Tag Archives: Kerry Morrison

Freud, Jesus agree: Kerry Morrison finds LA County mental health court plans to be “hindering progress, in the way”

November 22, 2014 kohlhaas Leave a comment

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

As outlined here, Kerry Morrison, Executive Director of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, recently wrote to California State Controller John Chiang asking him to force the State Judicial Council to pay the $42,857.88 that the HPOA claims they are in arrears. Well and good, we suppose, but in her letter, we find this argument:

Finally, though the courthouse has significantly scaled back its operations in the past couple of years, I understand that there are ambitious plans underfoot to centralize the county’s mental health and diversion courts into this facility. As such, with the anticipated crush of people — court employees, jurors, family members, and professionals — coming to Hollywood to do business each day, the services provided by the BID will help to enhance this experience for everyone.

Oh happy day! Imagine that you’re a mom or a dad coming to the Hollywood Courthouse to watch, e.g., your schizophrenic kid get locked up in Atascadero, where he will spend the rest of his natural life pumped full of thorazine and shut away in the restraint room but at least, thanks to the BID, you don’t have to step over a bunch of homeless people drinking Taaka vodka as you make your way into the building. Your experience surely would be enhanced, would it not? After all, what are drunken homeless people if not unwelcome reminders of the likely fate of the schizophrenic kid if he’s ever let out of the snakepit?

But that’s not the subject of tonight’s post.
Continue reading Freud, Jesus agree: Kerry Morrison finds LA County mental health court plans to be “hindering progress, in the way” →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

State Judicial Council Gets “No Benefits From BID,” Refuses to Pay Assessments Since 2009

November 20, 2014 Mike Leave a comment

"The use and function of a courthouse is not directly impacted or benefited by any of the services provided by the BID." — “The use and function of a courthouse is not directly impacted or benefited by any of the services provided by the BID.”

If you look here you will find correspondence between HPOA Executive Director Kerry Morrison and various people with the California State Judicial Council, which has not paid its assessments since 2009. It’s well worth a read if only to see Kerry’s hapless rhetorical sallies counterposed with the calm authority of the state’s lawyers.
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Besley, Morrison: Hollywood’s Not Pleasant Cause it Ain’t Manhattan; TED-Talking Visionaries Will Fix Everything

November 19, 2014 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Visionaries converging on Hollywood in order to fix EVERYTHING. — Visionaries pouring out of a Kool-Aid drenched TED talk on their way to Hollywood to fix EVERYTHING, especially stuff that ain’t broke.

At the November 11, 2014, meeting of the Central Hollywood Coalition, kommisariat of the Sunset-Vine “Baby BID,” there was some discussion of visionaries doing something or another to do with “mobility”⁶ in Hollywood.² One of the visionaries mentioned was Janette Sadik-Khan,⁵ late of the erstwhile nouveau-Napoleonic Michael Bloomberg NYC empire, who now works for Bloomberg-the-corporation spreading Bloombergian bullshit around the world as fast as they can shovel it out and also gives TED talks.¹

Kerry Morrison about 36 minutes before she pronounced Hollywood "not pleasant." — Kerry Morrison about 36 minutes before she pronounced Hollywood “not pleasant.”

Bloomberg is one of these pezzonovante self-styled “reformers” like Eli Broad who thinks that because he’s a zillionaire he understands everything. Sadik-Khan is his Charlie McCarthy.⁴ These people’s zombie clones brought Los Angeles, among countless other horrors, Dr. John Deasy, who finally left this city with a stake through his heart and unsettling thoughts of Mark Berndt’s cookies dancing through his jug-like head. They’re probably up in the hills right now scheming to bring Michelle Rhee in to replace the guy. Of course, this kind of the-wealthy-gonna-fix-everything Kool-Aid is irresistible to the CHC-slash-SV-BID, a group whose entire foundational principle is “rich people must be smarter cause otherwise why is they so rich?” Hence their eagerness to let Sadik-Khan explain it all to you.

