Tag Archives: CD13

Announcements, Homeless Issues, Public Records Act Pragmatics

A Bunch Of Interesting New Documents: City Attorney, LA Times, And Sanitation Reports From Encampment Cleanups

October 16, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

This is just a quick announcement of some interesting new collections of records, with minimal commentary. First of all, there’s a collection of emails between City Attorney spokesman¹ Rob Wilcox and various L.A. Times Reporters. You can get the whole batch here:

Also I have a full set of reports² from the Bureau of Sanitation on the cleanups of three homeless encampments on March 22, 2016. It took almost three months for them to hand over this material, which won’t surprise anyone who’s been following my recent interactions with them. This is likewise available from:

I don’t presently have much to say about the sanitation reports. At this point I’m collecting as much material as possible in order to (a) figure out what kind of material is available so that I’ll be able to make focused, effective requests in the future, (b) learn what kinds of arguments they make against handing over records so that I can make focused, effective counterarguments against them, and (c) understand all the players in the HE³ game and the roles they’re playing. I hope to be able to synthesize all of this at some point, but meanwhile I want to make the records available because I know smarter people than I are also reading them.

But I do have this and that to say about the emails,⁴ and after the break you will find commentary and links to interesting individual instances.
Continue reading A Bunch Of Interesting New Documents: City Attorney, LA Times, And Sanitation Reports From Encampment Cleanups →

CD13

CD13 Staffers Marisol Rodriguez and Juan Fregoso Conspire With Bureau of Sanitation Employees Jose Garcia and Renee Shackleford to Subvert City Homeless Encampment Cleanup Policies and Procedures Just So Mitch O’Farrell, Other “VIPs,” Don’t Have To Walk By Homeless People On Their Way To Give A Speech

October 8, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

Low income housing at 215 N Vermont Avenue. Note the distinctive lack of homeless people for VIPs to step over, thanks to the foresight and strongarm tactics of CD13's Marisol Rodriguez and Juan Fregoso. — Low income housing at 215 N Vermont Avenue. Note the distinctive lack of homeless people for VIPs to step over, thanks to the foresight and strongarm tactics of CD13’s Marisol Rodriguez and Juan Fregoso.

Well, it turns out there’s this company called AMCAL Housing, and according to their about-us page they build affordable housing in exchange for tax breaks, or some such thing. They’re building a big project at Vermont and Beverly¹ called the Meridian Apartments, and they broke ground officially on February 11, 2016, with Mitch O’Farrell scheduled to speak at the ceremony.

Thus, on February 1, 2016, Paige Horn of AMCAL Housing emailed Marisol Rodriguez, Dave Cano, Juan Fregoso, all of CD13, and some people from Korean Churches for Community Development, which is working with AMCAL on this project, telling them:

Thank you all for your participation in the Meridian Groundbreaking Event on Thursday, February 11^th at 11am! … There should be ample street parking, however, I have reserved VIP Parking for all speakers at the lower parking lot of Hubbard College of Administration that can be accessed from Juanita Avenue.

Map of the area. (a) is the parking lot, (b) is the encampment. A speculative VIP path to the event is shown in purple. Click to enlarge.

But local knowledge counts for a lot. The very next day, our very own Juan Fregoso emailed Victor Gutierrez (#26802) with a cc to Matthew Ziegler (#34208)² to report:

Hi Vic,
Here is the info for the event on the 11th.

We have CSI³ scheduled for February 9th.

As you can see, VIPs will park on Juanita and will have to walk through the encampment.

Me and Marisol are working to see how to address this but wanted to flag the event.

Thanks again for all your help.

