Hollywood Property Owners Alliance staff members implementing their new document retention policy. What have you got to hide, friends?!Longtime readers of this blog will recall that one of my very first successful CPRA requests of the HPOA yielded a bunch of emails between AI and the HPOA from October 1, 2014 through November 12, 2014. In fact there were 69 of them during this 43 day period, or more than 1.5 per day. There’s no reason that this period wouldn’t be representative, so we might expect over 500 emails total for 2014. However, I didn’t get around to asking for the rest of the 2014 emails until November of last year and didn’t receive them until January of this year. They are available here, all (only) 90 pages of them. Incredibly, HPOA supplied more distinct emails from October 1, 2014 through November 12, 2014 than they did for all the rest of 2014 when asked a year later. Statistically, therefore, it’s almost certain that they deleted a bunch of stuff. They handed over significantly more emails from 2015, almost 9 MB of them. In all cases there’s demonstrably material missing, e.g. only a small fraction of the weekly reports from AI are present. It wasn’t clear at all what was going on, although I certainly had my suspicions, until a few things happened: Continue reading Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Formalizes Ongoing Document Destruction Policy Involving Thousands Upon Thousands of Public Records, Seemingly just to Thwart Our Investigations→
Downtown Russell Brown stumping for Jose Huizar.Our fateful faithful correspondent recently completed a magnanimously opalesque tour de farce of historicalisticism concerning a wildly successful 2010 plot by a bunch of bitchy BIDsies along with then-councildude Eric Garcetti, le petit ami chéri de toutes les dames mignonnes des BIDs, to ruthlessly destroy a perfectly reasonable proposal from the City Ethics Commission to make it easier to figure out who’s supposed to register as a lobbyist. Well, as part of his research he ended up transcribing not just the nonsense spewed by best-BIDdie-buddies Garcetti and Morrison, but a bunch of other tangential nonsense as well. Some of it’s fascinating in its own right, and we’re planning to write about it from time to time, starting this evening with a pluperfect portion of paranoia from Downtown L.A.’s own pallidly prophetic Russ Brown himself!
Historically-minded observers of the Downtown Los Angeles politico-sociologico-ethnomethodologico-cultural scene will remember Mr. Brown as the erstwhile boss-boy of the Historic Downtown BID, ignominiously forced out of his BIDship by the Board for reasons that surely aren’t being stated, and then ignominiously reinstalled two weeks later when Jose Huizar pitched a fit for reasons that surely also aren’t being stated and then… well, you get the idea. These days he’s doing something with neighborhood councils and remains the subject of artful advocacy blog Step Down Russ Brown which, though currently dormant, may any day rise, like Lazarus, from its pallet to scourge yet again the corridors and crannies of Downtown zillionaire-dom. Enough of that, though. Turn the page for the quotes! Continue reading The Paranoid Prophecies of Downtown Russell Brown, July 2010 Edition→
Carol Schatz in January 2008 at Bringing Back Broadway.I have a number of interesting documents to announce this morning. There are emails to and from Eric Garcetti’s office in 2015:
Assistant Chief Jorge Villegas, LAPD: “As you know [homelessness] is an extremely complex issue to address. It is not as simple as simply making an arrest. As you know, we cannot arrest [our] way out of this complex social issue.”Today I uploaded documents from the DCBID, the Fashion District, and some emails from Raquel Beard to the Mayor’s office. The DCBID’s Operations Committee agendas are here, and according to Suzanne Holley this is all of them for which there are electronic copies. They don’t meet very often, it seems. Next up we have 2015 minutes and agendas for the Fashion District BID Board of Directors. There’s some interesting stuff here, although I haven’t had time to read them carefully. For instance, on February 26, 2015, the Board heard about the Central City Association’s plot to hire Rodriguez Strategies to fight the legalization of street vending in LA. The new information here is that Carol Schatz evidently pegged the cost at $60,000 and Kent Smith of the FDBID asked and received from the Board approval to donate $10,000. I think that, given how the original initiative expanded, including the hiring of subordinate publicists, that original estimate must have ended up to be quite low. In March Kent asked for and received from the board $5,000 to oppose Carol Liu’s Right to Rest Act. I really do wonder if this kind of political activism is a legal use of BID money, since it’s supposed to be used to provide services in the district above and beyond what the City provides. How, I wonder, is taking positions on state laws consistent with this charge? A question for another day, I guess. And finally, after the break, we have some emails from Raquel Beard of the CCEA to Eric Garcetti’s office. Continue reading New Documents, Mostly Routine, although Assistant LAPD Chief Jorge Villegas Explicitly Acknowledges Limitations of Arrests as a Tool for Addressing Homelessness→