Anyway, Besley’s description of what’s obviously an impending trainwreck³ moved Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Executive Director Kerry Morrison to opine thusly:
Continue reading Besley, Morrison: Hollywood’s Not Pleasant Cause it Ain’t Manhattan; TED-Talking Visionaries Will Fix Everything →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Kerry Morrison Pisses, Moans about Inefficiency of Feds, Runs Crying to Mommy State

November 13, 2014 kohlhaas Leave a comment

The SSA building on Vine Street; a soft target?

Listen here as Kerry Morrison, at the November 11, 2014, meeting of the Central Hollywood Coalition, bosses of the Sunset-Vine Business Improvement District, discusses what is to be done about the Social Security Administration building on Vine Street above Santa Monica Blvd:
Kerry Morrison: So…um…just in terms of solving a couple stakeholders’ requests we, we’ve been getting a lot of…um…complaints about people gathering around the Social Security building on Vine Street. It’s a rather unsecured building after six o’clock…um…and there’s been…if you drive by there you see it, especially on the weekends, people sleeping in the parking lot…
Unidentified Interlocutor: And it’s in the BID?
Kerry Morrison: And it’s in the BID, on Vine Street, so it’s south of…um…Picture Head…
Unidentified Interlocutors: [interrupting] [something unintelligible about the surplus store] Kerry Morrison: So we met with…um…the owner of the building and the federal police? And general services department and the Social Security folks and our BID security to just do some problem solving on how to harden the target [unintelligible] Kind of a, you know, a lack of mobility of the federal government to really secure that building…uh…[unintelligible] They say they don’t have the money to put in a fence, or and the federal police work Monday through Friday from nine to five and they’re supposed to be the ones who are patrolling that property but they’re off [unintelligible]… So, um, we’re kinda [unintelligible] a little bit frustrated because it’s kinda become a, a bit of a drain on our resources and…um…the owner of the building had a great idea, he would like to reach out to our congressional representatives and maybe they have some pull with the federal bureaucracy. So [unintelligible] reached out to congressman Adam Schiff’s office and immediately they jumped all over it, said we should have been in that meeting too, you know, we can help you with the general services department, so we’re gonna write a letter, kind of outline what our issues are, and see if we get some help with that…

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Joint Security Committee

A Shameful Thing

November 1, 2014 Mike Leave a comment

Hollywood, November 1, 2014, 8:15 a.m. P.D.T.

The second redacted report from Steve Seyler to the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID is available here. I don’t actually feel equal to the task of describing in serious terms how upsetting this material is, but I’m going to try my best to match the gravity of the subject.

Steve’s narratives of the homeless people of Hollywood lack any consciousness of the fact that these are human beings with human lives that he’s dealing with. They have no power, no voice, no property, they have nothing. They are harried and tormented by Steve’s Andrews International Security guards. It’s not enough that Steve’s guards scream at and arrest the homeless for activities which are not only lawful but completely normal if done in a house: sleeping, sitting, urination, defecation, but he mocks them with epithets and has them photographed like trophy animals in the process.

His reports betray no evidence of compassion or even a basic understanding of the fact that these people are homeless as the result of social processes beyond anyone’s control. Instead he fills his reports with self-serving anecdotes about his horror-movie-boyscout guards helping blind men across the street and buying hungry people pizza interspersed with immature jokes about shit on the streets and illicit vodka. Is he unaware that his ordained purpose is not helping and saving but moving homeless people out of the steamroller path of businessmen and their plans for tourism and development? He can’t possibly be, which makes his pretense and his weird antics even more disturbing.

