Tag Archives: Downtown Center BID

Business Improvement Districts, Los Angeles City Government, Public Records Act Pragmatics

In 2016 The City Of Los Angeles Revised Its Standard BID Administration Contract To Remove Language About Complying With CPRA And The Brown Act — Which Is Yet Another Example Of The City Refusing To Hold BIDs Responsible For Complying With Any Laws Whatsoever — It’s Not Clear What Effect This Will Have On Anything — They Certainly Did It In Response To My Activities, Though, For What That’s Worth

May 28, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Regular readers of this blog are well aware that business improvement districts in California are subject to the California Public Records Act and to the Brown Act by virtue of the Property and Business Improvement District Law at §36612, which states explicitly that BIDS … shall comply with the Ralph M. Brown Act … at all times when matters within the subject matter of the district are heard, discussed, or deliberated, and with the California Public Records Act … for all records relating to activities of the district.¹

Also, maybe you recall that the standard contract that BIDs sign with the City of Los Angeles contains² a clause basically repeating this requirement. There’s a transcription of this section after the break. So in March 2016, faced with blatant disregard of the CPRA by the Downtown Center BID, I wrote to the City Clerk, Holly Wolcott, asking her to enforce the terms of the City’s contract with this obstructionist BID.

And on March 14, 2016, she wrote back to me, stating pretty clearly that she wasn’t going to make sure that BIDs complied with the Public Records Act. Again, there’s a transcription of her response after the break, but her main argument was that the City wasn’t obligated by the contract to consider whether a given BID was complying with the CPRA.

And I thought that was the end of it, but I just recently discovered that actually, it’s likely that the City took my argument much more seriously than anyone was letting on. So seriously, in fact, that in April 2016 the City Attorney completely rewrote the standard contract between BIDs and the City to eliminate all language about CPRA and the Brown Act!
Continue reading In 2016 The City Of Los Angeles Revised Its Standard BID Administration Contract To Remove Language About Complying With CPRA And The Brown Act — Which Is Yet Another Example Of The City Refusing To Hold BIDs Responsible For Complying With Any Laws Whatsoever — It’s Not Clear What Effect This Will Have On Anything — They Certainly Did It In Response To My Activities, Though, For What That’s Worth →

Street Vending

Zillion Dollar Woman Carol Schatz Tells California State Senate That The Downtown Center BID Has Been Working For Years To Help Street Vendors And That Senator Lara’s SB-946 Is Going To Make Things Worse For Everybody — Thirty Eight New Support/Oppose Letters Regarding Lara’s Bill Now Available

May 8, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Last month I published five letters to the State Senate supporting Senator Ricardo Lara’s SB-946, the Sanity in Street Vending Bill which, by the way, cleared the Senate last week and is awaiting consideration by the Assembly. And yesterday I received 38 more support/oppose letters, and I’ve updated the Archive.Org page with copies of these.

The letters supporting Lara’s bill are excellent reading, of course,³ but, as usual, it’s the letters opposing it that really crack open the seething skulls of the zillionaire elites of this City⁴ and let the fevered fragments of their sociopathic ids spill out for all to see. And, of course, that’s what this blog is all about!

For whatever reason these letters, both in support and in opposition, borrow a lot from one another. And an interesting theme running through the opposition letters from Los Angeles is the idea that somehow our City’s various zillionaire-serving institutions have been working hard to help our City Council craft laws that help street vendors and that Lara’s bill would interfere with all this putative good will.

For instance, see this letter from Carol Schatz at the Downtown Center BID, of which there’s a transcription after the break:

Over the past several years, we have joined a broad coalition of organizations working with the Los Angeles City Council to create a sidewalk vending program that balances the needs of brick-and-mortar establishments with the needs of vendors.