And amazingly enough, I have a copy of the lengthy email chain between Juan Fregoso, Marisol Rodriguez, and a bunch of people from the L.A. Sanitation department showing exactly what those two CD13 stalwarts were doing “to see how to address this.” You can probably guess what’s coming, because if VIPs (?!) have to walk near homeless people, something’s gotta give, and it ain’t gonna be the VIPs,⁴ You’d be right, and you can read the sordid details after the break!
Continue reading CD13 Staffers Marisol Rodriguez and Juan Fregoso Conspire With Bureau of Sanitation Employees Jose Garcia and Renee Shackleford to Subvert City Homeless Encampment Cleanup Policies and Procedures Just So Mitch O’Farrell, Other “VIPs,” Don’t Have To Walk By Homeless People On Their Way To Give A Speech →

Announcements, CD13, Homeless Issues, Public Records Act Pragmatics

Newly Available Emails From CD13 May Shed Some Light On City’s Procedures For Breaking Up Homeless Encampments. Also Glossary Updates And Some Fragmentary Information On The City’s Encampment Cleanup Authorization System

October 2, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

This (decontextualized) image from an email to CD13 staff suggests that despite the City's rhetoric on the matter, their policy towards people living in encampments is not all sunshine and outreach. — This (decontextualized) image from an email to CD13 staff suggests that despite the City’s rhetoric on the matter, their policy towards people living in encampments is not all sunshine and outreach.

My recent success in using CPRA to get advance notice of an encampment clean-up from the City reminded me that I had a number of emails to/from Council District 13 organizing such operations between January and April 2016 that I still hadn’t prepared for publication.¹ So I spent this morning getting them into shape and putting them up on the Internet. This material sheds new light on the City’s still-mysterious encampment-breaking system. Also, some of the attachments to these emails reveal crucial information about the computer database(s) used by the City to coordinate the process. I discuss this matter, along with some other issues, after the break. Meanwhile, here are the locations of these emails:

On the Internet Archive — As usual, this has the advantage that you can get the whole batch via BitTorrent if that’s useful. By later today, also, there should be OCRed PDFs there, and text versions.
From our local server

Also, I added a few new terms to our glossary to help you read the emails, which are decidedly acronym heavy.² These are CES, CSI, HE, PATH, and M&O. You can see the new definitions after the break (as well, of course, as via the menu structure or on the page itself). After the break I also discuss some fragmentary information about the City’s so-called Encampment Cleanup Authorization System.³ Continue reading Newly Available Emails From CD13 May Shed Some Light On City’s Procedures For Breaking Up Homeless Encampments. Also Glossary Updates And Some Fragmentary Information On The City’s Encampment Cleanup Authorization System →

Announcements

Lots of New Documents: CD5 Food Coalition Emails, CD13 HPOA Emails, Carol Schatz and Mike Feuer Material, 2016 Quarterly Reports From A Bunch Of BIDs

September 10, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

The subterranean archives at MK.org are filling up fast!

Just a quick post this fine Saturday morning before heading off to Canter’s for breakfast. I’ve been quietly uploading stuff to Archive.Org over the last few weeks, and there’s gotten to be quite a bit of unannounced material over there:

Emails to/from CD5 relating to Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition. This is about 20MB of emails. More NIMBY ranting, emails to/from Ted Landreth, the cops, and all the usual suspects. There doesn’t seem to be anything both unknown and shocking here, but I haven’t had time to read it all carefully yet.
July 2016 emails between CD13 and the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance. This is a thin selection of emails, more suggestive than indicative. Here is an interesting item although it may not seem so on its face. I will be writing more about this subject in the future.

And turn the page for material to do with Carol Schatz, Mike Feuer, and a bunch of highly assorted quarterly BID reports from the first half of 2016.
Continue reading Lots of New Documents: CD5 Food Coalition Emails, CD13 HPOA Emails, Carol Schatz and Mike Feuer Material, 2016 Quarterly Reports From A Bunch Of BIDs →

Lawsuits, Public Records Act Pragmatics

First Amendment Coalition Sues City of Los Angeles Over Tom LaBonge’s Illegal Records Destruction, Alleges Possible Felony Records Destruction, Eric Garcetti Still Not Held To Account For Similar Crimes

August 28, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

Current CD4 representative David Ryu, whose termed-out predecessor Tom LaBonge ordered the destruction of public records, leading to both an FAC lawsuit and a council motion to prevent this kind of thing in the future.