And the members of the Joint Security Committee, who have evidently received these reports for years without either seeing how disgusting they are or putting an end to them (if only for the sake of public image) are as guilty or more so. It’s plausible that Steve can’t help the fact that he’s a bully-boy who ended up with too much power for anyone’s good, but Kerry Morrison at least seems like a decent, kind person. I can’t believe she hasn’t seen how bad this is. Certainly the LAPD, LASD, and City Attorney’s Office liasons to the BID ought to know better; they’re professionals. Real police don’t act like this (at least not in public). It’s a shameful thing.
Continue reading A Shameful Thing →

Announcements

Documents

October 24, 2014 Mike Leave a comment

I’m pleased to announce our new Documents page, also available through the menu on the header in all its arboreally structured glory. We hope to build this into a repository of records we obtain under the California Public Records Act. So far we just have one item prepared for publication, a report by Steve Seyler of Andrews International Security to the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID. This is the document that Kerry Morrison originally refused to let me read at the meeting. I can see why she was reluctant because it’s not pretty. We’ve redacted it here to try to preserve some shreds of dignity in an ugly set of circumstances. Of course the unredacted original is available on request from Kerry.

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Frisco Dwellers don’t ♥ LA; Never Have, Never Will

October 23, 2014 kohlhaas Leave a comment

If this were a college class, it'd be Rocks for Jocks — If this were a college class, it’d be *Rocks for Jocks*

Maybe you’ve been out of state and had some wit tell you that they hate Los Angeles “but love San Francisco.” This is a commonplace sentiment among easterners (around here, we believe that easterners start at the San Bernardino County line). Here’s an explanation: San Francisco is a tiny, transparent town. It’s easy to understand because it’s small and because it’s a self-conscious imitation of eastern cities, themselves often self-conscious imitations of European cities. It’s visually appealing in a facile way. It’s got pretty houses and the “bad” neighborhoods, such as they are, have been suppressed and relocated to the point where tourists don’t have to go there. Their local burritos are just exotic enough to thrill but not so different from Chipotle™ that they disconcert the outta-towners.

San Francisco is exactly what easterners expect from a city and the weather’s better and the executioner’s face is always well hidden. So they “get it” immediately and love it instinctively, like tourists love Denny’s because the food’s the same wherever they are. Frisco dwellers crave this universal approval, too. They’re addicted to an extent where, like junkies, they need a big dose of tourist-love-bombing daily just to feel normal. Like sex addicts, they continually need yet another piece of strange or they’ll forget they exist. For over a hundred years they’ve been letting this addiction distort their city’s culture and politics to make it even more pleasing to easterners.
Continue reading Frisco Dwellers don’t ♥ LA; Never Have, Never Will →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Monica Yamada and the Hollywood Vicinage

October 21, 2014 kohlhaas Leave a comment

The 6th amendment guarantees the right to “by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” This was the result of a compromise away from a right to trial in “the vicinage” where the crime was committed, fought for by James Madison but ultimately compromised in order to allow the constitution to be ratified.
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Clips from the October 16, 2014 Meeting of the HPOA

October 20, 2014 Mike Leave a comment

The HPOA is the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance. It seems to be an umbrella organization which controls the Sunset-Vine BID and the Hollywood Entertainment District BID. Here is the full 56+ minute video of their October 16, 2014 meeting and here are a few clips of interest:
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

The Trees and the Forest

October 16, 2014 kohlhaas Leave a comment

See Sarah Besley, Carol Massie, and Kerry Morrison discuss the Vine Street tree vandal. Tree vandalism is antisocial and upsetting and the suspect should be arrested and tried, but why this zeal to charge it as a felony? The fact that the BID is talking to a prosecutor, who’s “willing to work with them,” about upping the charge even though the amount of damage hasn’t yet hit the required threshold evinces a lack of respect for the law and suggests that the BID has public officials willing to bend the law on their behalf. As far as we’re concerned, these BID folks are all serial misdemeanants for their Brown Act violations. Their victims don’t have prosecutors willing to even charge the BID people, let alone “work with them” to twist the law around to charge them as felons, even though their crimes affect quality of life in Hollywood far more than tree vandalism does. The vandalized trees might be beams in the eye of the vandal, but the BID has a forest in its own eye, which it evidently can’t see for the trees.
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