Category Archives: Los Angeles City Government

CD13

CD13 Staff Organizes On-Demand Homeless Encampment Cleanup for Benefit of Bryan Kim of “Scumbag” Cat-Kicking Koreatown Slumlords Kim and Casey, Subsequently Personally Invite Him to Support LAMC 56.11 in Council

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CD13 gleefully kicking "frustrating" homeless people out of your neighborhood since 2013.
Mitch O’Farrell and his staff: gleefully kicking “frustrating” homeless people out of your neighborhood since 2013.
How does the City of Los Angeles decide which homeless encampments to target for cleanup? How do they decide when to target them? Well, if these two email chains from City Council District 13 about encampment-breaking on Vermont Avenue and Marathon Street in Koreatown are any indication (one and two) they target them when non-homeless people call CD13 and tell them to clean out the homeless people.1 And what do they get out of targeting them? Well, they’re politically savvy enough to turn down free lunches offered in exchange for their dirty work, but they will accept an offer of bused-in political supporters to astroturf the public comments section of a Council meeting. First let’s look at the players involved.

Bryan Kim is a partner in Koreatown based property management company Kim and Casey, which doesn’t seem to have a website.2 They do, however, have a Yelp page. This is notable for having uniformly one star reviews, which include comments like:3
They would tell me I was picky about the filth they’d promised to clean up before I moved in but never took care of it. They wouldn’t accept responsibility and blamed everyone and everything else until they were legally forced to take control of the growing sludge and cesspool that had been forming for I don’t know how many weeks .

Aram Taslagyan: "Hi Bryan, [the homeless encampment that was interfering with your pending property inspection] is all clean now. ... Please let me know if it starts up again at any level.
Aram Taslagyan: “Hi Bryan, [the homeless encampment that was interfering with your pending property inspection] is all clean now. … Please let me know if it starts up again at any level.
Or, even more colorfully:

I had my sink drain burst and when I asked them to fix it they said “NO”. The reason they gave me was that I had a bathroom sink to use and I dint really need the one in my kitchen. … What kind of management company is this? Also, one day as I was looking out my window, I saw one of the three guys who were walking the property from Kim and Casey Kick my neighbors cat at he was walking down the path way. It was the middle aged guy of the three that were walking the property. I don’t know his name and don’t care to know such a scumbag.

So that’s Bryan Kim according to Yelp; K-Town slumlord and associate of cat-kickers if not a cat-kicker himself. The other correspondent is CD13 field deputy Aram Taslagyan, whose bio you can read for yourself. The whole thing evidently began with a disconnected phone call from Kim to CD13 intern Sean Starkey, which resulted in this email:
Continue reading CD13 Staff Organizes On-Demand Homeless Encampment Cleanup for Benefit of Bryan Kim of “Scumbag” Cat-Kicking Koreatown Slumlords Kim and Casey, Subsequently Personally Invite Him to Support LAMC 56.11 in Council →

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Announcements, CD13, Downtown Center BID, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

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

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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!
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.
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 →

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Hollywood BID Patrol, Municipal Ethics

City of Inglewood Practice of Post-Retirement Rehiring, Like Steve Seyler was Rehired, Denounced by City Treasurer Wanda Brown in 2014: “Nothing on Their Desk But Their Telephone and Their Feet.”

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Wanda Brown, long-time treasurer for the City of Inglewood, in 2014.
Wanda Brown, long-time treasurer for the City of Inglewood, in 2014.
Long-time readers of this blog will recall our revelation of the fact that Steve Seyler, executive director of the BID Patrol, formerly a police officer with the City of Inglewood, continues to moonlight for the IPD on weekends doing whatever it is that he does over there. This, naturally, is in addition to the more than $66,000 in retirement he’s collecting. Well today, thanks to a tip and a clip from the incomparable Dehol Truth, we can demonstrate that this kind of thing not only seems shady to anyone with some perspective, but that even to Wanda Brown, long-time Inglewood City Treasurer, speaking at a Inglewood City Council meeting in 2014:

But again, I could say, back in the nineties, I’ve been here twenty seven years, we’ve always had too many employees here. ALWAYS. And I can recall, during the times in the nineties, when certain folks were allowed to retire and come back and work part time doing nothing. Because I went by their office and saw nothing on their desk but their telephone and their feet.