Or check this little slab of puckey from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, with contact person none other than former Huizar staffer Diana Yedoyan, evidently now shilling for the man out on Bixel Street:
Continue reading Zillion Dollar Woman Carol Schatz Tells California State Senate That The Downtown Center BID Has Been Working For Years To Help Street Vendors And That Senator Lara’s SB-946 Is Going To Make Things Worse For Everybody — Thirty Eight New Support/Oppose Letters Regarding Lara’s Bill Now Available →

Business Improvement Districts, Downtown Center BID, Fashion District BID, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Street Vending

How Kerry Freaking Morrison Found Out About Senator Ricardo Lara’s Street Vending Bill In January 2018 And Told No-Epithet-Yet Suzanne Holley, Chardonnay-Swilling Scarf Monster Rena Leddy, And Batty Little Fusspot Blair Besten All About It And Suzanne Freaking Holley Went And Told Carol Freaking Schatz, The Zillion Dollar Woman, Who Subsequently Swore A Solemn Oath To Destroy SB 946

April 2, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Just another quick note from all them DCBID emails I’ve been dining out on for weeks now. It’s inconsequential in one sense, but on the other hand, it illuminates how information spreads among the zillionaire flunkies who run this City’s BIDs. Here is the original email chain, and I’m just going to lay it on you without commentary. Or without much, anyway.

On January 31, 2018, the incomparable Emily Alpert Reyes emailed Kerry Freaking Morrison thusly:

From: Alpert, Emily mailto:Emily.Alpert@latimes.com
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 9:23 AM
To: Kerry Morrison <Kerry@hollvwoodbid.org>

Subject: State bill on street vending

Hi Kerry — I hope all is well! I was curious for your thoughts on this state bill that would override local regulations on vending:

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB946&search_keywords=vendor

I’m at ■■■-■■■-■■■■. Thanks!

Emily

Did Kerry Morrison answer her? Well, I don’t know, but I will say that Emily Alpert Reyes published a fine article on Lara’s bill on February 2, and Kerry Morrison is not quoted in it. In any case, we do know that Kerry Morrison read the email because …. turn the page if you want to find out!
Continue reading How Kerry Freaking Morrison Found Out About Senator Ricardo Lara’s Street Vending Bill In January 2018 And Told No-Epithet-Yet Suzanne Holley, Chardonnay-Swilling Scarf Monster Rena Leddy, And Batty Little Fusspot Blair Besten All About It And Suzanne Freaking Holley Went And Told Carol Freaking Schatz, The Zillion Dollar Woman, Who Subsequently Swore A Solemn Oath To Destroy SB 946 →

Downtown Center BID, Street Vending

Of Course Carol Schatz Is The Queen Of Downtown But She Might Also Be The King Solomon Of Downtown Cause She Sure Knows How To Split A Damn Baby! Or — Assistant Queen Of Downtown Suzanne Holley Wants To Know Who’s Gonna Pay The Damn Lobbyists!

March 31, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Just what you have all been waiting for, friends! More tales from the massive DCBID document dump of a couple weeks ago. It truly is the gift that keeps on giving!⁵ And yeah, from one point of view this is yet another inconsequential bit of floof like our recent story about Lena Mulhall, CCALA office manager, using the office UPS account to ship various personal cosplay-linked merchandise hither and yon. But from another, it’s more than consequential, it’s essential evidence of … but of course, you have no idea what I’m talking about cause you haven’t seen the damn email.

You can read the whole chain here or, as usual, turn the page for a transcription. Anyway, remember Laura Mecoy? She’s the hotcha lobbyist who runs a shady little op out of the South Bay known as Mecoy Communications⁶ who got Kerry Morrison and Carol Schatz a sitdown with the L.A. Times Editorial Board over the street vending issue, giving them an opportunity to spew their poisonous puke all over the table at First and Main.⁷

And of course, she don’t do that kinda jive for free. After all, she’s a storyteller! A professional storyteller!! And the workman is worthy of her hire, ain’t she? So who’s going to pay her damn bills!? Well, of course, turn the page to find out!
Continue reading Of Course Carol Schatz Is The Queen Of Downtown But She Might Also Be The King Solomon Of Downtown Cause She Sure Knows How To Split A Damn Baby! Or — Assistant Queen Of Downtown Suzanne Holley Wants To Know Who’s Gonna Pay The Damn Lobbyists! →

Downtown Center BID, Public Records Act Pragmatics

Suzanne Holley Of The Downtown Center BID Redacted All The Email Addresses Of Her Frickin’ Board Of Directors Before She Coughed Up Emails In Response To My CPRA Request ‐ Not Only Is This Completely Unjustified Under The Law, But I Have The Damn Email Addresses Anyway And I’m Publishing Them Here In Case You Want Them Too!

