Tag Archives: Emails

Business Improvement Districts, Los Angeles City Government

You Know Those Proclamations From The City Of Los Angeles That Hyperconnected Zillionaires Like Laurie Goldman All Hang On Their Office Walls? — Well, Here’s How You Get One! — Have Your Minions Ask The Mayor’s Staff — Be Sure To Call Him MEG Cause That’s What The In-Crowd Calls Him! — And Two Days Later Go Pick Up The Proclamation! — Did I Mention Your Minions Have To Write The Damn Thing? — Don’t Have Any Minions? — No Proclamation For You!!

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The proclamations! You’ve probably seen them hanging on the walls of people’s offices, they’re in famous restaurants, like e.g. Musso and Frank has one, The Pantry has one, and so on. Here’s a nice picture of one. Well, here I am, hanging around this City more or less continuously since 1963 and I never knew, never even wondered, where or they came from or why.1 Amazingly, though, in a set of records recently handed over by the Media District BID,2 all was revealed!

Here’s the process, at least as it pertains to the office of the Mayor. First, have your minion email Yolanda Flores at y.flores@lacity.org. She’s actually his staffie in charge of proclamations! Don’t forget to refer to her boss as MEG, which is evidently what the cool kids call him! After she gives you the nod, have your minion write the damn proclamation! That’s it, you can pick it up next Thursday!

Does it seem too simple? Don’t believe it’s that easy? Can’t credit that actual3 grownups call the guy MEG with a straight face? Want to read the genuine one-and-only proclamation that unreconstructed criminal Lisa Schechter of the Media District BID wrote for former president Laurie Goldman that was subsequently issued by MEG? See the emails by means of which the whole mishegoss was arranged? Well, what are you waiting for?! Turn the damn page!!
Continue reading You Know Those Proclamations From The City Of Los Angeles That Hyperconnected Zillionaires Like Laurie Goldman All Hang On Their Office Walls? — Well, Here’s How You Get One! — Have Your Minions Ask The Mayor’s Staff — Be Sure To Call Him MEG Cause That’s What The In-Crowd Calls Him! — And Two Days Later Go Pick Up The Proclamation! — Did I Mention Your Minions Have To Write The Damn Thing? — Don’t Have Any Minions? — No Proclamation For You!! →

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Los Angeles City Government, Venice Beach BID

Last Friday, May 18, Devine And Heumann Got Called On The Carpet At City Hall To Get Yelled At By Wolcott, Hoppes, Moreno, Bazley, And Possibly Molnar! — We Have A Copy Of The Refund Affadavit Letter Being Sent To VBBID Property Owners! — As Of This Wednesday, May 23, Tara Devine Still Hadn’t Submitted The Freaking Annual Planning Report — Moreno Coming At Her All Salty! — And Rightly So!

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A bunch of new documents for you this morning, friends! You can look through the whole pile of them here on Archive.Org, and read on for some selected gems!

First of all, recall that the Venice Beach BID is being required by the City to refund most of the money collected from property owners in 2017 because they were too damn arrogant and/or incompetent to actually do anything other than pay themselves salaries with the almost two million dollars the City handed over to them.1

You can read this copy of the letter to property owners along with instructions for filling out the necessary affadavit. This was scheduled to be sent out on May 11. What’s more interesting, though, is this email exchange from May 8 between Tara Devine and Rita Moreno about when this letter was to be sent. First Rita Moreno emailed Tara Devine at 3:20 p.m. and said:

Hi Tara,

For your information, attached is the notice and instructions that will be mailed out on Friday. Also included will be the actual Affidavit and the return envelope.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Rita

A mere seven minutes later2 the shadowy one fired off this intemperate reply:

Thank you. To clarify, we want to sit down before anything is mailed . It is important that we understand the entire process.

I’m working now to schedule something as early as possible next week. (Monday is launch, so it can’t be Monday.)

Amazingly, Tara Devine does not seem to understand that she’s not in charge of this situation. She and her BIDdies out in Venice have messed up far, far beyond what’s acceptable to the City, and it takes an awful lot to get to that point. She does not have the leverage to set terms. Which is essentially what Rita Moreno said to her in reply.

Turn the page to read that reply as well as the story of Tara Devine and Steve Heumann’s May 18 meeting at City Hall with a bunch of angry City officials and the story of how as of this Wednesday, May 23, Tara Devine still hasn’t gotten that damn annual planning report in!
Continue reading Last Friday, May 18, Devine And Heumann Got Called On The Carpet At City Hall To Get Yelled At By Wolcott, Hoppes, Moreno, Bazley, And Possibly Molnar! — We Have A Copy Of The Refund Affadavit Letter Being Sent To VBBID Property Owners! — As Of This Wednesday, May 23, Tara Devine Still Hadn’t Submitted The Freaking Annual Planning Report — Moreno Coming At Her All Salty! — And Rightly So! →

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Business Improvement Districts

Emails Between Studio City BID Director John Walker And Disgraced BID Consultant Slash Civil Engineer Ed Henning Shed Some Newish Light On The BID Renewal Process — E.G. Lawsuits Against BIDs Have Greatly Complicated Matters But Ed Henning Is “In constant touch with the attorneys defending the City BIDs” — The Agreement Between Henning And The BID Sheds A Lot Of Light On The Still-Unresolved Question Of Whether BID Consultancy Is Lobbying

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As I mentioned the other day, I recently received a huge set of emails from the Studio City BID.1 This is an interesting time to be looking at their correspondence, because the SCBID is set to renew in January 2020, so the process is just now getting started. And although I haven’t had time yet to prep the whole multiGB release for publication, I did get this set of emails between John Walker and Ed Henning ready, along with all the attachments.

