Tag Archives: Board of Directors

Estela Lopez’s Exclusion Of Andy Bales, Other Board Members, From Secret Email Discussion Of Skid Row Neighborhood Council Not Anomalous — Bales, Gardner, Kavoukjian Regularly Left Out Of Group Emails From Lopez To CCEA Board Members — What’s Lopez Hiding And Why Is She Hiding It?

Background: You can read my previous stories on the Skid Row Neighborhood Council formation effort and also see Jason McGahan’s article in the Weekly and Gale Holland’s article in the Times for more mainstream perspectives.

Recently I reported that nine out of the twelve members of the Board of Directors of the Central City East Association egregiously violated the Brown Act during their weeks-long participation in the anti-Skid-Row-Neighborhood-Council conspiracy centered around the shadowy anonymous Delaware-incorporated entity United Downtown Los Angeles LLC. Well, I’ve been continuing to investigate this matter, not only with respect to the involvement of CCEA executive directrix and Skid Row voodoo queen Estela Lopez and the CCEA board of directors, but from many other angles as well.

As part of the investigation I’ve been seeking via the California Public Records Act various emails between CCEA’s board and staff. I’ve actually been asking for these for almost a year now. Estela Lopez has been consistently obstructionist, mostly claiming that all such emails are exempt due to the famously abused, mostly made up, so-called deliberative process exemption to the CPRA.1

This position is indefensible, of course, and there have been some demand letters exchanged between my lawyer and some attorneyesque dude known as Don Steier, who seems to be very buddy buddy with the CCEA conspiracy. The CCEA remains mostly uncooperative, although they did cough up about 50 pages of emails they’d formerly claimed were exempt.2 An even superficial perusal of the evidence will show conclusively that their original claim that this stuff was exempt is nonsense of the first water, and the material they released is mostly chaff.3

However, there is still some interesting information to be gleaned from this release. In particular, the fact that Estela Lopez was involved in extensive secret email discussions with 9 out of 12 CCEA directors, excluding Andy Bales, Richard Gardner, and Sylvia Kavoukjian, was in fact not an anomaly. It seems that she habitually sends emails to everyone but those three.4 I have no idea at this point why those three directors are excluded on a regular basis. Perhaps someone more up on Downtown politics will be able to figure it out. Anyway, turn the page for some examples, some discussion, and some mockery of Don Steier, the CCEA’s lawyerlike co-conspirator.5 Continue reading Estela Lopez’s Exclusion Of Andy Bales, Other Board Members, From Secret Email Discussion Of Skid Row Neighborhood Council Not Anomalous — Bales, Gardner, Kavoukjian Regularly Left Out Of Group Emails From Lopez To CCEA Board Members — What’s Lopez Hiding And Why Is She Hiding It?

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Estela Lopez Is Off The DLANC Board Of Directors!

As much as I’d like to be able to take credit for this stunning development, I think it’s probably unrelated to my work. Or at least it’s not provably related. Anyway, here’s what happened. Estela Lopez missed the DLANC board meetings in July, August, and September. According to the bylaws:1
Any Board Member who misses three (3) consecutive regularly scheduled DLANC Board meetings or four (4) total Board meetings during any twelve (12) month period will be automatically removed from the Board. Each DLANC Director’s absence shall be recorded in the DLANC’s meeting minutes or other manner of Board record keeping, and that, upon missing the specified number of Board meetings for removal, the President shall notify the Board Director, copy the Board, and announce at the next regular Board meeting that their seat has been declared vacant.

Of course, President-for-life Patti Berman is not a rule-follower, but for whatever reason she seems to be following this one. Check the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting of the Board of Directors. Estela Lopez is not on the roster. Presumably PFL Patti will announce the vacancy tomorrow night as specified in item 1.

So that’s two down, four to go. Turn the page for links to the relevant sets of minutes.
Continue reading Estela Lopez Is Off The DLANC Board Of Directors!

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In 2015 Bonin Aide Debbie Dyner Harris Sought To Leverage “Extremely Unusual” Outsized City Assessment For Venice Beach BID Into Voting Seat On Board Of Directors But City Attorney Said No! Freaking! Way! Conflict! Of! Freaking! Interest!

Debbie Dyner Harris, uncaptioned.
I’ve written before on how the City of Los Angeles arranges for itself to be lobbied by BIDs for various reasons. Now it appears that even this usual arrangement wasn’t enough for Mike Bonin and Debbie Dyner Harris at CD11 with respect to the Venice Beach BID. In particular, during the formation process, in December 2015, Dyner Harris emailed Miranda Paster asking if she could have a voting seat on the BID Board of Directors:

Hi Miranda, how are you? I hope all is well. I am checking on something we had discussed a while ago, but I can’t find in my notes. I wanted to confirm whether or not the City, as 1/3 paying member of the BID,1 is allowed to be a voting member on the BID board.

