Tag Archives: Los Angeles City Clerk

Announcements, Los Angeles City Government

Los Angeles BIDs To Be Audited by the City Every Three Years According to City Clerk’s April 2016 RFQ, Published At Direction of Council. Also City to Spend $250,000 Promoting BIDs and Training BID People.

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Holly Wolcott, Clerk of the City of Los Angeles
Holly Wolcott, Clerk of the City of Los Angeles
One of the advantages that zillionaires have over humans with respect to City politics is that they can hire innumerable minions to keep up with the firehose of crap spewed forth by City Hall, certainly in an effort to keep the minion-deprived majority too busy to address everything. Which is my half-serious, half-silly1 excuse for only having noticed this evening the two matters addressed in this post.

First we have Council File 14-0903, in which Holly Wolcott asked for and received an “amount not to exceed $100,000 …for a period of two years with two one-year extensions to assist with the creation and implementation and coordination of a Public Information Campaign” having to do with how fricking great BIDs are for the City of L.A. Additionally they’re getting “an amount not to exceed $150,000 … for a period of two years with two one-year extensions to assist with the creation and implementation of a capacity building and leadership training series relative to business improvement districts and create public/private partnerships with other nonprofit organizations..” None of this seems like very much money given (a) the amount of truth they’re going to have to overcome in order to achieve the first goal and (b) the amount of sheer incompetence and bloody-mindedness to achieve the second. Brace yourself for the incoming propaganda!

Second, and much more interesting, we have this Request for Qualifications, issued by the Clerk in April 2016 asking for people to submit proposals to audit BIDs. There must be a council file associated with this item, but I can’t locate it. Here’s some background. First of all, the standard contract that BIDs sign with the City allows the City to audit BIDs at will.2 This is rarely done. In fact, as far as I can tell, it has only happened twice, both times in 2005, when then-Controller Laura Chick audited both the Central City East Association and also the Westwood Village BID. The details of those audits are worth reading, although I’m not going to write about them tonight.3 However, Controller Chick made some observations then that are still relevant today:
Continue reading Los Angeles BIDs To Be Audited by the City Every Three Years According to City Clerk’s April 2016 RFQ, Published At Direction of Council. Also City to Spend $250,000 Promoting BIDs and Training BID People. →

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Venice Beach BID

Property Owner Protests Against Venice Beach BID Hit Council File. Miranda Paster Of Clerk’s Office Imposes Curtain Of Silence, Forbids Communication, Prohibits Dialogue, Instructs Subordinates: “Do Not Respond To The Email”

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God helps those who help themselves, but a miracle never hurts.
God helps those who help themselves, but a miracle never hurts.
Yesterday evening a number of emails protesting the formation of a BID in Venice were added to the Council File. These demonstrate the heartening fact that not every owner of commercial property within the boundaries of the proposed BID supports its formation. The arguments are solid, too. For instance, Kevin Ragsdale says:

At this point, the idea of a VERY small group of property owners who may be handed $1.8 million with NO oversight, even by the City, is frightening and not appropriate unless and until we know more and have some say in the process that may well drastically change the face and character of the Venice we know and love in the name of profit making and creating a private police force. The consequences of this action without careful analysis will be profound and must be discussed in a wider audience of people, who also include the majority of property owners who have to pay and those who have more at stake than a desire to clean up Venice Beach to make more money.

Or Frank Lutz, who’s lived in Venice for 48 years:
Continue reading Property Owner Protests Against Venice Beach BID Hit Council File. Miranda Paster Of Clerk’s Office Imposes Curtain Of Silence, Forbids Communication, Prohibits Dialogue, Instructs Subordinates: “Do Not Respond To The Email” →

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Venice Beach BID

Open Letter to City Council Asking For Postponement of Venice Beach BID And A Moratorium On New BID Formation

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Honorable Los Angeles City Councilmembers,

