Tag Archives: Downtown News

Press Relations Master Class With Flying Copy-Pasta Monster Carol Schatz And Her Pet Editor-Slash-Fluffer Jon Regardie As Well As About A Thousand Mostly Useless Emails From Her Weirdo Fiefdom, The Downtown Center BID, With Special Bonus Showing Self-Proclaimed Downtown News Senior Reporter And World’s Most Journalistic Attack-Labradoodle Eddie Kim Pleading For Access!

December 16, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

First the substance. I just uploaded about a thousand emails between the Downtown Center BID and either Kindel Gagan or the Downtown News. There are a few other kinds of items in there as well. This material came to me as MSG files and I converted it into an MBOX and also exported the emails individually as PDFs. If you have trouble getting the attachments out of the MBOX file drop me a line and I’ll get you started. Now on to the mockery!!

First of all, take a look at this item from February 2017: Nicole Kuklok-Waldman and Kate Hennigan Join Kindel Gagan. A run-of-the-mill announcement that two more urbanist-capitalist-developerist plague-carrying zombies have sold what passes for their souls by becoming partners at Kindel Gagan, a lobbying firm that’s so deeply fucked up that I can’t even think of nasty names to call it because none of them are even close to nasty enough:

Kindel Gagan is pleased to announce that prominent land use attorney Nicole Kuklok-Waldman and City Hall and public affairs veteran Kate Hennigan have joined the firm. Nicole and Kate bring a combined 20 years of successful land use and public affairs consulting experience, greatly expanding the firm’s capacity to serve our clients.

Really makes you want to read on, does it not?! Turn the page for Carol Schatz’s deeply professional response to this nonsense, as well as some foofraw about Jessica Lall’s takeover of the Central City Association and also some trivial bullshit from putatively journalistic attack puppy Eddie Kim.
Continue reading Press Relations Master Class With Flying Copy-Pasta Monster Carol Schatz And Her Pet Editor-Slash-Fluffer Jon Regardie As Well As About A Thousand Mostly Useless Emails From Her Weirdo Fiefdom, The Downtown Center BID, With Special Bonus Showing Self-Proclaimed Downtown News Senior Reporter And World’s Most Journalistic Attack-Labradoodle Eddie Kim Pleading For Access! →

Central City East Association, Skid Row Neighborhood Council

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?

November 1, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

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? →

Business Improvement Districts, Skid Row Neighborhood Council

On November 21, 2016 Blair Besten Told The City Of Los Angeles That Her Zillionaire Developer Bosses Were Ready To Gentrify And Build Out Skid Row And Listed The Kinds Of Zillion Dollar Handouts, Tax Breaks, And Zoning Giveaways They Wanted. Seven Weeks Later She Was Lobbying José Huizar In Opposition To Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation. This Is Not A Coincidence

May 29, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

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

Scott Gray of major Skid Row property owner Capital Foresight, likely behind-the-curtain string-puller for the covert anti-SRNC lobbying campaign, was famously quoted in the Downtown News in March 2017 with respect to the Skid Row Neighborhood Council formation effort to the effect that:

…the pending proposal to divide Downtown Los Angeles into separate geographic districts will have significant fiscal and far-reaching economic impact on the entire city

Anyone who attends to the shady world of Los Angeles real estate development can easily imagine in the abstract the kinds of things Scott Gray means, but there has hitherto been very little specific information about what he was talking about.

It turns out that in November 2016 Blair Besten’s megadeveloper bosses at the Historic Core BID had their heavy artillery aimed at Skid Row and had begun soliciting the usual array of sleazy under-table giveaways, such as tax abatements, relaxed zoning, and so on. It’s no surprise at all, then, that when the Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation Committee’s proposal was approved by the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment in January 2017 they flipped out to the astonishing degree that they did. As always, documentation and highly detailed description after the break.
Continue reading On November 21, 2016 Blair Besten Told The City Of Los Angeles That Her Zillionaire Developer Bosses Were Ready To Gentrify And Build Out Skid Row And Listed The Kinds Of Zillion Dollar Handouts, Tax Breaks, And Zoning Giveaways They Wanted. Seven Weeks Later She Was Lobbying José Huizar In Opposition To Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation. This Is Not A Coincidence →

Business Improvement Districts, Hypocrisy, Skid Row Neighborhood Council

Historic Core BID Executive Directrix Blair Besten Seems OK With The Crimes Of Her Employers, E.g. HCBID Board Members Ruben “The Homicidal Slumlord” Islas And Michael “Asshole Buddy With Ultra-Corrupt Tax Assessor John Noguez” Delijani, Even While Claiming That “The increase in crime lowers the morale of the neighborhood”

May 21, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

The fact that, as I reported on Friday, Blair Besten, batty little fusspot queen of the Historic Core BID, along with her ne’er-do-well companions in corruption, Estela Lopez and Michael Delijani, were meeting as early as January 2017 with CD14 Councilswordsman José Huizar to oppose the Skid Row Neighborhood Council more or less overshadowed the parallel discovery that, at roughly the same time, Ms. Blair Besten was also setting up a meeting between Mr. José and Ruben Islas, one of her bosses from the HCBID Board of Directors.¹

Now, Ruben “the homicidal slumlord” Islas is famous not just for whatever it is he does to be a zillionaire, but also for the fact that he and a bunch of his co-conspirators were arrested and charged with manslaughter and a host of other crimes in 2010 related to the fact that the slums they were then lording over were in such bad shape that three people died as a result. This incident followed the now-seen-to-be-cruelly-ironic series of criminal counts filed against Islas‘s firm for roughly similar misconduct by then-City-Attorney Rockard Delgadillo, lately working under the table as an anti-human lobbyist for a shadowy Downtown law firm.