Continue reading City of Inglewood Practice of Post-Retirement Rehiring, Like Steve Seyler was Rehired, Denounced by City Treasurer Wanda Brown in 2014: “Nothing on Their Desk But Their Telephone and Their Feet.” →

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BID-Free Los Angeles, Business Improvement Districts, CD13

Epic Fact-Finding Journey to Echo Park to Document What Will Be Lost if the Proposed BID is Established and Call to Political Action!

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If the BID is established forget about food trucks. BIDs freaking hate food trucks. Especially if they're near a restaurant, like this one on Logan Street North of Sunset is.
If the BID is established forget about food trucks. BIDs freaking hate food trucks. Especially if they’re near a restaurant, like this one on Logan Street North of Sunset is.
If the Echo Park BID is established forget about little old ladies selling flowers, like this one on Sunset Blvd. just West of Echo Park Avenue. BIDs freaking hate little old ladies!
If the Echo Park BID is established forget about little old ladies selling flowers, like this one on Sunset Blvd. just West of Echo Park Avenue. BIDs freaking hate little old ladies!
If the Echo Park BID is established forget about signs like this. BIDs freaking hate signs on the sidewalk.
If the Echo Park BID is established forget about signs like this. BIDs freaking hate signs on the sidewalk.
If the BID is established in Echo Park say goodbye to RVs around the Park itself. BIDs freaking hate RVs.
If the BID is established in Echo Park say goodbye to RVs around the Park itself. BIDs freaking hate RVs.
Due to some kind-hearted click bait4 bestowed by loyal FOMs Esotouric, my colleagues’ recent post on the resurgence of the long-dormant proposed Echo Park Business Improvement District has turned out to be one of our most popular posts of 2016. The colleagues left out some absolutely essential information and so I’m following up on their behalves. Also I used the whole situation as an excuse to ride the 704 Eastbound to Echo Park Avenue and Sunset Blvd. to check out the situation on the ground.

First the essential info: This thing is on the agenda for the Economic Development Committee meeting on Tuesday, May 10, in room 1010 in City Hall. You can go tell them what you think about it. Unfortunately I have other commitments, and I’m sure approval is a foregone conclusion, but there’s the info if you want it.

Second, as you can see from the images accompanying this post, if the BID’s approved a lot of stuff is going to change out there. They’re going to chase off taco trucks. BIDs hate taco trucks with a passion that’s hard to understand. They even, believe it or not, hate taco trucks parked on private property. Showing an astonishing ignorance of the rights of property owners in a free society, they’ve been known to express amazement that they’re not against the law.

If the BID is approved, sidewalk signs have got to go. BIDs freaking hate sidewalk signs. In fact, one of the very first things Kerry Morrison did in the 1990s after the Hollywood Entertainment District BID was established was to go after businesses with signs on the sidewalk. Why? Who the hell knows? It offended her sense of order or something. Why should Echo Park expect anything different.
Continue reading Epic Fact-Finding Journey to Echo Park to Document What Will Be Lost if the Proposed BID is Established and Call to Political Action! →

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Business Improvement Districts, CD13

Just When You Thought it was Safe to Go Back in the Water: Zombie Echo Park BID Comes Roaring Back to Life After 6 Years of Inanition

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Garcetti's last laugh...the Echo Park BID claws its grimy way out of its once-forgotten grave.
Garcetti’s last laugh…the Echo Park BID claws its grimy way out of its once-forgotten grave.
NOTE: Part Two of this series is now live on the internets.

I mean, sure, we’re being overdramatic, but what is anyone to think when a long-forgotten council file comes roaring back to life after six years of inactivity. We didn’t even know that was legal!