I’m writing to urge you to postpone consideration of the proposed Venice Beach business improvement district and to think about placing a moratorium on the formation of new BIDs until we as a City can have a much-needed, long-delayed conversation about their proper role. A major problem is that as they’re now constituted, there is no way for anyone not on their Boards of Directors to have any influence over property-based BIDs in Los Angeles. They have effectively isolated themselves from every one of the City’s means of contractor oversight. People who live in or near BIDs are directly impacted by their activities in many ways but have no effective means of influencing them. Since the property owners associations that administer the BIDs are mostly controlled by self-perpetuating Boards there aren’t even effective ways for the property owners in BIDs to influence their policies. Property-based BIDs also covertly and perhaps inadvertently perpetuate racist policies from the past in unexpected ways.
Continue reading Open Letter to City Council Asking For Postponement of Venice Beach BID And A Moratorium On New BID Formation →

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Venice Beach BID

If BIDs Are Such A Good Good Thing For The City Then Why Is Everyone Involved In Their Creation So Darned Secretive?

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Laura McLennan, Mike Bonin's Deputy Chief of Staff, who has her story about BID formation and she's sticking to it.
Laura McLennan, Mike Bonin’s Deputy Chief of Staff, who has her story about BID formation and she’s sticking to it.
Ask anybody who’s making bank off BIDs. Ask the BID Consortium. Ask the freaking State Legislature, who has incorporated their findings in the freaking Streets and Highways Code at Section 36601(e)(1). Every zillionaire in the state of California and every zillionaire lackey legislator at every level will tell you that the flipping RAND Corporation Report on BIDs proves that they’re better for the health, wealth, and eternal salvation for the people of the Golden State than the the forthcoming resurrection of Jesus, Mary, and all 12 of the apostles.1 And yet when it comes to finding out who’s behind creating them, everybody lies, everybody hides.

Here’s the story. The City creates BIDs. This is no secret. When Aaron Epstein changed the world with his lawsuit the court found that yes, the City of Los Angeles created its BIDs. Read through the records from the years of work Jackie Goldberg dedicated in the 1990s to forming a BID in Hollywood. And yet if you ask anyone at the City for any records to do with the preformation of a BID, they will trot out their official story, which is a lie, that BIDs are formed by a spontaneous movement of property owners.2 This is what Laura McLennan, Mike Bonin’s Deputy Chief of Staff, told me this morning after I asked her for a copy of the list of property owners in the forthcoming Venice Beach BID. She also told me that CD11 didn’t have the list and that I should ask the City Clerk.

I don’t know if that was meant as bitter sarcasm or was just a symptom of ignorance (although I’d hope that someone as intimately involved with the VBBID formation process as Bonin’s senior staff must be would not suffer from the requisite level of ignorance), but actually I’d already asked the Clerk yesterday, been denied at multiple levels, and that’s why I was asking CD11.3 Staff members of the division that oversees BIDs told me that they didn’t have the list, that they didn’t have anything to do with the list, that the list didn’t have anything to do with the City, and that I could ask the shadowy private consultant who’s running the private side of the process, Tara Devine, for the list. I did ask Devine, even though it was obviously a waste of time to ask someone like Devine for anything she wasn’t obligated to provide by law. And it was a waste of time.
Continue reading If BIDs Are Such A Good Good Thing For The City Then Why Is Everyone Involved In Their Creation So Darned Secretive? →

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Featured, Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, The Race Card

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

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

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Business Improvement Districts, Hollywood BID Patrol, Public Records Act Pragmatics

Why Aren’t BID Security Patrols Registered with the Los Angeles Police Commission?

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Any badge, insignia, patch or uniform used or worn by any employee, officer, member or associate of a private patrol service, while on duty for said patrol service, shall be in compliance with State law. Any such badge, insignia, patch or uniform shall not be of such a design as to be mistaken for an official badge, insignia or uniform worn by a law enforcement officer of the City of Los Angeles or any other law enforcement agency with jurisdiction in the City. LAMC 52.34(d)(1)
Any badge, insignia, patch or uniform used or worn by any employee, officer, member or associate of a private patrol service, while on duty for said patrol service, shall be in compliance with State law. Any such badge, insignia, patch or uniform shall not be of such a design as to be mistaken for an official badge, insignia or uniform worn by a law enforcement officer of the City of Los Angeles or any other law enforcement agency with jurisdiction in the City. LAMC 52.34(d)(1)
Recently I was reading the Los Angeles Municipal Code1 and came across LAMC 52.34, which discusses “private patrol services” and their employees, “street patrol officers.” The gist of it seems to be2 that private patrol service operators must register with the Police Commission, and also prove that their employees’ uniforms and badges don’t look too much like real police uniforms and badges. They’re also required to have a complaint process and submit lists of employees and some other things too.