Miranda Paster replied a few days later, stating:

We opt out of sitting on the Board because it may appear to be a conflict of interest. We can sign the petition for a BID and we cast a ballot for the Prop 218 balloting. However, we do not sit on the boards and vote.

Debbie Dyner Harris doesn’t like this at all. She evidently really wants to be on this board!2 Continue reading In 2015 Bonin Aide Debbie Dyner Harris Sought To Leverage “Extremely Unusual” Outsized City Assessment For Venice Beach BID Into Voting Seat On Board Of Directors But City Attorney Said No! Freaking! Way! Conflict! Of! Freaking! Interest!

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February 5, 2003: The Very First Known Public Records Act Ever Received by the HPOA and Kerry Morrison was Already Offended

Kerry Morrison on February 18, 2016, the 13th anniversary of her receipt of an offensive letter from a lawyer regarding the very first known CPRA request to the HPOA.
Kerry Morrison on February 18, 2016, the 13th anniversary of her receipt of an “offensive” letter from a lawyer regarding the very first known CPRA request to the HPOA.
Electronic versions of the HPOA Board of Directors minutes from 1996 through 2006 haven’t been retained by the HPOA, so while waiting on physical copies1 to publish here, I’m taking advantage of good old section 6253(a) of CPRA,2 which tells us that:

Public records are open to inspection at all times during the office hours of the state or local agency and every person has a right to inspect any public record, except as hereafter provided.

Consequently, last Thursday I went over to HPOA secret headquarters on Hollywood Boulevard to read through this material, something I plan to make a regular habit of doing.
Justice Walter Croskey wrote the landmark 2001 opinion in Epstein v. Hollywood Entertainment District BID.
Justice Walter Croskey wrote the landmark 2001 opinion in Epstein v. Hollywood Entertainment District BID.
And there is much fascinating material there, not least of which is the complete unfolding in real time of Aaron Epstein’s epic lawsuit against the HPOA. This ended, of course, in a landmark 2001 decision by the Second District of the California Court of Appeal making BIDs subject to both the Brown Act and CPRA. That story is woven through years and years worth of minutes, so it must wait for the copies to arrive. However, I was able to photograph3 a description of the very first CPRA request known to have been received by the HPOA (on February 5, 2003).

Read on for what it said:
Continue reading February 5, 2003: The Very First Known Public Records Act Ever Received by the HPOA and Kerry Morrison was Already Offended

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Video of Yesterday’s Central City East Association Meeting Now Available

Edward Camarillo at the January 26, 2016 meeting of the CCEA at 725 S. Crocker Street.
Edward Camarillo at the January 26, 2016 meeting of the CCEA at 725 S. Crocker Street.
I’m formally initiating coverage of the Central City East Association with some video of yesterday’s meeting of the Board of Directors at CCEA headquarters at 725 S. Crocker Street. You can find Part 1 and also Part 2. Note that the record is not complete because the Board went into closed session and I couldn’t stick around to see them reconvene. Part I consists entirely of CD14 representative Jose Huizar policy director Martin Schlageter talking about homeless issues in the BID’s territory and then, most interesting of all, taking questions from the Board members. The level of micromanagement is astonishing. We hope to write on some of the details later, but check some representative Q&A after the break. Part 2 is mostly taken up by a representative from the Runyon Group seeking CCEA support for entitlements for their ROW DTLA project (this project was formerly known as Alameda Square). Someone here will be writing on this soon in some detail.
Continue reading Video of Yesterday’s Central City East Association Meeting Now Available

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Many New Documents: CCEA, Media District, and HPOA.

Suzanne Holley, Chief Operating Something-or-Another with the DCBID and the Central City Association as well.
Suzanne Holley, Chief Operating Something-or-Another with the DCBID and the Central City Association as well. This image adorns this post for no reason whatsoever. I don’t even have any new documents from the DCBID.
Today is all documents, minimal commentary, no analysis:

  1. 2009 emails from HPOA about Sesame Street characters. See tag archive for context.
  2. Some new Universal Protection Service internal reports from the Media District. We already wrote about one of these. Here are a couple more.
  3. Many, many years worth of Board of Directors minutes from the CCEA provided by the ever-helpful-in-bizarro-world Raquel K. Beard. As always these people take no thought for making files sort properly in directories. I’ll fix this when I have time.
  4. A minimal number of CCEA committee minutes. According to Raquel K. Beard, “Committees do not meet monthly or quarterly, more so as needed,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. If you want a little puzzle to work out until someone around here gets time to write about it, you can think about why this item plus this email chain might add up to very, very bad news for the CCEA.