Ed Henning, you may recall, is a civil engineer and popular BID consultant. He recently handled the San Pedro BID‘s renewal. He did the engineering report for the South Los Angeles Industrial Tract BID in 2015, the South Park BID in 2017, and, most famously, for the Venice Beach BID establishment in 2016. His work on that last project was so shoddy that it led to a Venice resident filing a complaint against Ed Henning with the California Board for Professional Engineers.2

And, as it turns out, he is also handling the entire renewal for the SCBID, at an estimated total cost of no more than $18,900.3 And although John Walker’s email conversation with Ed Henning was only tangentially responsive to my CPRA request,4 I got a really good set of records.

The emails contain discussions of Ed Henning’s fees, of the various tasks to be completed in the renewal process, of the wisdom of the SCBID’s adding more territory to their BID, of how various lawsuits against BIDs in Los Angeles have complicated the renewal process and of how Ed Henning is being coached by the defense attorneys in those cases on how to modify his Management District Plans and Engineer’s Reports to withstand challenges, and so on.

This is invaluable information for students of the BID consulting process. Turn the page for links, transcriptions, and discussion!
Continue reading Emails Between Studio City BID Director John Walker And Disgraced BID Consultant Slash Civil Engineer Ed Henning Shed Some Newish Light On The BID Renewal Process — E.G. Lawsuits Against BIDs Have Greatly Complicated Matters But Ed Henning Is “In constant touch with the attorneys defending the City BIDs” — The Agreement Between Henning And The BID Sheds A Lot Of Light On The Still-Unresolved Question Of Whether BID Consultancy Is Lobbying →

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Business Improvement Districts

Highland Park BID Accused Of Promoting Gentrification By Among Other Things Asking The City To Enforce Anti-Mural Laws And Selectively Promoting White-Serving Businesses — Board Of Directors Spy On Activists’ Facebook Comments — All Of Which Sheds Some Light On The Exceedly Underappreciated Facts That (A) Property-Based BIDs Do Not In Any Way Represent Businesses — They Represent Property Owners And Only Property Owners and (B) The City Is More Complicit In Gentrification Than Anyone Will Admit

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One purpose of this post is to announce the availability of a bunch of emails from the Highland Park BID from 2017 and early 2018. The Highland Park BID is a new client1 of mine, and thus far they, in the person of their executive director Misty Iwatsu, have been exceedingly cooperative, for which I thank them very much.

There’s a lot of interesting material in there,2 and I’ll be writing about at least a few more items over the coming weeks, but most interesting of all, I think, is some material from November 2017 about antigentrification activists in Highland Park and their understanding of the BID’s role in social cleansing for the sake of financial gain.3

This story provides an excellent example of what pernicious gentrification looks like in Los Angeles, how it is covertly but significantly supported by the City government, and how property-based BIDs do not care a whit about the interests of business owners per se. They only care about the interests of the owners of commercial property who, in this City at least, are predominately white. Turn the page for all the details!
Continue reading Highland Park BID Accused Of Promoting Gentrification By Among Other Things Asking The City To Enforce Anti-Mural Laws And Selectively Promoting White-Serving Businesses — Board Of Directors Spy On Activists’ Facebook Comments — All Of Which Sheds Some Light On The Exceedly Underappreciated Facts That (A) Property-Based BIDs Do Not In Any Way Represent Businesses — They Represent Property Owners And Only Property Owners and (B) The City Is More Complicit In Gentrification Than Anyone Will Admit →

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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!

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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.1 Those emails are available here on Archive.Org. On the other hand, Ms. Suzanne Holley, who is Chief Operating Officer of the BID,2 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,3 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! →

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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

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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.1 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 →

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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!

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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.1

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.2 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 week3 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! →

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Business Improvement Districts, Miscellaneous, Public Records Act Pragmatics

Self-Proclaimed Hollywood Super Lawyer Jeffrey Charles Briggs Adorns His Professional Emails With Quotes From This Blog!! Tacit Endorsement Of Us? Irresistible Freudian Urge To Reveal His Hidden Forbidden Feelings? Stockholm Syndrome? All Of The Above?? Enquiring Minds Wanna Know!!