Well, as you can see from the photo above, and from innumerable other photos and videos I’ve obtained from the Hollywood BID Patrol, there is a real problem with BID Patrol officers looking like LAPD. Their uniforms are the same color, their badges are the same shape and color, and so on. Also, they’re famous for not having a complaint process, or at least not one that anyone can discover easily. The Andrews International BID Patrol isn’t the only one with this problem, either. The Media District‘s security vendor, Universal Protection Service, doesn’t seem to have one either. In fact, it was UPS Captain John Irigoyen‘s refusal to accept a complaint about two of his officers that inspired the establishment of this blog. The A/I BID Patrol is as guilty of this lapse as anyone.

Richard Tefank, Executive Director of the LA Police Commission.
Richard Tefank, Executive Director of the LA Police Commission.
The fact that private patrol operators were required to file actual documents with a city agency means that copies would be available! So I fired off some public records requests to Richard Tefank, Executive Director of the Police Commission. He answered right away and told me they’d get right on it. What a relief to discover that Police Commission CPRA requests don’t have to go through the LAPD Discovery Section, which is so notoriously slow to respond that the City of LA has had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in court-imposed fines due to their tardiness. Mr. Tefank handed me off to an officer in the permits section, and he told me that none of the three BID security contractors I asked about; Andrews International, Universal Protection, and Streetplus3 were registered. How could this be, I wondered, given what seems like the plain language of the statute? The story turns out to be immensely complicated, and with lots of new documents.
Continue reading Why Aren’t BID Security Patrols Registered with the Los Angeles Police Commission? →

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Announcements, Business Improvement Districts, Central City East Association, Downtown Center BID, Fashion District BID

A Vast Panoply of BID Quarterly Reports

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TL;DR BID Quarterly Report: Bitch, moan, self-aggrandize, bitch, moan, self-aggrandize, whine, repeat if necessary.
TL;DR BID Quarterly Report: Bitch, moan, self-aggrandize, bitch, moan, self-aggrandize, whine, repeat if necessary.
As a follow-up to Tuesday’s release of all Hollywood Entertainment District and all Sunset & Vine BID Quarterly Reports I’m pleased to announce today that I have bunches of these reports from other BIDS. Although these collections aren’t (yet) complete, they’re nevertheless essential. You can access them through the menu structure above, and here are links:

These are also available on the Internet Archive, which is useful because you can download them via torrent, they have OCR versions, and so on. Links are after the break.
Continue reading A Vast Panoply of BID Quarterly Reports →

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Announcements, Downtown Center BID, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Huge Document Dump: HPOA Quarterly Reports, DCBID Emails, Central Crime Control Documents

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We're out here having fun in the warm California sun!
We’re out here having fun in the warm California sun!
It’s been a while since I’ve announced a pure, old-fashioned document dump, but the records just keep pouring in, and I have loads of them to lay on you this evening. First, from our friends at the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, we have pretty much all their Quarterly Reports, even going back to the 1990s. I also put these on the Archive:

BIDs are required to send these reports to the City Clerk, who keeps them on file. They contain detailed narratives of the BIDs’ activities and are invaluable for understanding what’s going on. I have a ton of these from other BIDs as well, but they’re not quite ready for prime time. If there’s something you need urgently, though, drop me a line and I will try to fix you up.

Also, courtesy of the much-more-helpful-lately-than-she-has-been-in-the-past Suzanne Holley of the Downtown Center BID we have a massive pile of Central Area Crime Control stuff from the LAPD. This is valuable because getting it out of the LAPD would be practically impossible, and yet here it is. See what Compstat output looks like and much else of interest.

Finally, I have a bunch of emails, and there are details after the break:
Continue reading Huge Document Dump: HPOA Quarterly Reports, DCBID Emails, Central Crime Control Documents →

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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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