND over seven feet in height. See the problem? At first I wondered if this were nothing more than an uncharacteristically lapse into honesty by the class warriors at the BID. Perhaps, I thought, they wanted to keep it legal to live in limousines, even if RVs were to be banned, banned, banned.
Continue reading Simple Error In Propositional Logic Defeats Evil, Illegal Anti-RV Scheming of Mitch O’Farrell, Mike Bonin, and the Hollywood Media District BID But It’s Probably Irrelevant In The Real World Anyway →

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