March 25, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Of course you will recall that recently I published a huge dump of records from Carol Schatzenstein’s monster, known in the vernacular as the Downtown Center BID. The bulk of these came to me as MSG files, which is by far one of the three most useful formats in which to receive emails.⁸ Those emails are available here on Archive.Org. On the other hand, Ms. Suzanne Holley, who is Chief Operating Officer of the BID,⁹ for reasons known only to her and her lawyer, felt the need to heavily redact some of the emails, and these she provided to me as PDFs with the usual black bars through the putatively sensitive information.

Now, superficially this is all in accordance with the requirements of the California Public Records Act. The law defines certain categories of information that are exempt from disclosure, but also, at §6253(a), requires redaction rather than withholding the entire document when possible: Any reasonably segregable portion of a record shall be available for inspection by any person requesting the record after deletion of the portions that are exempted by law.

Now take a look at this little puppy, which down in the chain contains an email from Board member Cari Wolk to the rest of her unindicted co-conspirators announcing that she’s gonna be attending the upcoming conspiracy meeting. The content is not nearly so interesting as the redactions, which include all the email addresses of all the board members. Turn the page for a picture of the redacted portion as well as the usual sarcastic commentary and as an extra-special bonus, all the redacted email addresses which, as common sense would tell anyone who thought about it for a second,¹⁰ are not actually exempt after all.
Continue reading Suzanne Holley Of The Downtown Center BID Redacted All The Email Addresses Of Her Frickin’ Board Of Directors Before She Coughed Up Emails In Response To My CPRA Request ‐ Not Only Is This Completely Unjustified Under The Law, But I Have The Damn Email Addresses Anyway And I’m Publishing Them Here In Case You Want Them Too! →

Downtown Center BID, Hypocrisy

Despite Law-And-Order Obsession Of Central City Association With Respect To E.G. LAMC §41.18(d) And Other Homelessness-Criminalizing Measures It Seems That Lawlessness Flourishes And Is Tolerated Internally In The Form Of Unauthorized Use Of FedEx Account For Personal Shipping By CCALA Office Manager Lena Mulhall, Reimbursed Only Upon Discovery, Which Hardly Counts As Contrition At All

March 20, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

So the other day I got a metric doodieton of emails from the Downtown Center BID, published them all right here on Archive.Org, and have been gradually writing about item after item. Today’s item is, from one perspective, inconsequential albeit entertaining. From another point of view, though, it illustrates the utter flamingly shameless flagrancy of the Downtown zillionaire establishment’s hypocrisy when it comes to law and order.

These parasites¹¹ expect everyone, especially the homeless population of our City, to follow the law to the very freaking letter while they themselves, it turns out, are somehow allowed to steal from their employer and only make retribution months later when their crimes are discovered and that, it seems, settles the issue. Homeless people are caught with stolen bicycles all the time. Just imagine if all they had to do at that point was tell the cop that they would return the bike to the owner and that act of contrition, even if it was only contrition after apprehension, would make everything be just fine!

Why aren’t Carol Schatz and Jessica Lall advocating for this kind of policy, since it’s evident that it’s what they use internally at the CCALA and the DCBID? Oh, right, I haven’t told you the story! Well, TL;DR is that it seems that on March 30, 2017 at 2:00 p.m. precisely, DCBID staff accountant Joan Noble emailed CCALA office manager Lena Mulhall and was all like “WTF?! What did you spend this $31.39 on??!” and Lena Mulhall was all like “Sorry! I’ll pay it back! Just tell me who to write the damn check to!!”

Naturally turn the page for transcriptions, more emails, and the full and complete story of how Lena Mulhall charged $31.39 worth of FedEx to her employer’s account to return some cosplay supplies to a retailer and didn’t reimburse the funds until more than three months later and then not until she actually got caught!
Continue reading Despite Law-And-Order Obsession Of Central City Association With Respect To E.G. LAMC §41.18(d) And Other Homelessness-Criminalizing Measures It Seems That Lawlessness Flourishes And Is Tolerated Internally In The Form Of Unauthorized Use Of FedEx Account For Personal Shipping By CCALA Office Manager Lena Mulhall, Reimbursed Only Upon Discovery, Which Hardly Counts As Contrition At All →

Downtown Center BID

Lobbyists Are Made, Not Born — How Carol Schatz, The Zillion Dollar Queen Of Downtown, Is Raising Up Her Newly Anointed Little Princess Jessica Lall In The Methods And Practices Of The Influence-Peddling Trade

March 19, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Yesterday I loosed mere anarchy on the world in the form of about 3500 emails between the Downtown Center BID and the seething stew of evil goop known to the world as the Central City Association. The release came in two parts, the unredacted and also the redacted.

