Tag Archives: Jessica Borek

Business Improvement Districts, Downtown Center BID, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy, Los Angeles City Council, Street Vending

The Actual Mechanism By Which Suzanne Holley And The Central City Association Strangled The Incipient Street Vending Ordinance In Its Cradle By Sneaking In Unilateral Councilmember Opt-Out On Behalf Of BIDs, The Role In This Debacle Played By Criminal Conspirators Jessica Borek and Matt Rodriguez, And How The Council Messaged It To BIDs

March 27, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

The Wicked Witch of the Southeast corner of Wilshire and Hope giving instructions to her flying monkeys.

Recall that I’ve been tracking the hysterical, irrational opposition of LA’s business improvement districts to the ongoing process of legalizing (some aspects of) street vending in the City since the Spring of 2015. A truly astonishing level of bitching and moaning in 2015 stalled out the whole process for most of 2016 because, I believe, everyone was too freaking sick of the whining and the carefully orchestrated lying on any number of occasions and the City just needed a rest.

A man arrested, transported, and handcuffed to a bench by the Andrews International BID Patrol in Hollywood for selling umbrellas on the street. At least it appears that this horror show is over, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there are even more loopholes and it’s not over at all.

Until the November election of Donald Trump and his subsequent threats to deport essentially anyone, U.S. citizen or not, who’d ever smiled while thinking of eating a taco spurred the Council into action on at least the small part (small but in no way insignificant) of the plan to decriminalize illegal street vending so that, no matter how much trouble the zillionaires might cause the heladeros, at least they wouldn’t be subject to arrest and subsequent deportation. That bit seemed urgent enough to pass Council outright, and even the anti-vending forces of the zillionaire elite seemed to realize that they were just going to be exposed as the nasty little mean creeps that they are if they fought back on this particular issue. However, the Council put off acting on an actual legalization framework until later.

But recall, as I reported in January, the instructions for the report-back were altered from the original, and quite sensible,¹ request for

A process to create special vending districts to be initiated by Council, the Board of Public Works, or petition (with signatures from 20 percent of property owners or businesses in the proposed district), based on legitimate public health, safety and welfare concerns that are unique to specific neighborhoods with special circumstances.

to a request for language

Providing the City Council the ability to opt out of certain streets by Council action.

At that time I didn’t understand yet how this had all taken place, but now I’ve accumulated enough documentary evidence that it’s possible to sketch out a picture. The short version is that in December 2016, Suzanne Holley, at that time acting Executive Director² of the Schatzian horror show known as the Central City Association of Los Angeles, wrote a letter to the City Council telling them to make the change. This was distributed to the BIDs via the BID Consortium. They all told their pet Councilmembers to change it. It got changed, and all the BIDs rejoiced, some of them quite publicly. The consequences of this are going to be horrific, and whatever street vending framework gets put in place will be DOA. Details and evidence after the break.
Continue reading The Actual Mechanism By Which Suzanne Holley And The Central City Association Strangled The Incipient Street Vending Ordinance In Its Cradle By Sneaking In Unilateral Councilmember Opt-Out On Behalf Of BIDs, The Role In This Debacle Played By Criminal Conspirators Jessica Borek and Matt Rodriguez, And How The Council Messaged It To BIDs →

Los Angeles City Council, Street Vending

Sneaky Shit-Sneakers Sneakily Sneak Sneaky Shit Into Current Version Of Street Vending Legalization Process, Setting The Stage For Continued Persecution of Vendors in Business Improvement Districts

January 31, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

So today the City Council moved forward with CF 13-1493, which, of course, is the famed street vending thing. For a good, objective,³ discussion of today’s developments, take a look at this article in today’s Times by the incomparable Emily Alpert Reyes.⁴ This is just a brief post to note the fact that the various anti-human opponents of legalized street vending won a major, seemingly unnoticed by anyone but me, victory via amendment in the current version of the motion.

