Tag Archives: Don Steier

Video Clips Of January 5, 2018 Meeting Of Venice Beach BID Board Available — In Conjunction With December Letter To Property Owners These Clips Suggest That They’re Egregiously Violating The Brown Act — President Tara Devine Is Even More Horrifically Offensive, Irritating, Mendacious, And Reprehensible Than Hitherto Suspected

As you may recall, the Venice Beach Business Improvement District putatively began its existence on January 1, 2017. However, the BID did nothing whatsoever for most of its first year except cash its zillion dollar checks from the City. In late December 2017 the BID finally announced a public meeting both through a letter sent to property owners on December 22, 2017 (there’s a transcription of this PDF at the bottom of the post) and via an email sent to the BID’s MailChimp list on January 2, 2018.

Well, the meeting took place, although I was not able to attend. The indefatigable Margaret Molloy recorded some selections, though, and has published them on her YouTube Channel. I have not watched all of them yet, but I’ve watched some of them, and it’s not a pretty sight, friends. These Venice BIDdies are a bunch of bad, bad babies.

So here’s what I have for you tonight. After the break, along with the promised transcription of devious little chump Mark Sokol’s letter to property owners, there’s also a reproduction of Margaret’s directory of these clips along with direct links through to them. Also there’s a transcription and a little bit of accompanying discussion of this particular clip, in which President Tara Devine explains how and why she and her fellow bad BIDdies on the board egregiously violated the Brown Act in the months leading up to this January meeting. Read on!
Continue reading Video Clips Of January 5, 2018 Meeting Of Venice Beach BID Board Available — In Conjunction With December Letter To Property Owners These Clips Suggest That They’re Egregiously Violating The Brown Act — President Tara Devine Is Even More Horrifically Offensive, Irritating, Mendacious, And Reprehensible Than Hitherto Suspected

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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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More Than Ten Thousand Emails! Downtown Santa Monica BID And Downtown Center BID! Two Unbelievably Rich Sets Of Records!

This is just a short note to announce two massive sets of emails that I’ve obtained over the last couple weeks. There’s so much material here that it’s taken an unusual amount of time to get it processed and published. I will be writing about this material over the next few weeks. There’s so much, and it’s so rich, that it’s going to take me a while to get it all sorted out, so I thought it’d be best to make it available to you right away:

  • Downtown Santa Monica BID — Emails between the City of Santa Monica and the Downtown Santa Monica BID from January 1 through September 8, 2017.
  • Downtown Center BID — Assorted emails from the Downtown Center BID, mostly from 2017.

Like I said, there’s so much here that it will take a while to get it sorted through. Meanwhile, though, turn the page for some interesting stuff you can begin to look for on your own.
Continue reading More Than Ten Thousand Emails! Downtown Santa Monica BID And Downtown Center BID! Two Unbelievably Rich Sets Of Records!

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