Tag Archives: Los Angeles County

Business Improvement Districts, Los Angeles City Government

The City Of Los Angeles Shells Out More Than $2.2M Per Year To Business Improvement Districts — Add In Other Local Public Money — Like LAUSD — And Metro — And LA County — The Total Is More Than $3.7M Per Year To The BIDdies — Not Sure How Many People That Could Put In How Many Hotel Rooms For How Many Nights — But It’s A Lot — Not Sure How Many City Employee Furloughs That Money Could Prevent — But It’s A Lot More Than Zero Of Them — Remember That When They Tell You They Can’t Afford Something — They’re Choosing Not To Afford It

April 25, 2020 Mike Leave a comment

Spend some time hanging around business improvement districts and you’ll certainly hear a bunch of entitled zillionaires whining, bragging, or lying about how they voluntarily agree to spend their own damn money to provide services that the City of Los Angeles is too incompetent, too broke, or too both of these to provide. They just love explaining this to everyone. And the City of Los Angeles is also thrilled with that narrative. This City-produced BID FAQ explains it quite clearly:

[A] majority of business owners of commercial property owners in a given area decide to acquire special benefits and to pay for those benefits themselves.

The story serves everyone’s interests. The BIDdies get to imagine themselves as heroes of putative private sector efficiency and the City gets a bunch of useful idiots to carry out policies that would be incredibly illegal if the City did them directly. Everybody wins but the citizens of Los Angeles. The part you don’t hear too much about, though, the part that none of them really like to discuss, is that when property owned by the City or by other public agencies is included in a BID then the City or the other public agency is also subject to these assessments.

This is specifically authorized by the Property and Business Improvement District Law under which BIDs are established in California.¹ This means that when the City Council approves a business improvement district it’s often also approving an ongoing annual payment to the BIDdies. Which, by the way, can be substantial. Over the last few days I looked at various public records involved in BID formation in LA and learned that the City of Los Angeles is on the hook for annual payments to BIDs of at least $2,278,604.²

If LAUSD, Metro, and the County are included the total is $3,710,281 and property owned by the State of California brings the total amount of public money paid annually to LA BIDs to $4,203,276.³ These days, with the City of Los Angeles furloughing employees and moaning about the price of hotel rooms to protect unhoused residents from the ongoing pandemic, there are much, much better uses that that money could be put to.⁴ Continue reading The City Of Los Angeles Shells Out More Than $2.2M Per Year To Business Improvement Districts — Add In Other Local Public Money — Like LAUSD — And Metro — And LA County — The Total Is More Than $3.7M Per Year To The BIDdies — Not Sure How Many People That Could Put In How Many Hotel Rooms For How Many Nights — But It’s A Lot — Not Sure How Many City Employee Furloughs That Money Could Prevent — But It’s A Lot More Than Zero Of Them — Remember That When They Tell You They Can’t Afford Something — They’re Choosing Not To Afford It →

Homeless Issues

Miguel Santiago’s BID-Inspired Horror-Show Anti-Homeless Bill Is Dead For This Year — It Would Have Made It Far Easier To Intern Homeless People In Los Angeles County — Placed On Inactive File Yesterday As Legislature Adjourns For The Year

September 1, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

In January of this year Assemblymember Miguel Santiago introduced AB-1971, which was meant to expand the legal definition of a gravely disabled person essentially to allow at-will internment of homeless human beings. This pernicious nonsense was eagerly supported by Los Angeles City Councillors and their BIDdie co-conspirators. The bill met vigorous opposition from homeless people, their advocates, civil rights supporters, people who see how such a law could be weaponized against the elderly, and so on. A coalition of the sane, that is.

Last month, in a particularly cynical move, the bill was amended to only apply in Los Angeles County. However, even that concession to the opposition evidently wasn’t enough to save it. Yesterday, on the last day of the 2018 legislative session, the bill was placed on the inactive file. I don’t pretend to understand much about the arcane workings of the legislature, but it seems that this means it’s not dead, it could come back for further politicking next year, but that it’s not going to pass into law in 2018 and therefore will not take effect in 2019.⁵

Of course the bill’s supporters presented it publicly as a compassionate measure to save homeless people who would otherwise die on the street. Regardless of their stated intentions, though, it’s clear that, if passed, this bill would have given police and BIDs a powerful tool for clearing homeless people off the streets and into carceral institutions, the better to effectuate their goal of cleansing the streets of Los Angeles of people who they see as no better than trash.

This perspective is supported by the lists of opposers and supporters, consisting of mostly governments, police, and Kerry Morrison’s wholly-controlled subsidiaries, which you will find after the break.
Continue reading Miguel Santiago’s BID-Inspired Horror-Show Anti-Homeless Bill Is Dead For This Year — It Would Have Made It Far Easier To Intern Homeless People In Los Angeles County — Placed On Inactive File Yesterday As Legislature Adjourns For The Year →

Homeless Issues

Miguel Santiago’s BID-Inspired Bill Redefining Grave Disability Amended Yesterday To Expire In 2024, Apply Only In Los Angeles County — Revealing With Even More Clarity That This Is Nothing But Cynical Pandering To The Anti-Homeless, Anti-Human Zillionaires Of Los Angeles

July 4, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

You may recall that Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, a through-and-through creature of the BIDs of Downtown Los Angeles, has been pushing a bill, AB-1971, to redefine grave disability in California in order to allow cities to lock up homeless people on even more superficial pretexts than are currently available to them.

The prospect of this, of course, has BIDs all over the City messing their jeans in joy, and therefore has our esteemed councilbabies messing theirs at the thought of the copious contributions soon to swell their officeholder accounts.⁶ So much did this unconstitutional jive mean to our Council that they memorialized their support in Council File 18-0002-S11 and also went about the place giving dog-whistle-filled speeches to their BIDdie constituencies.

But despite Santiago and the BIDs and the LA City Council dressing the proposal up as somehow related to compassion or other human emotions, it was pretty clear to everyone that it was nothing more than another tool to facilitate the detention and removal of homeless human beings from our streets. Thus did opposition begin to build, even to the point where, last week, the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, in no way known for its leftie firebrandism, came out against the bill for precisely the right reasons:

… it’s odd that so much attention is devoted instead to making it easier for authorities to force mentally ill homeless people into involuntary treatment even if they are not an immediate danger to themselves or to others. Once we grab them — and remove them from whatever comfort or support structure they have managed to create — where do we put them? If we force them into hospitals for medical treatment they say they don’t want, then what?

Well, evidently the opposition grew strong enough that yesterday Miguel Santiago felt forced to amend his cynical creation. Amazingly, though, he didn’t change its substance, but only its scope. The new version, if adopted, would expire on January 1, 2024 and, most bizarrely, would apply only in Los Angeles County. Turn the page for some more commentary and a red-lined summary version of yesterday’s changes.
Continue reading Miguel Santiago’s BID-Inspired Bill Redefining Grave Disability Amended Yesterday To Expire In 2024, Apply Only In Los Angeles County — Revealing With Even More Clarity That This Is Nothing But Cynical Pandering To The Anti-Homeless, Anti-Human Zillionaires Of Los Angeles →