In January 2016 the Los Feliz Ledger broke the story that termed-out CD4 Councilmember Tom LaBonge had ordered the destruction of public records prior to his leaving office on June 30, 2015. Emily Alpert Reyes, writing in the Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday that the First Amendment Coalition had filed suit against the City of Los Angeles, claiming, among other things, that the destruction of this material either violated the California Public Records Act or else the fairly draconian Government Code section 6200. Thanks to FAC director Peter Scheer I have a copy of the petition to share with you, and you can read some further commentary after the break.
Continue reading →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

Peter Zarcone and Kerry Morrison Conspire Not To Enforce CUP Conditions Against BID-Approved Venues for November 2015 BID-Sponsored Music Festival In Stark Hypocritical Contrast To Their Overzealous Hyperenforcement Against Minority-Serving Venues in Hollywood

August 24, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

A newly shaven Peter Zarcone in April 2015. — A newly shaven Peter Zarcone in April 2015 just as his joint vendetta with the BIDs against nightclubs in Hollywood took off.

Recall that in April 2015 the two HPOA BIDs, the LAPD, and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce revealed an ongoing conspiracy to shut down minority-serving entertainment venues in Hollywood. Their favored technique for doing this is hyperenforcement of Conditional Use Permits (CUPs). These documents contain numerous restrictions on the operations of bars, restaurants, and so on. Violating these conditions while operating is actually a crime, and owners and employees of venues can be arrested for doing so. This actually happens, e.g. in the shameful case of the Rusty Mullet. Keep that in mind. The LAPD can physically arrest restaurant employees for violations of the CUP. It can also shut the venue down immediately if the CUP is being violated.

Now, in November 2015, eight months after the BID and Zarcone began targeting nightclubs and bars that they didn’t like,¹ the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance sponsored a music festival centered around Cahuenga Boulevard between Hollywood and Selma, notably the most caucasian micro-neighborhood in Hollywood-nightlife-land. Thus, on September 9, 2015, Kerry Morrison wrote to LAPD and CD13:

This festival is intended to present a neighborhood “night-life” experience in Hollywood. We are trying to change the image of Hollywood by celebrating the authentic music and artistic options that are here. As such, the BID is “curating” over four days/nights dozens of different musical experiences, acts, pop-up art shows, comedy, etc — and inviting the public in to experience Hollywood as a walkable neighborhood. … The activity is largely going to be centered around Selma and Cahuenga — very little will happen on Hollywood Blvd.

By the way, this statement is full of dog whistles. Note the contrast between putatively authentic music and whatever kind of music they play on Hollywood Blvd. (hint: white:authentic :: ??:Hollywood Blvd. music) Note the scare quotes around “night-life,” and so on. But that’s not all:
Continue reading Peter Zarcone and Kerry Morrison Conspire Not To Enforce CUP Conditions Against BID-Approved Venues for November 2015 BID-Sponsored Music Festival In Stark Hypocritical Contrast To Their Overzealous Hyperenforcement Against Minority-Serving Venues in Hollywood →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

Scenes From The Cosmo Club’s Appeal Of The Revocation Of Its Conditional Use Permit At The PLUM Committee Part 1: Marqueece Harris-Dawson Is An American Hero, MK.Org Video Of Racist Sunset-Vine BID Rant Played In City Hall

August 17, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

Marqueece Harris-Dawson is an American hero.

Yesterday the Planning and Land Use Management Committee heard the Cosmo Club’s appeal of the Zoning Administrator’s revocation of their conditional use permit. See the whole thing here, with a very short second part here. Also, the Council file is here. This is the second in the ongoing series of Hollywood clubs that cater to minorities being targeted for elimination by Kerry Morrison, the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, the LAPD, and CD13 rep Mitch O’Farrell. The racist nature of this anti-nightclub campaign is revealing itself to the public, as dirty secrets will do, so this hearing drew some protesters who stated clearly, articulately, just exactly what is going on in Hollywood. Also, although L.A. Times reporting on this issue to date has been sporadic and radically incomplete, I spotted the incomparable Emily Alpert-Reyes exchanging contact information with Cosmo Club attorney Mike Ayaz after the hearing, so maybe something interesting is forthcoming.