Now, I know that not everyone in the world is obsessed with these BIDdies as I am, so let me just remind you all that in September 2016, Queen of Downtown and Zillion Dollar Woman Carol Schatz retired from her lofty post as supreme commanderette of the CCALA. She subsequently anointed the former big bad bossietta of the South Park BID, Jessica Lall, as Princess of Downtown and Schatz’s successorette at CCALA, effective January 3, 2017.

With this background in mind it turns out that this little gem from February 6, 2017, is not, by far, the least interesting item in the new release. In short, what happened is that on January 13, 2017, just ten days after she assumed the throne, Jessica Lall made an appointment to go to City Hall on February 9, 2017 with Carol Schatz, presumably to get shown the ropes and be introduced personally to the tame Councilpets by the master Counciltamer herself.

Of course, February 9, 2017 was a Thursday, which revealed Jessica Lall to be the inexperienced ignoramus that everyone Downtown mostly knew that she was.¹² Carol Schatz, though, as much as this faux pas might have made her wish she’d elevated anybody but Ms. Jessica Lall to the crown, gritted her teeth and decided to teach her error-prone little protégé a lesson. Fortunately for us and for history, she did this via an email.

Now, if you are, as I am, a normal human being, those last sentences may well be completely unintelligible to you. Turn the page for transcriptions of everything along with the details of why you should never go to City Hall on a Thursday and how Carol Schatz schooled the newly-minted Princess in the inscrutable folkways of those who are paid to influence!
Continue reading Lobbyists Are Made, Not Born — How Carol Schatz, The Zillion Dollar Queen Of Downtown, Is Raising Up Her Newly Anointed Little Princess Jessica Lall In The Methods And Practices Of The Influence-Peddling Trade →

Announcements, Downtown Center BID

Downtown Center BID Sunday Afternoon Document Dump! Thousands Of Pages Of Emails To/From The Central City Association! Zillionaire Secrets, Such As They Are, Laid Bare For All To See!

March 18, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

This is just a short note to announce that I recently received a ton of records from Suzanne Holley of the Downtown Center BID. These are ostensibly all non-exempt emails between the Central City Association of Los Angeles and DCBID staffers from July 1, 2016 through January 31, 2018. You can get most of them here on Archive.Org. That set includes a bunch of PDFs I exported as well as an MBOX file that will give you access to the attachments.¹³

Suzanne also saw fit to redact 134 of these emails. She supplies them as MSG files, which I guess are binaries of some sort and not easily edited, so she prints them to PDF and redacts with some kind of PDF editor.¹⁴ You can find these 134 additional emails here on Archive.Org. There are a bunch of really important items here that I’ll be writing about over the next week¹⁵ but I just want to leave you with one hilarious item about music streaming. Turn the page for a transcription.
Continue reading Downtown Center BID Sunday Afternoon Document Dump! Thousands Of Pages Of Emails To/From The Central City Association! Zillionaire Secrets, Such As They Are, Laid Bare For All To See! →

Fashion District BID

Oh Snap, You Sap! Generation Gap Crap Map App Flap As BIDdies Yap — Executroid Directrix Rena Leddy And Marketing Creak-Talk Queen Ariana Gomez (Who Dumped Snapchat Before Kylie, She’s That Freaking Smart) Explain To Dumb-As-A-Bag-Of-Kidney-Stones Laurie Sale About Kids These Days — And Rena Leddy Makes Big Brother Look Sane: Proclaims Hate Is Love, Slavery Is Freedom, War Is Peace, Streets Closed To The Public Are Public Space

March 1, 2018 kohlhaas Leave a comment

I mean, we spill an awful lot of electrons around here yammering on about the sheer fuck-witted stupidity of our white supremacist BIDdie friends, but somehow the unmitigated bag-of-kidney-stones level dumbness on display at these people’s meetings still has the power to astonish.¹⁶ Evidence for this claim? Witness, if you will, this recent meeting of the Fashion District BID‘s freaking marketing committee, kindly recorded for your viewing pleasure¹⁷ by one of our long-time correspondents, the mysterious Mr. Mike.