Alisa Orduna at the Sunset-Vine BID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015. Is anyone, anyone at all, listening to what’s coming out of this woman’s mouth?Yesterday we presented part 1 of our coverage of Garcetti aide Alisa Orduna’s visit to the Sunset-Vine BID meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, in which, among other nonsense, she announced that part of what the state of emergency means to the BIDs is that Garcetti is going to spend a million bucks on iPads for the BID Patrol. Today we bring you part two, in which she proposes to empower the BID Patrol (as well as the currently-being-sued-in-freaking-federal-court-for-how-they-deal-with-the-homeless Central City East no less) to deal with homelessness since they’re front-line responders, according to her. As if, with their guns, their shackles, their COINTELPRO-style surveillance of their critics, their freaking blessing by the LAPD, their locking up of every harmless heladero that falls into their clutches, their arrests of over 1000 homeless people per year, they weren’t freaking empowered enough. What’s next? Nuclear weapons? DEATH RAYS? Anyway, you can watch the whole thing here (try Chrome if Firefox acts wonky) and, as always, there’s a transcription after the break. Here’s what Alisa said:
… but what’s the role for BIDs? I mean, so many of our BID officers are front line on the street. I met with Central City East BID, this BID, there was another BID, um, I forgot, but, you know, there was another BID that we’ve just been talking to, and the spike in violence, spike in substance abuse, the spike in, um, families, so it’s people with children that are out on the street in these encampments and often are abandoned, sometimes if their parents are active substance abusers, just the spike in the number of people, the spike in, the sense of permanency, I would say, with encampments, when before they’ve been, you know, none of this is [unintelligible], but someone may have been in a sleeping bag at the bus stop, but now, those coming in [unintelligible], they’re out in San Pedro, there was like a block-long encampment, that was pretty sturdy, you wouldn’t just be able to go in and take it down, you know, at some point, there was carpentry skills keeping it up, so it’s, it’s, how do we, how do we, adjust this, and what are, what do you guys see, and what’s, how can we empower BIDs so that, that information that they’re seeing and that experience that they’re having is fed back into us as policy-makers and we can together come [unintelligible] a solution. Continue reading Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 2, in which she Proposes to “Empower” BIDs (Including the Freaking CCEA?!?!) to Deal with Homelessness and, No Joke, to Pay Homeless People’s Parents to Let them Move Back In→
Alisa Orduna free-associating unintelligibly on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, at the Sunset-Vine BID Board meeting.Well, our faithful correspondent hasn’t had time to attend a BID meeting in a while, but he made it to the SVBID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, over at the Hollywood YMCA (right across the street from the famed Selma Park). And what a witches brew of craziness he witnessed over there! They had brand-new Eric Garcetti aide Alisa Orduna there to talk to them about the mayor’s declaration of a state of emergency about homelessness. And can she ever talk. Does she make sense? Some of the time.1 But, as Sigmund Freud taught the world, even in incomprehensible free-associationalism, truth can be found by those who take the time to look. And it does take time. We were planning to cover Alisa’s entire 40-ish minute thing in one post, but after spending two days transcribing just the first 12 minutes, we found that our sanity requires us to lay it on you in increments. You can watch here and, as always, there’s a transcription of the whole thing after the break for context (for some reason these links to YouTube into the middle of videos don’t seem to work well in Firefox. If you get an error, try Chrome).
Thus spake Alisa Orduna: So with all of that said, on September 22nd, Mayor Garcetti along with City Council made an announcement declaring an emergency. And there was a commitment of a hundred million dollars in resources to finally address homelessness. And, looking at it since that time, what does that really mean?
And later she said: So the hundred million was an announcement, and that was just a commitment, so that was just kinda throwing a benchmark out there and saying how are we gonna rise to the occasion?
And then Fabio Conti proclaimed: Did anybody think, oh a hundred million! That’s [unintelligible]. There’s no hundred million.
And she replied: It’s kind of [unintelligible] is standing by that commitment, so everyone is looking for it.