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So as you’re probably aware, the staff of this blog is involved in any number of interminable legal battles with various BIDs across the City of Los Angeles for the sole reason that, being zillionaires and therefore suckled on white privilege and Satan’s wine, they cannot, for the damn life of them, just follow the freaking law. And some astonishingly large percentage of this City’s BIDdies are represented in their CPRAfactions by self-proclaimed Hollywood Superlawyer Jeffrey Charles Briggs.1

Therefore it is not unusual for me to sit down in front of the computer to spend a pleasant hour or so arguing with BIDdies about how they better start handing over the damn goods or else …2 and to spend like 80% of that time swapping electrons with the notorious JCB himself. And I have to say, it’s pretty fulfilling, cause the guy has a hair-trigger temper and I get three points3 every time he loses it.4

So anyway, right now we’re into it about the issue of whether two different versions of an email, with different metadata but the same body content, are distinct records or not. He says no, they’re the same. I say yes, they’re different.5 And he’s maintaining his untenable position for two distinct clients. First, the East Hollywood BID and second, the Hollywood Media District BID. And, my friend, turn the page for more snide remarks, evidence that Mr. JCB reads this blog and quotes it, and, de natch, transcriptions galore!
Continue reading Self-Proclaimed Hollywood Super Lawyer Jeffrey Charles Briggs Adorns His Professional Emails With Quotes From This Blog!! Tacit Endorsement Of Us? Irresistible Freudian Urge To Reveal His Hidden Forbidden Feelings? Stockholm Syndrome? All Of The Above?? Enquiring Minds Wanna Know!! →

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Business Improvement Districts, Public Records Act Pragmatics

More Eye-Poppingly Implausible Deliberative Process Exemption Claims By Attorney Briggs, BID-Addled Self-Proclaimed 36th Level Shaolin Black Belt CPRA-Fu Master — Not!

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Recently, first on February 8, 2018 and then again on February 17, 2018, I’ve published some sets of emails for which self-proclaimed Hollywood Superlawyer Jeffrey Charles Briggs had at some point in the past claimed were exempt from production via the California Public Records Act due to the half-delusional common law principle known to the zillionaire elite and their minions as the Deliberative Process Exemption.

Both of those sets of documents were collateral fallout from an almost-concluded writ petition I was forced by Briggs’s bizarro intransigence to file against his client, the Hollywood Media District. Today, though, I have yet another set, this batch from the East Hollywood BID. They are also a client of Briggs, moved not only to bizarro intransigence but to a freaking intransigential paradigm shift by Briggs’s newly emboldened stance against simple compliance with the law.1

There are two quite distinct parts to this story. First, there are the actual emails that Briggs Esq. claimed to be exempt. Along with those goes much more than a modicum of mockery. Second, there’s the story of the CPRA request itself and how Attorney Briggs cannot for the freaking life of him just tell his client to follow the damn law because it’s easier for everyone in the long run. Turn the page for an obsessively detailed discussion of the first part.2 Continue reading More Eye-Poppingly Implausible Deliberative Process Exemption Claims By Attorney Briggs, BID-Addled Self-Proclaimed 36th Level Shaolin Black Belt CPRA-Fu Master — Not! →

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Business Improvement Districts, Public Records Act Pragmatics

More Hollywood Media District CPRA Exemption Claims Exposed By Court Order As Unmitigated Mendacity — E.G. Laurie Goldman’s City Hall Gossip-Mongering Chittery-Chat To Fellow Board Members Ferris Wehbe And David Freaking Bass About Michael Weinstein, Eric Garcetti, And Little Mitchie O’Farrell Could Not Be Considered Part Of A Deliberative Process Anywhere Outside Of The Feverishly Dizzying Intellect Of Self-Proclaimed Hollywood Superlawyer Jeffrey Charles Briggs

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A couple weeks ago I wrote about an email that self-proclaimed Hollywood superlawyer Jeffrey Charles Briggs had released to me in response to a CPRA request but later claimed that it was exempt from release as a result of his having solemnly intoned the words “deliberative process” three times while standing on his hands naked at a crossroads at midnight on the Summer Solstice, which is about the level to which the CPRA has descended in this fair City in these latter days.

I mentioned at that point that he and his infernal client, the Hollywood Media District Property Owners Association, had been ordered by the Hon. Mary Strobel to hand over a whole passel of other emails which they’d claimed were exempt for various reasons.1 So finally I received these emails from le super-avocat de Hollywood lui-même, and now you can read them too!

For extra behind-the-scenes CPRA thrills, compare them to Jeffrey Charles Briggs’s summaries and aggressively hallucinated exemption claims in the declaration and log he filed with the court. And turn the page for a detailed analysis in a couple of cases of just how deeply, arrogantly nonsensical these exemption claims are revealed to be once we can compare them with the actual emails.
Continue reading More Hollywood Media District CPRA Exemption Claims Exposed By Court Order As Unmitigated Mendacity — E.G. Laurie Goldman’s City Hall Gossip-Mongering Chittery-Chat To Fellow Board Members Ferris Wehbe And David Freaking Bass About Michael Weinstein, Eric Garcetti, And Little Mitchie O’Farrell Could Not Be Considered Part Of A Deliberative Process Anywhere Outside Of The Feverishly Dizzying Intellect Of Self-Proclaimed Hollywood Superlawyer Jeffrey Charles Briggs →

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