Tag Archives: Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority

Lawsuits, Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles City Government, Los Angeles County Government, Public Records Act Pragmatics

Last Week The Los Angeles Sunshine Coalition And Friends Filed Four CPRA Petitions — Three Against The City Of Los Angeles And One Against LAHSA — The LA City Suits Are Versus CD4 — And CD15 — And The Information Tech Agency — The CD15 One Includes A Taxpayer Suit Based On California Code of Civil Procedure 526a — Which Lets Us Allege That Buscaino Is Wasting Public Money By Using It To Violate The CPRA — And May Lead To Lasting Policy Changes Rather Than A Mere Production Of Records

August 4, 2021 Mike Leave a comment

This post is about four CPRA suits filed last week. If you want to skip the nonsense and read the petitions here are the links:
⤕ Los Angeles Sunshine Coalition v. City of Los Angeles (CD4) — Council District 4 ignores requests and refuses to produce native format. 
⤕ Los Angeles Sunshine Coalition v. City of Los Angeles (ITA) — The Information Technology Agency of the City of Los Angeles refuses to produce native formats and refuses to produce complete records.
⤕ Los Angeles Sunshine Coalition v. LAHSA — The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority refuses to produce records in a timely manner and also ignores requests for years on end.
⤕ Riskin v. City of Los Angeles (CD15) — CD15 refuses to produce records in a timely manner and won’t produce native format. This one is also a taxpayer suit under the California Code of Civil Procedure at §526a, which is huge!

It’s been a big few days around here! The Los Angeles Sunshine Coalition filed two CPRA suits against the City of Los Angeles and one against LAHSA and I personally filed one against the City of Los Angeles. Both LASC and I are repped by the formidable Gina Hong of the Los Angeles Center for Community Law and Action.

The case against CD15 is based on a request I made in June 2019, for which, two years later, I’ve only received minimal responsives with no unexpired deadline for production forthcoming. Buscaino staffer Amy Gebert’s shameless violations of the CPRA led me to file two distinct complaints against her with the LA Ethics Commission, one in August 2020 and the other in February 2021.

This is an extremely exciting petition. It’s the first time I’ve used a cause of action based on California Code of Civil Procedure §526a, which allows taxpayers to file suit against government agencies for wasting tax money.¹ The idea is that by insisting on producing emails by printing them in color on paper and then scanning the paper to PDFs CD15 is wasting staff time on unnecessary processes and public money on completely unnecessary color printing.
Continue reading Last Week The Los Angeles Sunshine Coalition And Friends Filed Four CPRA Petitions — Three Against The City Of Los Angeles And One Against LAHSA — The LA City Suits Are Versus CD4 — And CD15 — And The Information Tech Agency — The CD15 One Includes A Taxpayer Suit Based On California Code of Civil Procedure 526a — Which Lets Us Allege That Buscaino Is Wasting Public Money By Using It To Violate The CPRA — And May Lead To Lasting Policy Changes Rather Than A Mere Production Of Records →

Los Angeles City Government, Los Angeles County Government

On July 13, 2020 Victor Hinderliter of LAHSA Wrote A Formal Memo To Director Heidi Marston Recommending That Kristy Lovich Be Fired — Here Is A Copy Of The Memo — Hinderliter Had Disciplined Lovich In June — And Here’s A Copy Of That Disciplinary Action Report — And Lovich’s Response To It — Which Reveals That Hinderliter Knew In Advance About Her Fateful All-Staff Email — The One She Was Fired For Sending — And Yet Did Not Advise Her Not To Send It — Hinderliter And Staff From The Mayor’s Office Monitored Lovich’s Social Media Usage — And Cited Posts In The Firing Recommendation — Including The Accusation That She Tweeted About A Post On This Blog!

September 23, 2020 Mike Leave a comment

But first some background! In June 2020 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority supervisor Kristy Lovich sent an email to all LAHSA employees calling for the agency to stop working with police during homeless encampment sweeps and seeking signatures on a petition. She was screamed at by her bosses over this and they ended up firing her over it in July. I recently obtained a copy of a June disciplinary report filed against Lovich by Victor Hinderliter, her supervisor.

I also obtained a formal memo from Hinderliter to LAHSA Director Heidi Marston from July recommending that Lovich be fired. There’s also a strangely formatted email conversation from June between Lovich and Hinderliter in which she responds to the accusations he would later include in both reports, in part by listing examples of HInderliter supporting her in precisely the kinds of activities he used to advocate that she be fired.