Today’s motion doesn’t actually legalize street vending. What it does is direct the City Attorney, the Chief Legislative Analyst, and the City Administrative Officer to put together a proposed ordinance. This was to be based on this detailed set of recommendations from the Public Works and Gang Reduction Committee report. This report was amended in Council today before being adopted, and at least two of the amended recommendations are quite sneaky, and, I predict, will undermine the future ordinance in quite underhanded ways that will please business improvement districts and other business interests who have been working tirelessly to keep street vending illegal for years now. See the details and some⁵ predictions after the break.
Continue reading Sneaky Shit-Sneakers Sneakily Sneak Sneaky Shit Into Current Version Of Street Vending Legalization Process, Setting The Stage For Continued Persecution of Vendors in Business Improvement Districts →

Announcements

Many, Many New Emails from CD13 About Homeless Encampments, From CD4 About the Food Coalition, and From South Park BID About Street Vending

June 28, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

An image attached to one of many CD13 emails discussing breaking up homeless encampments on Melrose, Vermont, Alvarado, Beverly, and some adjacent streets.

Today I’m just announcing three new collections of emails, all of which can be found (for now) exclusively in our Archive.org collections. First we have emails to and from CD13 about homeless encampments on Vermont Avenue, Melrose, Beverly, Alvarado, and some adjacent streets. The Council District was involved with breaking up these encampments in March 2016 and these emails document the process. They also contain a lot of fodder for future requests, since some of them list specific document numbers for Bureau of Street Services and also Sanitation Department orders and reports. It’s almost as if no one at CD13 was aware that breaking up homeless encampments puts federal money in jeopardy.
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Announcements, Fashion District BID

Fashion District BID Executive Director Kent Smith’s Complete July 2015 Emails Now Available. FDBID Managing Director Rena Leddy Wins MK.org Excellence in BID Transparency Award!

March 15, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

Rena Leddy, Managing Director of the Fashion District BID and MK.org CPRA Hero of the Fricking Year!!

Just this morning I received, via Dropbox, every one of Kent Smith’s emails for the month of July 2015. You can see all 1098 of them on the archive. Most of it’s dismal mass-blasted junk, of course, but even a lot of that is interesting. E.g. search in there for CCA (Central City Association) to see bunches of their bulletins, like this one, advertising special guests Jessica Borek and Matt Rodriguez. Unfortunately there’s probably no way to find out what was said there, but at least we know it happened.

Yet another smoking gun, as if it weren't clear enough that Marie Rumsey is a big-time lawbreaker. — Yet another smoking gun, as if it weren’t clear enough that Marie Rumsey is a big-time lawbreaker.

The most amazing thing about this document dump is the formatting. They’re PDFs, which often is a bad sign for emails, although these are text-based⁶ so they can be searched reasonably effectively. Too many agencies think somehow that a scanned PDF of a printed email satisfies CPRA’s requirement that electronic documents be produced in native formats. These PDFs are on a level I’ve never seen before, though. First of all, the links are live, including the links to remote images. Also the links to attachments are live and the attachments are embedded in the PDFs. For instance, look at this email about anti-street-vending strategies from Marie Rumsey to various people. It has an actual schedule of actual meetings with Councilmembers that CCA set up for street vending opponents attached, and you can click on it and read it! Or here it is if you’re lazy. This is the real deal! Look at the properties in that last item and see that Marie Rumsey spent 2015 breaking the revolving door ordinance to an even greater extent than anyone here imagined. Also take a look at this email from Jessica Borek to the gang which comes with a copy of a Power Point thing by Jessica Borek about the Coalition to Save Small Business strategy as well as a marked-up copy of ELACC’s proposed framework. This is the real deal, friends! It’s what CPRA was actually meant to yield.
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Announcements, Lawsuits

City of Los Angeles Ordered to Produce Documents, Promises to Pay Costs Incurred Due to Their Delays; Historic Core BID Documents Available

February 5, 2016 Mike 2 Comments

One of those hammers they seem to have in a lot of courtrooms.