It seems that back in January 2010, big bad BID buddy Eric Garcetti, then of CD13, made a motion to spend $40,000 of public money to facilitate the formation of a BID in Echo Park. And, weirdly, in March of that year, sent his aide Alejandra Marroquin to plump for the BID in front of the Jobs and Business Development Committee.5 Anyway, the forty grand was approved in April 2010 and there it stopped. Until this April, anyway, when more funding was approved and they’re all-systems-go yet again. Evidently Echo Park hit some kind of gentrification tipping point and now they need to hire some armed minions of their own to run the heladeros out of the park. Unless the yuppies think they’re too cute to shackle, that is, and they just might, cause ain’t that just like a yuppie?
Continue reading Just When You Thought it was Safe to Go Back in the Water: Zombie Echo Park BID Comes Roaring Back to Life After 6 Years of Inanition →

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Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Los Angeles City Government

A Trip to City Archives Yields Fascinating Historical Material Including 2003 HPOA Stakeholder Rebellion Over Shady and Neurotic Behavior by Tronson and Morrison During Security Provider Bidding Process

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The view from Ramirez Street. The entrance to the Archives is by the loading dock in the mid-right area of the image.
The view from Ramirez Street. The entrance to the Archives is by the loading dock in the mid-right area of the image.
A recent trip to the lovely City Archives on Ramirez Street, my absolute favorite of all city agencies,6 yielded up a bunch of really interesting stuff from 2001–2003. So much so that I started a new page for it. It took me three hours to look through two boxes of BID records (out of more than 400), so I’m sure there will be much more of this stuff to come. There’s a list of some highlights after the break, but check it!

In 2003 the BID’s expiring security contract with Burke Security, the predecessor of Andrews International, was put out for bids. Aaron Epstein, yes, the same one whose nuclear bomb of a lawsuit established the subjection of BIDs to both the Brown Act and the California Public Records Act, thereby making this blog possible, and a large group of his fellow Hollywood BID stakeholders7 sent a letter to then-mayor James Hahn complaining that they:

believe[d] that the District’s board of directors and executive director have not conducted a fully open and competitive process to ensure that property owners receive the finest security service for the lowest competitive price (the current two year contract exceeds $2 million). Moreover, we believe that the board and executive director have failed to be objective in the process and have allowed the contractor, Burke Security, to function in ways that do not provide the maximum benefits to the property owners and merchants.

Even in 2003 the BIDs had captured the regulatory function of the City Clerk's office to the point where they were warning Kerry Morrison that people were scrutinizing her sketchy behavior rather than using the power of the purse to make her be not so shady. The fox wasn't guarding the henhouse--the lunatics were (and are) running the asylum.
Even in 2003 the BIDs had captured the regulatory function of the City Clerk’s office to the point where they were warning Kerry Morrison that people were scrutinizing her sketchy behavior rather than using the power of the purse to make her be not so shady. The fox wasn’t guarding the henhouse–the lunatics were (and are) running the asylum.
If you read the letter you’ll see that they’re talking about practices that are still retained by the current BID Patrol: custodial arrests rather than observe-and-report, unseeming over-coziness with the staff of the HPOA, and so on.8 The copy I obtained came with a couple of handwritten notes9 from a Clerk’s office employee suggesting that they warn Kerry Morrison that people were watching so she should follow the rules. This, obviously, is not the kind of behavior one would expect from a regulatory agency. Why didn’t they tell Kerry Morrison to follow the rules because the law required her to?
Continue reading A Trip to City Archives Yields Fascinating Historical Material Including 2003 HPOA Stakeholder Rebellion Over Shady and Neurotic Behavior by Tronson and Morrison During Security Provider Bidding Process →

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Announcements, Los Angeles City Government

BID Consortium Minutes 2007-2015 Available, Demonstrating Among Other Things that the City Clerk’s Office Has Utterly Abdicated its Duty to Monitor and Regulate BIDs

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city_clerk_logoFor whatever reason I haven’t yet requested many documents about BIDs from the City Clerk, but I’m making up for it now. I’ve started a page here to collect the material. This morning I have minutes from L.A. BID Consortium meetings from 2007 through 2015:

And this material is also available on the Archive.
Continue reading BID Consortium Minutes 2007-2015 Available, Demonstrating Among Other Things that the City Clerk’s Office Has Utterly Abdicated its Duty to Monitor and Regulate BIDs →