Hinderliter apparently even knew about Lovich’s all-staff email in advance and failed to advise her not to send it, a fact which did not deter him from later listing it as a reason for firing her. One of the most surprising aspects of this fiasco is the extent to which Lovich’s superiors at LAHSA and also random staffers in the Mayor’s office monitored her social media usage, which Hinderliter quoted from extensively in his recommendation. Read on for a transcription of the July memo:
Continue reading On July 13, 2020 Victor Hinderliter of LAHSA Wrote A Formal Memo To Director Heidi Marston Recommending That Kristy Lovich Be Fired — Here Is A Copy Of The Memo — Hinderliter Had Disciplined Lovich In June — And Here’s A Copy Of That Disciplinary Action Report — And Lovich’s Response To It — Which Reveals That Hinderliter Knew In Advance About Her Fateful All-Staff Email — The One She Was Fired For Sending — And Yet Did Not Advise Her Not To Send It — Hinderliter And Staff From The Mayor’s Office Monitored Lovich’s Social Media Usage — And Cited Posts In The Firing Recommendation — Including The Accusation That She Tweeted About A Post On This Blog! →

Homeless Issues, Los Angeles City Government, Los Angeles County Government

LAHSA Director Heidi Marston Fired Kristy Lovich In July 2020 For Advocating That LAHSA Cut Ties With Law Enforcement — For The Simple Reason That Cop Involvement Makes Effective Outreach Impossible — As Her Comms Staff Struggled To Concoct A Response To The Subsequent Outcry Marston Told Them Not To Say Explicitly That The Response Was About Lovich — And To Rewrite Their Messaging “To Infuse A Tone Of Compassion” — You Can Read The Actual Comments She Inserted In The Document!

September 12, 2020 Mike Leave a comment

This post is based on a few items from a small set of emails that LAHSA produced to me recently. There’s other interesting stuff in there, so take a look at the whole set!

In June 2020 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority staffer Kristy Lovich started a petition calling on her employer to sever ties with law enforcement agencies. On July 28, 2020 LAHSA Director Heidi Marston fired her in retaliation,² which prompted swift and brutal criticism on social media and a powerful public response from Lovich the next day, July 29. And very soon thereafter Marston’s publicity machine started revving its powerful engines! I don’t yet have the full story,³ but on July 30 Marston emailed her communications staff and thanked them for their work:

From: Heidi Marston <hmarston@lahsa.org>
To: Christopher Yee <cyee@lahsa.org>, Nadia James <njames@lahsa.org>, Ahmad Chapman <achapman@lahsa.org>, Paloma Beltroy <pbeltroy@lahsa.org>
Subject: Letter response for social

Hi all,

Thanks for pulling this together. My comments are attached but overall, I like the google doc and the messaging in that the best. Also love the call to action in asking municipalities to commit to our principles. The more we can center on compassion and humanizing this, the better.

Continue reading LAHSA Director Heidi Marston Fired Kristy Lovich In July 2020 For Advocating That LAHSA Cut Ties With Law Enforcement — For The Simple Reason That Cop Involvement Makes Effective Outreach Impossible — As Her Comms Staff Struggled To Concoct A Response To The Subsequent Outcry Marston Told Them Not To Say Explicitly That The Response Was About Lovich — And To Rewrite Their Messaging “To Infuse A Tone Of Compassion” — You Can Read The Actual Comments She Inserted In The Document! →

Homeless Issues, Los Angeles City Government, Los Angeles County Government

Public Records Newly Obtained From LAHSA Shed Some Light On Homeless Encampment Cleanup Process — And LAHSA’s Role In It — Including Training Powerpoint By LAHSA Administrator Matthew Tenchavez — Organizational Chart Of LAHSA Outreach Personnel — And More Than 8K Entries From The Encampment Tracking Database — Showing Very Specific Information About Each Encampment Worked In 2019

August 12, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

I recently received a small but crucial set of records from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority relating to that organization’s role in the process of homeless encampment sweeps. LAHSA outreach workers are required to contact encampment residents and offer them services before LA City Sanitation and the LAPD come in and throw away all their stuff.