One week ago, on Friday, January 29, there was a telephonic conference before Federal Magistrate Judge Andrew Wistrich, who’s handling what’s turned out to be a grueling discovery process in the LA Community Action Network and LA Catholic Worker lawsuit against the City of LA and the Central City East Association concerning the illegal confiscation of the property of homeless people. The minutes and associated order just showed up in the Court’s RSS feed this afternoon, and you can grab a copy here. It sounds like a hot time was had by all, and the upshot is that:

Counsel for the City represented that the City will complete the LAPD production described during the telephonic conference by February 1, 2016 and the production of other agencies within 14 days. The City is directed to perform those promises. If it is necessary for plaintiffs to retake depositions because of delay or inadequacy in the City’s production of documents, the City will be responsible for all associated reasonable costs and attorneys fees. Counsel for the City assured the Court that the City would cooperate with any efforts by plaintiffs to seek adjustments to the case schedule to mitigate prejudice to plaintiffs resulting from delay or inadequacy in the City’s document production.

There’s no mention of the CCEA, so I suppose that either they’re complying with discovery finally or else they’re failing to comply so badly that it couldn’t be dealt with at this conference.

Read on for absolutely unrelated information about documents from Historic Core BID that just arrived today.
Continue reading City of Los Angeles Ordered to Produce Documents, Promises to Pay Costs Incurred Due to Their Delays; Historic Core BID Documents Available →

Hypocrisy, Municipal Ethics, Street Vending

Law-and-Order-Touting Anti-Street-Vending Central City Association Flack Marie Rumsey is a Hypocritical Defier of the Revolving Door Ordinance of the City of Los Angeles

January 21, 2016 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Marie Rumsey in happier days back at CD13.

When last we wrote of Marie Rumsey, late of CD13 but now moved on to greener pastures with the revoltingly Schatzian nightmare horror-show the Central City Association, she was introducing thuggish opposite-of-Alinsky Jessica Borek of the not-so-very-law-abiding-their-own-selves Rodriguez Strategies to the Board of Directors of the racketeer influenced criminal conspiracy known as the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance.

Since that time we’ve learned a little bit about the government ethics laws of the City of Los Angeles, such as they are, and, amazingly, it turns out that Marie Rumsey is, was, and, for all we know, shall be violating them big-time. This, you will remember, is the woman who, in March 2015, went on and on and on and on about how there would be no way to enforce health codes and laws if street vending were to be legalized and how desperately bad that would be for everyone. Well, let us now enlighten you about the law Marie Rumsey was breaking even as she spoke those fateful words.
Continue reading Law-and-Order-Touting Anti-Street-Vending Central City Association Flack Marie Rumsey is a Hypocritical Defier of the Revolving Door Ordinance of the City of Los Angeles →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Street Vending

Inside the Anti-Street-Vending Campaign: Newly Revealed Emails Between Kerry Morrison, Carol Schatz, and PR Flack Laura Mecoy Shine Unwonted Light Into Power-Elite Media Manipulation Process

December 5, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that, in March 2015, we broke the story that outlaw downtown ringleader Carol Schatz’s ongoing criminal conspiracy, popularly known as the Central City Association, had hired shadowy PR flacks Rodriguez Strategies to shill for this city’s white-power-elite-zillionaire-industrial complex in order to defeat Councilmen José Huizar’s and Curren Price’s surprisingly-for-LA-politicos sane proposals regarding street vending. Rodriguez Strategies deputed its minion, evil PR-thuggette Jessica Borek, to set up a bullshit astroturf group known as “The Coalition to Save Small Business,” and off they went to lie about everything at every public hearing possible on the subject.