Image of Suzanne Holley is from a screenshot of this DCBID newsletter which, being a California public record, is in the public domain.

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Multi-Megabyte Treasure Trove of DCBID Documents: UPS Use of Force Manual, Beaucoup Board Minutes, Finance Committee.

If you're the kind of person to whom diagrams such as this have meaning, this one certainly has meaning to you.
If you’re the kind of person to whom diagrams such as this have meaning, this one certainly has meaning to you. Click to see full size.
I just got a ton of stuff from the ever-helpful (and, relatively speaking, surprisingly sane) Suzanne Holley of the DCBID. The most amazing item, and one which no one here has yet had time to read carefully enough to appreciate, is the 64 page PDF of the Universal Protection Service Use of Force Manual. This is an amazing piece of evidence. What it is evidence of, as always, remains to be seen. If you notice anything important in it, please drop me a line. No doubt my colleagues and I will be mining this for a long time. It is the source of the cryptic yet creepy diagram which adorns this post. There are also a bunch of slightly more pedestrian-on-their-face documents, described after the break.
Continue reading Multi-Megabyte Treasure Trove of DCBID Documents: UPS Use of Force Manual, Beaucoup Board Minutes, Finance Committee.

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Lots of New Documents: Tax Returns from the DCBID, the CHC, and the HPOA, Whistleblower Policies (?!) and More

Death and taxes at the Internal Revenue Service
Death and taxes at the Internal Revenue Service
I have 2012 and 2013 tax returns for the DCBID, which now have their very own subdirectory. Also I have 2014 tax returns for both HPOA administered BIDs (it’s too much alphabet soup to list these all out, it doesn’t matter anyway). They can all be found in the Finances subdirectory of the HPOA directory. Finally, we have what may be the very weirdest items we’ve obtained to date. Find out what they are after the break!
Continue reading Lots of New Documents: Tax Returns from the DCBID, the CHC, and the HPOA, Whistleblower Policies (?!) and More

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HPOA-Backed Anti-Street-Vending Agents Provocateurs Exposed, Mocked in Boyle Heights; Kerry Morrison Characteristically Misses Point, Whines About Incivility

Kerry Morrison, who uses gun-wielding thugs as tools to terrorize, kidnap, torment, and ridicule people but nevertheless expects herself and her henchmen to be treated with politesse on all occasions
Kerry Morrison, who uses gun-wielding thugs as tools to terrorize, kidnap, torment, and ridicule people but nevertheless expects herself and her henchmen to be treated with politesse on all occasions
The release of the HPOA’s quarterly newsletter is always an interesting time here at MK.org secret headquarters. On the one hand we’re always aghast at the latest stupidity, cupidity, mental rigidity, and white privilegidity on display. On the other hand, we always end up with a bunch of topics about which to write. The Summer 2015 issue is no exception.

As every regular reader of this blog knows by now, the HPOA is hysterically opposed to the legalization of street vending in Los Angeles. They’ve entered into conspiracies with the abhorrent Central City Association to subvert the democratic process through astroturfing and mendacity. And, according to Kerry Morrison, writing in the newsletter:

Devin Strecker, Alyssa Van Breene, Kerry Morrison, and a bunch of unindicted co-conspirators
Devin Strecker, Alyssa Van Breene, Kerry Morrison, and a bunch of unindicted co-conspirators

Before an ordinance is drafted, the CLA [Chief Legislative Analyst] staff presided over a series of public hearings to gain input from the community. Staff representing both BIDs, along with board members, attended each of these hearings and expressed the concerns of the business community. However, members of the business community were outnumbered easily 10:1 at these hearings.

Hollywood board member Alyssa Van Breene and staffer Devin Strecker attended the first meeting on May 28 in Boyle Heights. When they tried to share their concerns the audience booed. Though there were no boos or hissing at the second hearing on June 11 in Van Nuys, the audience was unruly and disrespectful to those testifying against the ordinance or speaking on behalf of small business.

Now, Kerry is well-known for her bluenosed Mrs. Grundyism, and we’ve grown somewhat accustomed to it, but this is really over the top, even for her. Let’s restate this in human language, shall we?
Continue reading HPOA-Backed Anti-Street-Vending Agents Provocateurs Exposed, Mocked in Boyle Heights; Kerry Morrison Characteristically Misses Point, Whines About Incivility

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