There are links to a number of highlights at the end of this post, but the hearing was particularly rich, and I’m going to have to cover it in increments, starting at the end. If you’re not familiar with the situation, you can read up about it here and also here.¹ But here is the short version of how we got to this point: Kerry Morrison, her BIDs, and Peter Zarcone decided to destroy a bunch of nightclubs in Hollywood. Mitch O’Farrell told City Planning to get on it. They did, and the City Council will vote in favor of Mitch no matter how bogus the evidence is because they also want to exercise unilateral control over every aspect of everything in their districts, which they can only do with the connivance of their colleagues. Marqueece Harris-Dawson didn’t play along at yesterday’s hearing, which, although he was merely doing his job as a Councilmember, is very brave, since if he does it too often the zillionaire elite will certainly take away his seat in 2019.

In any case, after interminable testimony by Zoning Administrator Aleta James which listed every traffic ticket and open container violation within 100 yards of the business as is evidently the practice in these cases, after LAPD Hollywood Division Captain Cory Palka shilling for real estate developers, after greasy little liar and LAPD Hollywood undercover vice cop Benjamin Thompson told his greasy little lies, after many cogent comments by actual human beings opposing the City’s raw destructive power, after Sean Rafael from the Cosmo played OUR VIDEO from 2015, after all that, a small miracle occurred. Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson of CD8 questioned the Zoning Administrator extremely closely, ultimately a round of applause from the audience, who were amazed to witness that rarest of phenomena in Los Angeles: truth spoken from behind a desk in a Council hearing. Read on for details.
Continue reading Scenes From The Cosmo Club’s Appeal Of The Revocation Of Its Conditional Use Permit At The PLUM Committee Part 1: Marqueece Harris-Dawson Is An American Hero, MK.Org Video Of Racist Sunset-Vine BID Rant Played In City Hall →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

Daniel Halden, Speaking On Behalf Of Mitch O’Farrell, Explains Why The Rusty Mullet Must Die

August 16, 2016 kohlhaas Leave a comment

CD13 Hollywood Field Deputy Dan Halden at the August 2015 HPOA All Property Owners Meeting.

(Hitherto we have sought to understand O’Farrell’s anti-nightclub campaign; the point, however, is to change it)

The other day we wrote about the Rusty Mullet conditional use permit revocation hearing, but didn’t get around to covering CD13 Hollywood Field Deputy Dan Halden’s testimony, which you can listen to here, and as always there’s a transcript after the break, and we’ll just take it line by line, also as always.

My name is Daniel Halden. H-A-L-D-E-N. Good afternoon, I guess. I was going to say good morning, but good afternoon. I serve Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell of the Thirteenth District. I’m his Hollywood Field Deputy, which is a position I’ve had since May 2014.

It is editorial policy here at MK.org to showcase anything true that our guests say. Unfortunately all too often that’s no more than their name, rank, and serial number.

It’s the top priority of the Councilman [unintelligible] to ensure public safety and a high quality of life, whether it’s in Hollywood or anywhere in the Thirteenth District.

Not really. In fact it is the top priority of the Councilman to hire private security forces who are not subject to democratic control so that they can physically attack homeless people who have not yet been targeted by one of his on-demand forcible encampment cleanups or attempts to deny them food and in the spare time left to him after these efforts, to destroy nightclubs in Hollywood solely because Kerry Morrison and Peter Zarcone are unable to tell the difference between groups of nonwhite people having fun and freaking civil insurrections or something. Anyway, that’s what the evidence shows is the top priority of the Councilman. We guess you could call that a high quality of life, but really, whose life?
Continue reading Daniel Halden, Speaking On Behalf Of Mitch O’Farrell, Explains Why The Rusty Mullet Must Die →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

MK.Org Video Of Racist Diatribe At March 2015 SVBID Board Meeting Played At The Rusty Mullet CUP Revocation Hearing, Or How Fabio Conti Shot The BID In The Foot With His Big Fat Mouth — Also LAPD Vice Officer Benjamin Thompson (39467) Is A Shameless Liar — Guest Appearance By Dan Halden Of CD13

August 14, 2016 kohlhaas Leave a comment

This photograph shows that Officer Benjamin Thompson (#39467) of the Hollywood Vice Squad is a mewling, puking liar. Read on for details!