Well, evidently Rodriguez Strategies wasn’t doing enough damage for the CCA’s taste, because at some point the opponents of legalized street vending in Los Angeles hired yet another PR firm, Mecoy Communications, run by former reporter Laura Mecoy, pictured above. Yesterday, we obtained a bunch of emails from Laura Mecoy to Kerry Morrison, Carol Schatz, and two business owners who oppose legalized street vending about a meeting Laura’s arranged with the LA Times editorial board. And Laura is worth whatever they’re paying her. Although the Times showed some independent thought in the resulting editorial, Laura got them to take Kerry Morrison’s and Carol Schatz’s delusory and insincere arguments as if they were something more than self-interested expediencies. They’re not. This is a fascinating but all-too-rare glimpse into the interplay between money, power, and media in Los Angeles.
Continue reading Inside the Anti-Street-Vending Campaign: Newly Revealed Emails Between Kerry Morrison, Carol Schatz, and PR Flack Laura Mecoy Shine Unwonted Light Into Power-Elite Media Manipulation Process →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy, Street Vending

Kerry Morrison in Van Nuys: Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison / Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden¹

August 7, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Tailgunner Kerry Morrison giving a performative demonstration of effective methods for keeping public meetings respectful, civil, and orderly.

As you probably know, the city of Los Angeles has been holding public hearings to gather input on possible frameworks for legalizing street vending. We’ve written before about the May 28 meeting in Boyle heights: once, twice, and thrice. Now, at last, we take up the June 11 meeting in Van Nuys. We’re starting things off with our old friend, Ms. Kerry Morrison. You can listen to her statement here or read a transcription after the break. We’ve also written about Kerry’s description of the meetings at the Joint Security Committee in July:

there were a series of four hearings that the chief administrative office staff held on the… the sidewalk vending ordinance. … It’s just this kind of amorphous set of hearings, which were completely dysfunctional, disrespectful, and almost, um, resembled a circus.

In the same meeting, Kerry explained that she wasn’t putting up with this, not for a second, and told everyone what she’d done about it:

So actually, Carol Schatz and I wrote a letter to Herb Wesson, the president of the city council after that meeting saying this is, this is really not being, you know, well-handled, there’s no security, it’s intimidating to people, there are people who did not want to testify. So the subsequent two hearings were, um, maybe a little bit more well-behaved.

As Ronald Reagan said in 1970, "If it takes a bloodbath to silence the demonstrators let's get it over with." The lyrics are cruder than Kerry Morrison's, but the tune's the same.1 — As Ronald Reagan said in 1970, “If it takes a bloodbath to silence the demonstrators let’s get it over with.”
The lyrics are cruder than Kerry Morrison’s, but the tune’s the same.²

Well, we put our fearless correspondent on the case and he went out and got us a copy of this letter. As is usual with Kerry when she’s writing in this genre, outraged-with-veneer-of-politesse-and-diplomacy white supremacism, the letter manages to combine utterly competent, even stylish, syntax with semantics that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1970-era Ronald Reagan psychotic fever dream about students running wild in the streets of Berkeley. Read on for details and more!
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Hypocrisy, Joint Security Committee, Street Vending

Kerry Morrison Accuses Street Vending Proponents Collectively of “Almost Resembl[ing] a Circus,” Being “Completely Dysfunctional [and] Disrespectful,” and “Being Bused in,” Elides True Nature of Putative Coalition

July 15, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Kerry Morrison at the July 9, 2015 meeting of the Joint Security Committee being the opposite of dysfunctional, disrespectful, and circus-like. — Kerry Morrison at the July 9, 2015 meeting of the Joint Security Committee looking mighty fed up with something while at the same time, of course, being nondysfunctional, nondisrespectful, and in no way resembling a circus.

We’ve written before about the HPOA’s crazed-and-at-the-mouth-foaming opposition to Councilmembers Huizar’s and Price’s proposed ordinance legalizing street vending in the city of Los Angeles. We’ve written about the HPOA’s scheme to send its agents to public meetings in the ill-concealed guise of concerned citizens opposing the ordinance. Today we report on Kerry Morrison’s recent discussion of her experience orchestrating that whole fiasco. We’ll analyze it line by line, and you can watch the whole thing here and/or read a transcription after the break.