These records shed some light on the practical aspects of that requirement. How they’re organized across Los Angeles County, who the outreach workers are, how LAHSA characterizes the controlling policies in its training materials, and so on. These documents provide essential but fairly technical information about local government’s response to the crisis of homelessness. There’s nothing lurid here, just a mass of crucial details. You can browse through them here on Archive.Org and here are links, descriptions, and some samples of this material:

★ Org chart for LAHSA encampment outreach workers — XLSX — PDF — LAHSA is a joint powers authority rather than a department of the City of Los Angeles. It therefore operates across the entire county, which they have divided into Service Planning Areas, or SPAs. This chart gives names and funding sources for outreach workers and supervisors for each SPA. The XLSX file is the original and I also exported it as a PDF for utility.

★ 2019 encampment tracker entries — XLSX — This is a crucial document.⁴ It contains short descriptions of almost 9,000 encampment outreach instances, including date, location, names of LAHSA outreach workers, number of residents, and brief notes from the outreach staff. Here’s a sample of what’s in there, click to enlarge:

★ CSLA Training Powerpoint — PDF — This is a powerpoint presentation prepared by LAHSA administrator Matthew Tenchavez about the Clean Streets Los Angeles program, which is one of at least two City of LA encampment sweeping initiatives. This is essential information for understanding how LAHSA sees its role in the process, the rules they believe they are meant to follow, and so on. It also explains various software tools used in planning encampment sweeps, with some screenshots. If PDFs aren’t convenient, I have images of the 11 pages below.
Continue reading Public Records Newly Obtained From LAHSA Shed Some Light On Homeless Encampment Cleanup Process — And LAHSA’s Role In It — Including Training Powerpoint By LAHSA Administrator Matthew Tenchavez — Organizational Chart Of LAHSA Outreach Personnel — And More Than 8K Entries From The Encampment Tracking Database — Showing Very Specific Information About Each Encampment Worked In 2019 →

CD13

CD13 Staff Organizes On-Demand Homeless Encampment Cleanup for Benefit of Bryan Kim of “Scumbag” Cat-Kicking Koreatown Slumlords Kim and Casey, Subsequently Personally Invite Him to Support LAMC 56.11 in Council

July 21, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

CD13 gleefully kicking "frustrating" homeless people out of your neighborhood since 2013. — Mitch O’Farrell and his staff: gleefully kicking “frustrating” homeless people out of your neighborhood since 2013.

How does the City of Los Angeles decide which homeless encampments to target for cleanup? How do they decide when to target them? Well, if these two email chains from City Council District 13 about encampment-breaking on Vermont Avenue and Marathon Street in Koreatown are any indication (one and two) they target them when non-homeless people call CD13 and tell them to clean out the homeless people.⁵ And what do they get out of targeting them? Well, they’re politically savvy enough to turn down free lunches offered in exchange for their dirty work, but they will accept an offer of bused-in political supporters to astroturf the public comments section of a Council meeting. First let’s look at the players involved.

Bryan Kim is a partner in Koreatown based property management company Kim and Casey, which doesn’t seem to have a website.⁶ They do, however, have a Yelp page. This is notable for having uniformly one star reviews, which include comments like:⁷
They would tell me I was picky about the filth they’d promised to clean up before I moved in but never took care of it. They wouldn’t accept responsibility and blamed everyone and everything else until they were legally forced to take control of the growing sludge and cesspool that had been forming for I don’t know how many weeks .

Aram Taslagyan: "Hi Bryan, [the homeless encampment that was interfering with your pending property inspection] is all clean now. ... Please let me know if it starts up again at any level. — Aram Taslagyan: “Hi Bryan, [the homeless encampment that was interfering with your pending property inspection] is all clean now. … Please let me know if it starts up again at any level.

Or, even more colorfully:

I had my sink drain burst and when I asked them to fix it they said “NO”. The reason they gave me was that I had a bathroom sink to use and I dint really need the one in my kitchen. … What kind of management company is this? Also, one day as I was looking out my window, I saw one of the three guys who were walking the property from Kim and Casey Kick my neighbors cat at he was walking down the path way. It was the middle aged guy of the three that were walking the property. I don’t know his name and don’t care to know such a scumbag.

So that’s Bryan Kim according to Yelp; K-Town slumlord and associate of cat-kickers if not a cat-kicker himself. The other correspondent is CD13 field deputy Aram Taslagyan, whose bio you can read for yourself. The whole thing evidently began with a disconnected phone call from Kim to CD13 intern Sean Starkey, which resulted in this email:
Continue reading →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

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

November 14, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

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 →

Announcements

Lots of Documents, and Not of the Usual Sort!