No one had the hundred million, but don’t worry, it shows we take it seriously and also don’t worry, we’re all out looking for the money! So we guess this was known, kind of. We guess there’s not really a revelation here. The New York Times quoted Herb Wesson at the time of the declaration as saying “The $100 million figure was chosen in part for its symbolism, said Herb J. Wesson Jr., the City Council president, to show county, state and federal officials that the city was willing to make a significant contribution to an urgent problem.” Now we find out from Alisa that actually it was chosen not just in part for its symbolism, but it was entirely symbolic. We wondering if she’s talking out of school, being new and maybe not entirely broken to the plow. Time will tell, we suppose. Read on for the rest of the news. And iPads! When will the city learn that iPads are not only going to solve problems, they’re likely to lead to FBI raids on public buildings and speculation about indictments? Continue reading Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 1, in which she Admits that Announced $100,000,000 for Homelessness Isn’t Real Money, State of Emergency Declaration will Ease Real-Estate Development for Zillionaires, Fund iPads for the BID Patrol→
The HPOA just after destroying Selma Park in order to save it.If you’ve been following the Selma Park story you’ll recall that, even as we’ve discovered that the park was illegally made off-limits to all but adults with children, even as we’ve uncovered a stinking, sordid history of both roustings-out and illegal arrests, it hasn’t been exactly clear who was actually, explicitly responsible for this ugly situation. Well, amongst the documents laid on you the other day by our faithful correspondent we found the actual smoking gun in an email written on January 22, 2008, by Kerry Morrison to Heather Repenning and Helen Leung, then-council-president and CD13 representative Eric Garcetti’s District Director of Community Development and Hollywood Field Deputy respectively. Exceedingly crazy-looking Heather Repenning in 2003, when she worked for Eric Garcetti as a “Community Organizer” which, on first hearing, sounds like some kind of lovely, angelic, St. Saul Alinsky kinda job, but a mere five years later she was conspiring with Kerry Morrison to steal away our freaking park! Times change and people change with them
Heather — wanted to see if you had an idea as to how we might be able to communicate with the families located around Selma Park…As you may know, with the help Helen [sic] and the rest of your team at CD-13, we’ve been able to designate the entire park as a children’s play area.
So that settles that. HPOA and Eric Garcetti’s staff illegally excluded everyone without kids from Selma Park at some time before January 22, 2008.
Mitch O’Farrell, cleverly photographed so as to render HPOA’s marionette control strings invisible.We reported recently on media coverage of CD13 Councildude Mitch O’Farrell’s recently inaugurated hysterical campaign against nightclubs in Hollywood which, if you read the coverage prior to today, seemed to come out of nowhere. Of course, as we said, it almost surely came from the HPOA, seeing as they are not only exceedingly prone to racist anti-nightclub hysteria but additionally are in no way above complex multi-agent conspiracies with Leron Gubler of the Hollywood chamber and Peter Zarcone of the LAPD.
Well, today the Times ran yet another gap-filled, info-deficient story on the subject. At least this one said one relevant thing:
The new attention from O’Farrell is not the result of an increase in complaints. In fact, Zarcone said complaints against clubs remain flat.
So that’s what O’Farrell’s attention is NOT a result of. Could the Times be bothered to find out what it IS a result of? No, they could not. What does O’Farrell have to say about this? Something stupid:
“Hollywood must be a neighborhood that is safe, clean and hospitable to its residents,” O’Farrell said.
One of three mysterious signs at Selma Park which appear to restrict the park’s use to children and caregivers only, even though the LA Recreation and Parks Department has stated explicitly that Selma Park is open to the general public except for the playground.The Andrews International BID Patrol has been arresting people without children and ordering people without children out of Selma Park in Hollywood at least since 2008, as shown by their very own reports to the Joint Security Committee. They justify these actions by claiming that Selma Park is “for children and parents only.” And indeed, there are three signs in the general park area which state this as policy.1 We wondered how this park had come to be off-limits to all the citizens of Hollywood and so directed our faithful correspondent to find out. His first stop was the May 2008 BID Patrol Report, wherein it is stated that:
On 05-31-08, we participated in ‘Family Day at Selma Park’. The park had been a hostile environment for children as certain people used the space for sleeping, urinating in public, and drug and alcohol abuse. We attempted to address this problem along with Kerry Morrison and her staff, Council 13 staff, LAPD, and the City Attorney’s Office. As a result, signs were made signifying that the park would now be only available for people with children. We hung the signs and began enforcement. For several months we have been advising violators and asking them to leave the park. One of the legitimate, Recreation and Parks Commission approved, signs at Selma Park stating that use of the playground is restricted to children and caregivers.
This, of course, is a typical destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it tactic of the HPOA. They can’t just kick homeless people out of the park, so they kick everyone out of the park except people with children. Christ, they’d probably privatize the entire city if they could, just so they could arrest homeless people for being in it. Anyway, we thought we’d find out what the Department of Recreation and Parks had to say about this. Imagine our surprise when our correspondent received a letter from the RAP Commissioners stating explicitly that
“Selma Park is a pocket park that is open to the general public, and is not limited exclusively to only children. The existing signage at Selma Park which indicates that adults without children are prohibited from the restricted area was installed for the designated children’s play area only.”
![Assistant Chief Jorge Villegas, LAPD: "As you know [homelessness] is an extremely complex issue to address. It is not as simple as simply making an arrest. As you know, we cannot arrest [our] way out of this complex social issue."](https://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Villegas-DC.jpg)
