I recently wrote in excruciating detail about how everyone involved with the BID formation process denies, almost certainly wrongly, that they have any power at all over which parcels are included in a BID. Thus, e.g., did Tara Devine inform unhappy property owner William Kuel in this email from August 2016 that his property, which is zoned commercial but used for residential purposes, must be included in the Venice Beach BID. She went so far as to tell him explicitly that “neither the Engineer nor I can remove your parcel from the proposed BID.” This phenomenon has been hugely controversial in the formation of the Venice Beach BID, and is the basis of a lawsuit filed against the City by Venice residents upset over the inclusion of their property in the BID.

So what a surprise it was to find, buried amongst thousands of pages of nonsense in this latest pile of emails between Tara Devine and various employees of the City Clerk’s office, this June 30, 2015 missive from Tara Devine to a bunch of people, stating that she was unilaterally removing a commercially zoned property from the BID for, seemingly, no particular reason:

I will also re-send the database as we made one tiny change. After a discussion with Ed, we removed the federal USPS parcel (Venice post office.) It was on the edge of the BID and was not required for a contiguous boundary, so we just removed it from dbase and other docs.

Leaving aside the evident fact that Tara Devine doesn’t know the difference between contiguous and continuous, isn’t this interesting? She “just removed” a piece of property from the BID. And then a year later she was telling property owners that she didn’t have the power to remove parcels, and some of those property owners are now suing the City partially on the basis of this claim she¹ has been pushing about her powerlessness. It will be interesting to see if this turns out to be evidence in the lawsuit!² It’s extremely interesting to see that she told a bunch of City Clerk employees that she’d done this and not one of them questioned her ability to do it, which is in stark contrast to Holly Wolcott’s 2016 assertions that no one was empowered to remove properties.

Tara Devine’s justification for her unwillingness to exclude property has been that commercially zoned parcels cannot be removed,³ so perhaps this property isn’t zoned commercial? Well, good old ZIMAS will let us investigate this matter more thoroughly. This and some other issues with the property, including its current status with respect to BID inclusion, are discussed in painfully obsessive detail after the break.
Continue reading Shadowy BID Consultant Tara Devine Unilaterally Removed A Commercially Zoned Parcel From The Venice Beach BID In 2015 And Then Told Unhappy Property Owners In 2016 That She Was Not Allowed To Remove Parcels From The BID If They Were Commercially Zoned →