July 21, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, 99 years ago in 1916. Her truth, like that of John Brown, goes marching on in Los Angeles in 2015.

Today I’m pleased to announce the availability of a bunch more documents, some of them really interesting, and none of them of the sort we’ve usually featured here. First of all we are adding the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to our list of scrutinizees, albeit in a fairly desultory manner. Documents we obtain will be available from the usual menus above, and here is a link to that page. We kick things off with a couple years worth of form 700s from the Commissioners and the Executive Director. For almost certainly nefarious reasons, the city of Los Angeles, unlike other more enlightened cities in California, does not require BID board members or high-level employees to file financial disclosures (although this may be changing soon, fingers crossed!), so obtaining these forms was the only way to get any insight into Kerry Morrison’s finances insofar as they relate to her work for the HPOA. And now, like Jesus Christ hisself, we have saved the best for last, so the good stuff is after the break!
Continue reading →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

We Have a Suspicion that Morrison’s Mission in New Exposition’s to Lie by Omission About Her Commission so Our Admonition to this Patrician Technician’s to Cure the Condition of her Own Volition with an Act of Contrition¹

July 5, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Kerry Morrison keeping schtum about her culpability. — Kerry Morrison, patrician technician of homeless policy in LA, keeping schtum about her culpability in various matters.

On the front page of the Summer 2015 issue of the HPOA newsletter, our heroine and perennial source of subject matter, Kerry Morrison, has an article cynically entitled Discouraging News About Homelessness Surprises No One. Her subject is the 2015 homeless count results, released last month and showing that homelessness in Los Angeles County has increased by 12% over 2013, the year of the last count. In her piece, Kerry gives a number of delusional speculations on why this might have happened: more crazy people, good weather in LA, Prop 47 (srsly), people who, following the example of Jesus Christ, give money to panhandlers, the FREAKING ACLU?!!³

You’d never guess though, from reading this little essay, that the County’s approach to the problem of homelessness consists of anything more than a bunch of random but self-styledly-good-natured business-people chilling in their offices speculating benignantly about how hobos gossiping amongst themselves about how the livin’ is easy down by the LA River³ might possibly have to our current homelessness armageddon. There are actually agencies in Los Angeles whose entire purpose is “to support, create and sustain solutions to homelessness in Los Angeles County…”
Continue reading We Have a Suspicion that Morrison’s Mission in New Exposition’s to Lie by Omission About Her Commission so Our Admonition to this Patrician Technician’s to Cure the Condition of her Own Volition with an Act of Contrition¹ →

Hypocrisy

Charlie Beck Explains the Real Purpose of LAHSA’s Homeless Count: It Will Allow LAPD to Resume Mass Incarceration of Homeless

March 24, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Charlie Beck at March 19, 2015 meeting of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, just prior to explaining that the biennial homeless count is gonna let the LAPD start arresting the homeless en masse like God intends them to do — Charlie Beck at March 19, 2015 meeting of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, just prior to explaining how LAHSA’s biennial homeless count is gonna let the LAPD start arresting the homeless *en masse* like God intends them to do

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), whose chair is none other than HPOA Executive Directrix Kerry Morrison, sponsors a biennial count of the homeless population of Los Angeles. And what is the purpose of this massive volunteer effort? Well, according to LAHSA, it’s to “[m]ake a difference in the lives of homeless men, women, and children throughout Los Angeles County.” That turns out to be quite accurate. The homeless count will eventually make a huge difference in the lives of the homeless of Los Angeles.

According to LAHSA executive director Peter Lynn, quoted in a January 2015 press release:

Peter Lynn, human being experiencing executive-directorship of LAHSA and person duly utilizing person-first language when publicly misrepresenting the motives behind the homeless count

The 2015 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count is a critical opportunity to gain information about the size and scope of the challenge we face to house community residents experiencing homelessness. We use this information to better target our homeless service resources. Volunteers will make a difference in their community, and the lives of their homeless neighbors, by committing four hours of their time.

Now, doesn’t that just sound warm and fuzzy, but what the heck does it really mean? Well, thanks to an unexpected visit to the March 19, 2015, HPOA Board meeting by Charlie Beck, LAPD capo di tutti capi, we have an explanation for you (hint: when Peter says “better target our homeless” that’s exactly what he means).
Continue reading Charlie Beck Explains the Real Purpose of LAHSA’s Homeless Count: It Will Allow LAPD to Resume Mass Incarceration of Homeless →