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Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, Municipal Ethics

The Paranoid Prophecies of Downtown Russell Brown, July 2010 Edition

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Downtown Russell Brown stumping for Jose Huizar.
Downtown Russell Brown stumping for Jose Huizar.
Our fateful faithful correspondent recently completed a magnanimously opalesque tour de farce of historicalisticism concerning a wildly successful 2010 plot by a bunch of bitchy BIDsies along with then-councildude Eric Garcetti, le petit ami chéri de toutes les dames mignonnes des BIDs, to ruthlessly destroy a perfectly reasonable proposal from the City Ethics Commission to make it easier to figure out who’s supposed to register as a lobbyist. Well, as part of his research he ended up transcribing not just the nonsense spewed by best-BIDdie-buddies Garcetti and Morrison, but a bunch of other tangential nonsense as well. Some of it’s fascinating in its own right, and we’re planning to write about it from time to time, starting this evening with a pluperfect portion of paranoia from Downtown L.A.’s own pallidly prophetic Russ Brown himself!

Historically-minded observers of the Downtown Los Angeles politico-sociologico-ethnomethodologico-cultural scene will remember Mr. Brown as the erstwhile boss-boy of the Historic Downtown BID, ignominiously forced out of his BIDship by the Board for reasons that surely aren’t being stated, and then ignominiously reinstalled two weeks later when Jose Huizar pitched a fit for reasons that surely also aren’t being stated and then… well, you get the idea. These days he’s doing something with neighborhood councils and remains the subject of artful advocacy blog Step Down Russ Brown which, though currently dormant, may any day rise, like Lazarus, from its pallet to scourge yet again the corridors and crannies of Downtown zillionaire-dom. Enough of that, though. Turn the page for the quotes!
Continue reading The Paranoid Prophecies of Downtown Russell Brown, July 2010 Edition →

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Announcements, Municipal Ethics

City of Los Angeles Revolving Door Law Contest! Prizes!!

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First-Place-TrophyThe City of Los Angeles has a revolving door law, which prohibits certain high-level officials from being paid to lobby the city government for various lengths of time after leaving their city jobs. This law was passed by the City Council in its current form at the end of 2013 and it became effective on February 10, 2014. It states that:

For one year after leaving City service, a City official shall not receive compensation to attempt to influence, either personally or through an agent, City action on any matter pending before any agency on behalf of a person other than an agency if, during the 24 months preceding the official’s departure from City service, the official held any of the following positions: elected City officer; Board of Public Works Commissioner; General Manager; Chief Administrative Officer; Mayor’s Chief of Staff; Deputy Mayor; Mayoral Aide VII; Mayoral Aide VIII; Executive Assistant City Attorney; Chief Assistant City Attorney; Senior Assistant City Attorney; City Attorney Exempt Employee; Chief Deputy Controller; Administrative Deputy Controller; Principal Deputy Controller; Council Aide VI; or Council Aide VII.

Now, it turns out that it’s not so easy to find out who falls into those categories.12 The problem is that, e.g., a Council Aide VII may have any number of job titles. They might be a chief of staff, a director of planning, and so on. A later section of the law says:

By July 31 of every year, the City Controller shall submit to the Ethics Commission the names of each individual who held a position identified in Subsection C.1. during the preceding 24 months. By July 31 of every year, the City Clerk shall submit to the Ethics Commission the names of each individual who held a City Attorney Exempt position as provided in City Charter Section 1050(d) during the preceding 24 months.

So after we noticed the whole Marie Rumsey situation it occurred to me that a copy of this list would be an interesting document to have. It turned out not to be so incredibly simple to get13 but, finally, get it I did. And here it is for you!14 Note that checking this list against the Ethics Commission’s list of registered lobbyists for 2015 would have revealed Marie Rumsey’s perfidy. There don’t seem to be any other fruits quite so low-hanging on here, but there’s still juice to be squeezed! And that fact practically begs for a contest, so read on for the rules.
Continue reading City of Los Angeles Revolving Door Law Contest! Prizes!! →

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