Most of the meeting consisted, as usual, of creak-voiced FDBID Marketrix Extraordinaire Ariana Gomez¹⁸ yammering on about web freaking analytics, affinity freaking groups, in-freaking-fluencers, social freaking media freaking blah-de-freaking-blah-blah-blah, and the usual sort of jive one might expect to be emitted by a bunch of BIDdies all hopped up on managerial jargon and an unshakably delusional sense of the depth, value, and intrinsic rightness of their own objectively bizarro world-view. There were at least a couple of non-coma-inducing episodes as well, though!

First, Fashion District Board of Directors member, part-time executive directrix in her own right, and by far the least brilliant bulb in the metaphorical Fashion District chandelier, the inimitable Ms. Laurie Sale, started a flap about some map app crap and was dealt a slap by the generation gap. Watch and listen here, and turn the page for some mockery and the usual transcription.

Second, Rena Leddy,¹⁹ who in the past has somehow managed to pass fairly successfully as a sane person, gave up on that whole pointless charade and took a great deal of time out of everyone’s lives to explain how that periodic BID-sponsored black mass known as the Urban Dinner Party celebrates a lack of public space by reserving a public street for a private party, forbidding the public from even entering it without a pricey ticket, and how this somehow turns the closed-off street into public space.²⁰ Watch and listen here, and, as above, turn the page for some mockery and the usual transcription.
Continue reading Oh Snap, You Sap! Generation Gap Crap Map App Flap As BIDdies Yap — Executroid Directrix Rena Leddy And Marketing Creak-Talk Queen Ariana Gomez (Who Dumped Snapchat Before Kylie, She’s That Freaking Smart) Explain To Dumb-As-A-Bag-Of-Kidney-Stones Laurie Sale About Kids These Days — And Rena Leddy Makes Big Brother Look Sane: Proclaims Hate Is Love, Slavery Is Freedom, War Is Peace, Streets Closed To The Public Are Public Space →

Business Improvement Districts

Ahahahaha And LOL!!! Ellen Riotto Of The South Park BID Is Now Taking Sensitive Legal Advice From Internet Randoms At This Blog!!!

February 21, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

The Brown Act contains many wonderful treasures, but one of the wonderfullest is to be found at §54954.1, which states unambiguously that:

Any person may request that a copy of the agenda, or a copy of all the documents constituting the agenda packet, of any meeting of a legislative body be mailed to that person. … Upon receipt of the written request, the legislative body or its designee shall cause the requested materials to be mailed at the time the agenda is posted pursuant to Section 54954.2 and 54956 or upon distribution to all, or a majority of all, of the members of a legislative body, whichever occurs first.

I ask many of my BID friends to send me these notifications and their agenda packets. It really seems to piss most of them off.²¹ I don’t feel bad for asking BIDs to comply with the law, though. After all, it’s voluntary on their part and they’re making an awful damn lot of money out of it.

So anyway, our friends at the South Park BID are reasonably cooperative about complying with the law. They invited me to sign up for their public mailing list, which I did. It’s an open question as to whether this is compliance, since the law requires notifications to be sent at the time that the board receives them, but this presently seems too minor to quibble over. On the other hand they spout an awful lot of spam through that account, and clearly I shouldn’t be required to sort through the junk just to be able to receive notifications that they’re legally mandated to send. Again, though, this is an argument for another day.

However, it turns out that the South Park BID does distribute packets to its board of directors in advance of the meetings and also that those are not available via the public mailing list. I only found out about this recently, so I wrote to the BID boss ladies and asked them to send them goodies my way!

After some nonsense with them interrogating me mercilessly about which email address I wanted the board packets sent to,²² we got all the details ironed out. And after that, my friends, it must follow, as the night the day, that I ended up sending Ellen Riotto some of my sage legal advice and, amazingly, she ended up taking it!²³ Read on for the details and a bunch of emails!
Continue reading Ahahahaha And LOL!!! Ellen Riotto Of The South Park BID Is Now Taking Sensitive Legal Advice From Internet Randoms At This Blog!!! →