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.
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-based1 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. Continue reading 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!→
The City of Los Angeles has a revolving door law, which prohibits certain high-level officials from being paid to lobby the city government for various lengths of time after leaving their city jobs. This law was passed by the City Council in its current form at the end of 2013 and it became effective on February 10, 2014. It states that:
For one year after leaving City service, a City official shall not receive compensation to attempt to influence, either personally or through an agent, City action on any matter pending before any agency on behalf of a person other than an agency if, during the 24 months preceding the official’s departure from City service, the official held any of the following positions: elected City officer; Board of Public Works Commissioner; General Manager; Chief Administrative Officer; Mayor’s Chief of Staff; Deputy Mayor; Mayoral Aide VII; Mayoral Aide VIII; Executive Assistant City Attorney; Chief Assistant City Attorney; Senior Assistant City Attorney; City Attorney Exempt Employee; Chief Deputy Controller; Administrative Deputy Controller; Principal Deputy Controller; Council Aide VI; or Council Aide VII.
Now, it turns out that it’s not so easy to find out who falls into those categories.2 The problem is that, e.g., a Council Aide VII may have any number of job titles. They might be a chief of staff, a director of planning, and so on. A later section of the law says:
By July 31 of every year, the City Controller shall submit to the Ethics Commission the names of each individual who held a position identified in Subsection C.1. during the preceding 24 months. By July 31 of every year, the City Clerk shall submit to the Ethics Commission the names of each individual who held a City Attorney Exempt position as provided in City Charter Section 1050(d) during the preceding 24 months.
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.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! Continue reading 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→
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.
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. 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. Continue reading 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→
Joe Mariani, right up front, smilin’, man…ahh, beautiful! Well, here is a bunch of emails, which we obtained from the Los Angeles City Attorney using the California Public Records Act, between BID employees Smilin’ Joe Mariani and Kerry Morrison and various people that work for the City of Los Angeles. We join the story when Joe writes to Gary Benjamin, who is eyeglass-fashionista Councilguy Mitch O’Farrell’s something-or-another for what-passes-for-planning-at-200-Spring-Street. It seems the boys met up in early September 2014 at an HPOA “Streetscape2 Committee” meeting, giving Joe a pretext to renew the big ask: CD13 employee Gary Benjamin, who “enjoys…good urbanism.”
Great seeing you today at the Streetscape Committee meeting. As I mentioned, if you can please follow up with GSD3 and ask when our lease will be ready for the Cherokee space we would appreciate it [sic]. According to our vendor we are supposed to be off the Selma parking lot by the end of September, so the sooner we can move in the better.
So the BID needs some space and they’re going to lease it from the city. So far, so good. After all, they’re a public agency created by the city to do the city’s work. On September 9, 2014, Gary responds, saying he’ll check into it. On September 23, 2014, Gary announces that there’s a little problem. Says Gary:
Joe,
I have some bad news regarding the prospect of getting the lease in a timely manner. I checked in with the General Services Department (GSD) a couple weeks back and they said they were still not authorized to issue the lease, despite the approved Council motion.4 This seemed ridiculous to us, as the language of the motion came from Rene Sagles5 and he assured us the motion would be sufficient. GSD staffers were aware of the motion as it moved through the ITGS6 Committee, and yet they raised no red flags. In the last week, I’ve been in further communication with GSD, the City Attorney’s office and Rene Sagles. Apparently, DOT have not been following City standards regarding lease of space for some time now. Recently the City Attorney took note of this issue and has forced them to undergo a more rigorous public solicitation RFP process. Your lease process has dragged on for so long because of a lack of communication between DOT and GSD and a general uncertainty among the bureaus about how to proceed.
I now have Melody McCormick of GSD working with DOT and the City Attorney to draft a new “sole source” motion that will explain why the normal RFP process was not followed and why the HPOA should get this lease. They have told me they can have the motion ready by the end of the week. We will work to waive it from ITGS committee and get it approved at Council next week ideally. Then the City Attorney will need to draft the lease. It will still be another month, at the earliest, until the lease will be issued. I’m really sorry about all this confusion and for losing time pushing forward a motion that was insufficient.
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.
Why does jittery little psychopath Carol Massie hate America and the residents of Hollywood so much? Only God and her pyschoanalyst know for sure…First a little background. Council District 14 representative José Huizar recently proposed a law to legalize street vending in Los Angeles. Predictably, the BIDs are horrified by the thought that this might pass.
In fact, they’re so horrified that the icky-poo Central City Association hired thuggish PR flacks Rodriguez Strategies to help defeat it. We’ll be writing much more on this presently, but for now you just need to know that one of the subterfuges that the BIDs and Rodriguez Strategies are proposing is to get the law modified to allow neighborhoods to opt in rather than the city-wide legalization that’s now on the table. Rodriguez Strategies PR flackie Jessica Borek at the March 17, 2015 meeting of the SVBID board of directors, calmy contemplating methods to utterly destroy the living culture of Los Angeles and plow salt into the fields where it once grew
This is bad enough, of course, since everyone knows that opt-in regulations kill participation, but even this mild, skewed-in-her-favor form of democracy is too much for jittery little psychopath and big kahunette of the Sunset-Vine BID, Carol Massie. She doesn’t believe in the holy principle of one-person-one-vote. WHAT IF PEOPLE VOTE THE WRONG WAY??!? After hearing a couple of flacks from Rodriguez explain the strategy at the March 17, 2015 meeting of the SVBID board of directors, Carol Massie ranted thusly:
Um…you know, Kerry, uh, one of the things that I think we should consider…and this was something that you mentioned, Marie, was the idea of having a certain percentage of the residents and the businesses. The problem with the residents is that they don’t deal with the things that the businesses do, so they might say “WHOAH! A bunch of great, cheap food and cheap CDs, and they could vote it in, and then all the businesses are outvoted, because there’s a lot fewer businesses than there are residents, and so having the residents in on the opt-ins [unintelligible] Continue reading Why Does Hollywood McDonald’s Queen Carol Massie Hate America, Mom, Apple Pie, Bacon Dogs, and the Residents of Hollywood?→