This painting by Georges Seurat almost resembles a circus also, but, and this is a subtle point but sound, Cela ne veut pas un cirque. — This painting by Georges Seurat almost resembles a circus also, but, and this is a subtle point but sound, cela ne veut pas un cirque.

Kerry’s been on before about this issue, people not treating her agents provocateurs to what she delusorily imagines to be the duly appropriate level of forelock-tugging, although she hits a new high note¹ here. We mean, we weren’t at the hearings, but it’s hard to imagine that they were dysfunctional. It’s easier to imagine that perhaps Kerry’s mistaken the purpose. It’s hard to see how a public hearing can be disrespectful without being told towards what or whom it’s disrespectful. Does she mean the hearing was disrespectful towards her minions? What is it that they’ve done to earn anyone’s respect? Perhaps she means something else. And as for the hearings “almost…resembl[ing] a circus,” well, we imagine that’s nothing more than the reaction of someone who has done her illegal best to make sure that the public doesn’t feel welcome at the meetings she’s the boss of to finding out that she’s not the boss of every meeting in Los Angeles and, just possibly, maybe not so welcome at all of them her own self.
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy, Street Vending

Marie Rumsey and Thuggish Rodriguez Strategies Flack Jessica Borek Plot with the HPOA Board to Keep Arresting Bacon-Dog Sellers and Heladeros

March 26, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Heladero chained to a bench in 2007 courtesy of the BID Patrol. José Huizar's proposed ordinance would end this kind of sadism in Los Angeles, but the BIDs, with the connivance of CCA and Rodriguez Strategies won't give up so easily. "It is our God-given right to handcuff the heladero!" — Heladero chained to a bench in 2007 courtesy of the BID Patrol. José Huizar’s proposed ordinance would end this kind of sadism in Los Angeles, but the BIDs, with the connivance of CCA and Rodriguez Strategies won’t give up so easily. “It is our God-given right to handcuff the heladero!”

Watch, listen, and learn¹ as Marie Rumsey of the Central City Association and PR flackette Jessica Borek of thuggish PR RICO Rodriguez Strategies fill in the HPOA board on their strategic schemes to allow the BID Patrol to continue to arrest, shackle, and humiliate the ice-cream man. These people are so power-mad they want to ban bacon dogs, the national food of Los Angeles!(Transcription, as always, after the break).

Even after all this time, it’s hard to understand why these people are so dead-set against legalizing and regulating something that’s not only happening now, but is going to be happening in the future because it’s an integral part of the culture of Los Angeles. We have some ideas, but whatever their reasoning is, we don’t think it would be too much to ask that they tell the truth while they’re opposing it.

Marie Rumsey of the Central City Association at the March 19, 2015 meeting of the HPOA Board, lying through her teeth about pretty much everything.

First of all, Marie Rumsey wants you to know that there are only nine health inspectors for all of LA county and there are 50,000 street vendors. The point is that it’s unlikely that food vendors would be inspected sufficiently. Let’s forget, just for a second, that currently none of the vendors are inspected, so inspecting ANY of them would improve public health. According to Bloomberg, there are 10,000 illegal food vendors in Los Angeles (granted, out of 50,000 vendors total, but health inspectors don’t worry about balloon-sellers, do they?) That’s lie number one, Marie. Next, we can’t find hard data for the number of health inspectors in LA County at the moment, but a moment’s googling told us that in 1989 there were 47 of them, and in 1997 there were 161. That the number has dropped to 9 in 2015 seems beyond implausible. That’s lie number two, Marie.

And this brings us to Rodriguez Strategies flackette Jessica Borek.
Continue reading Marie Rumsey and Thuggish Rodriguez Strategies Flack Jessica Borek Plot with the HPOA Board to Keep Arresting Bacon-Dog Sellers and Heladeros →