And similarly, the other one of Ms. Blair Besten’s bosses whose name has come up a lot recently, that is to say furtive hereditary imperialist downtown zillionaire Michael Delijani, has also availed himself of Blair Besten’s probably-illegally-exercised² skills at relationship building with CD14 repster³ José Huizar. Just see here for six pages of blathering between Blair Besten and various CD14 staffers about a meeting she’s trying to arrange between the CM and the Delijani.

Michael Delijani has also been involved in some exceedingly shady-if-as-yet-unindicted activities in relation to the deep corruption in the office of the LA County Assessor as personified by former assessor, now jailbird, John Noguez. The details are too involved to discuss here, but essentially Noguez reduced zillionaires’ property tax bills in exchange for campaign contributions, and a bunch of the deals were made at fundraising events for Noguez at Michael Delijani’s house. Delijani himself gave Noguez more than $20,000, and you can draw your own conclusions from that.

As far as I can see, Michael Delijani has never been convicted of a crime related to the bribery of Noguez. And it’s true that Ruben Islas’s manslaughter charges were dropped, and also, as part of a deal in which the corporation itself pleaded guilty, Delgadillo’s criminal charges were also dropped against the firm’s principals, including Ruben “the Alexandria Hotel assassin” Islas. So in some technical sense, these guys are not criminals. But in some strong but nontechnical sense they certainly are criminals, and Blair Besten is certainly a hypocrite when it comes to these zillionaire bad BID boys.
Continue reading Historic Core BID Executive Directrix Blair Besten Seems OK With The Crimes Of Her Employers, E.g. HCBID Board Members Ruben “The Homicidal Slumlord” Islas And Michael “Asshole Buddy With Ultra-Corrupt Tax Assessor John Noguez” Delijani, Even While Claiming That “The increase in crime lowers the morale of the neighborhood” →

Los Angeles City Government

Miranda Paster, Subverter Of Arts District BID Alternatives: Some Of What $3000 Bought The BIDs of Los Angeles Over The Years And How She Got Temporarily “Bumped” Due To Allegations Of Conflict Of Interest

September 8, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

I can't find any usable pictures of Miranda Paster, so here's another picture of Holly Wolcott! — I can’t find any usable pictures of Miranda Paster, so here’s another picture of Holly Wolcott!

Miranda Paster is the director of the LA City Clerk’s Neighborhood and Business Improvement Division (NABID), which administers the City’s BID program. Her job description (updated in February 2014) includes among her duties presenting at the conferences of the International Downtown Association:¹ …deliver formal presentations, including analyses and recommendations, to the City Council and its Committees and International Downtown Association Conferences…

The story begins in 2011,² when BIDs gave Miranda Paster $3000 to attend the IDA’s 2011 annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. Take a look at this collection of emails and records of payments from 2011. These show that less than two weeks before the conference started, Paster was scrambling to get the money together to attend, but that she already had a commitment from the BIDs to pay $3000 (a log of the actual payments is included there). It seems that in 2011, Paster’s attendance at this conference was a new thing for her, as the financing was arranged in such a hurry. I’m guessing that at this point presenting at this conference was not yet part of Paster’s official duties. It’s a rare bureaucracy indeed which will not pay its employees’ expenses to carry out their duties. So the BIDs paid, buying at least a sense of obligation.

Unfortunately, IDA records of the 2011 conference don’t seem to show what Paster did there, but by the 2012 conference, held in Minneapolis, she was a panelist. This is interesting in itself. The panel, moderated by Rena Leddy, now of the Fashion District BID but then of Progressive Urban Management Associates, or PUMA,³ was entitled How Cities Encourage BIDs: Trends and Challenges.⁴ Here is a copy of a Power Point summary of the session, which is astonishing in its own right.⁵

Now, you may not be familiar with the story of the destruction and resurrection of the Arts District BID. It began in 2011 when Yuval Bar-Zemer of Linear City development initiated a campaign against the BID based on the theory that BID assessments used for marketing campaigns didn’t benefit assessed property owners in any way allowed under state law.⁶ A court case ensued, and in May 2013 Superior Court judge Robert O’Brien ordered the BID to dissolve.
Continue reading Miranda Paster, Subverter Of Arts District BID Alternatives: Some Of What $3000 Bought The BIDs of Los Angeles Over The Years And How She Got Temporarily “Bumped” Due To Allegations Of Conflict Of Interest →