A couple weeks ago we wrote about a Zoning Administrator hearing being held for the purpose of revoking the Rusty Mullet’s conditional use permit. Well, the hearing was held on July 28, 2016. As far as we know a determination has not yet been made, but we recently obtained more than five hours of audio from the hearing. You can listen to part I and also part II here. It’s not easy to get through the whole damned thing, which is why you’re lucky to have us! We’ve listened to the whole thing and made clips of some interesting bits. Note that as long as we were haunting City Hall to get this material we also obtained audio from the CUP revocation hearings for the Cosmo Nightclub and the Cashmere, and you can find both of those on this Archive.org page.

Now, long-time readers of this blog will recall that in March 2015 we broke the story that Fabio Conti, Carol Massie, Kerry Morrison, Marty Shelton, and pretty much everyone on the Board of Directors of the Sunset & Vine BID except for Chase Gordon are a bunch of racists who want to shut down every bar on Hollywood Boulevard because they don’t like the skin color of the patrons. So imagine our pleasure at learning that Mike Ayaz, the Rusty Mullet’s lawyer, actually showed our video at the hearing! This was part of the evidence for his position, with which we concur, that the restaurant appears on a hit list of bars being targeted for racist reasons by the BID, the LAPD, and the City Government. You can hear the whole clip here, where he refers to Fabio’s speech as “disturbing video which I would like to play of a quasi-governmental agency that basically…I think I’ll let the video speak for itself.” And speak for itself it does:

Fabio Conti, Kerry Morrison, and Carol Massie at a March 2016 meeting of the quasi-governmental agency responsible for the clandestine hit list targeting the Rusty Mullet.

Be sure to catch the audience reaction at the end. It doesn’t make anyone sane happy to hear Fabio Conti channeling Marty Shelton claiming that “the Lindsey Lohans of the world are not hanging out at the Rusty Mullet” with the regulars, who are “decidedly minority, brown and black, and my guess, from a lower economic strata.” These dimwits on the BID are clearly going to regret the day they neglected to listen to their one and only sane Board Member, Chase Gordon, who responded to this bullshit in March 2015 by saying that he didn’t “think that we should be, especially public-facing, going out with the distinction of ‘we don’t want lower economic statuses coming and visiting Hollywood.” Anyway, who can say what will happen, but we here at MK.org are inordinately proud on this beautiful Sunday morning that the citizen journalism of our intrepid correspondent is paying off in this big way. This story is a sleeper, but when it finally makes the papers, it’s going to be huge.

Turn the page for some other interesting bits!
Continue reading MK.Org Video Of Racist Diatribe At March 2015 SVBID Board Meeting Played At The Rusty Mullet CUP Revocation Hearing, Or How Fabio Conti Shot The BID In The Foot With His Big Fat Mouth — Also LAPD Vice Officer Benjamin Thompson (39467) Is A Shameless Liar — Guest Appearance By Dan Halden Of CD13 →

Featured, Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, The Race Card

Business Improvement Districts As A Force For White Supremacy in Twenty-First Century Los Angeles

August 8, 2016 Mike 2 Comments

This is the most obvious and least dangerous form in which white supremacy expresses itself.

My colleagues and I spill a lot of metaphorical ink referring to business improvement districts and their Boards of Directors as white supremacists, and we certainly stand by that position. However, it’s recently come to my attention that not everyone in our audience is familiar with the literal meaning of the phrase. Evidently it strikes some people as a generic, semantically empty insult, or else they’re confused by the fact that the phrase refers to at least two fairly distinct ideologies. Thus I thought it would be useful to explain in detail why BIDs are in a very literal sense white supremacist organizations.

First let’s get the definitions straight. As always, our friends at Wikipedia give us a good starting place. Their article on white supremacy tells us that the phrase has two principal meanings. The salient one for our purposes is that white supremacy is:

…a political ideology that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical and/or industrial domination by white people

It’s crucial to note that there’s nothing inherently racist about this kind of white supremacy.¹ Now, the history of the racial segregation of real estate in Los Angeles is well-known, and Hollywood was at the forefront of it from the early years of the last century. What’s not so well understood is how racially segregated the commercial real estate market was. In fact² it was certainly more segregated than residential real estate, since white people owned much of the commercial real estate even in areas of the City where nonwhites were allowed to own houses.³ Continue reading Business Improvement Districts As A Force For White Supremacy in Twenty-First Century Los Angeles →