Tag Archives: Mike Fong

Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation Committee Files Blistering Petition In Superior Court — Asks Court To “Reestablish The Rule Of Law” — And Require The City Of Los Angeles To Award Skid Row “its well-deserved Neighborhood Council”

July 27, 2018 Mike 1 Comment

Background: You can read my previous stories on the Skid Row Neighborhood Council formation effort and also see Jason McGahan’s article in the Weekly and Gale Holland’s article in the Times for more mainstream perspectives.

I haven’t reported on it before, but maybe you’re aware nevertheless that the Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation Committee along with founding members General Jeff and Katherine McNenny are suing the City of Los Angeles over their egregious, illegal, and immoral vote suppression and other horrors during the subdivision election last year.

And just yesterday they filed a second amended petition, which lays out the evil shenanigans committed by the City of Los Angeles in collusion with Estela Lopez, Rena Leddy, and other Downtown zillionaires and zillionaire lackeys, This is a blistering and righteous piece of legal writing. I highly recommend that you read all of it, although here are the main issues, and as always there are transcribed selections after the break.

◈ The City prohibited homeless voters from voting online or at any of the twelve pop-up polls, which seriously advantaged the anti-subdivision side.

◈ The City’s voter registration requirements disenfranchised the largely black homeless population of Skid Row, which violates the Voting Rights Act.

◈ The City’s last minute implementation of online voting and secret alterations of pop-up poll timing unfairly advantaged the anti-subdivision side.

◈ Online voting violated California Elections Code §19205, which states unambiguously that “No part of [a] voting system shall be connected to the Internet at any time.”

◈ DONE’s pop-up polls violated §22.820 of the Los Angeles Administrative Code, which requires that neighborhood council subdivision elections be held solely within the proposed boundaries.

And the main thing they’re asking the judge to do to remedy these and the other violations is to discount online votes and votes submitted at pop-up polls and award the SRNC formation committee their neighborhood council. There is much, much more, all of it, as I said, worth your time to read and understand. Turn the page for transcribed selections from the petition.
Continue reading Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation Committee Files Blistering Petition In Superior Court — Asks Court To “Reestablish The Rule Of Law” — And Require The City Of Los Angeles To Award Skid Row “its well-deserved Neighborhood Council” →

Announcements, Business Improvement Districts, Downtown Center BID

More Than Ten Thousand Emails! Downtown Santa Monica BID And Downtown Center BID! Two Unbelievably Rich Sets Of Records!

October 2, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

This is just a short note to announce two massive sets of emails that I’ve obtained over the last couple weeks. There’s so much material here that it’s taken an unusual amount of time to get it processed and published. I will be writing about this material over the next few weeks. There’s so much, and it’s so rich, that it’s going to take me a while to get it all sorted out, so I thought it’d be best to make it available to you right away:

Downtown Santa Monica BID — Emails between the City of Santa Monica and the Downtown Santa Monica BID from January 1 through September 8, 2017.
Downtown Center BID — Assorted emails from the Downtown Center BID, mostly from 2017.

Like I said, there’s so much here that it will take a while to get it sorted through. Meanwhile, though, turn the page for some interesting stuff you can begin to look for on your own.
Continue reading More Than Ten Thousand Emails! Downtown Santa Monica BID And Downtown Center BID! Two Unbelievably Rich Sets Of Records! →

Skid Row Neighborhood Council

At Various Hearings Grayce Liu Seems To Have Concealed The Fact That Homeless People Faced Documentation-Based Obstacles To Online Voting In Skid Row Neighborhood Council Election In Addition To Lack Of Internet Access. She And Her Minions Also Gave Personalized Registration Assistance To Scott Gray And Carol Schatz. What’s Wrong With This Picture?

June 10, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

Background: You can read my previous stories on the Skid Row Neighborhood Council formation effort and also see Gale Holland’s article in the Times for a more mainstream perspective.

Recently I obtained a few emails which shed even more light on the already unbelievable injustice worked upon the Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation Committee by CD14 rep José Huizar. As has already been widely reported he unilaterally imposed online voting less than two weeks before the election. He did this in the face of explicit testimony that homeless residents would be irremediably disadvantaged by their relative lack of access to the Internet, a problem known as the digital divide.

He also ignored the serious problem that allowing online voting automatically registered more than 1,000 voters who could reasonably be expected to vote against the SRNC formation effort.¹ These 1,000 voters obviously determined the outcome of the election given that, according to Gale Holland of the LA Times, there were 1,398 online ballots cast and 807 were cast against the SRNC.

Now, in addition to these trangressions, newly obtained emails reveal the fact that homeless people without adequate documentation were forbidden from voting online. Also, even non-homeless people, even people as powerful as Carol Schatz and Scott Gray,² who did have adequate documentation had trouble registering to vote online and were assisted on an individual basis by Department of Neighborhood Empowerment staffers Stephen Box and Mike Fong. How much more difficult, then, was it for homeless people who weren’t on a first name basis with City staff, to register?

Finally, an email from Grayce Liu reveals that online registration was cut off at 11:59 p.m. on April 2, four days before the election. It appears from the Council File that the Council’s approval of online voting wasn’t finalized until March 28, which means that it ran for less than a week. This shows the role of the preregistered 1,000 voters mentioned above to be even more crucial than previously thought, given that proponents had to start essentially from scratch with the difficult process of online registration.
Continue reading At Various Hearings Grayce Liu Seems To Have Concealed The Fact That Homeless People Faced Documentation-Based Obstacles To Online Voting In Skid Row Neighborhood Council Election In Addition To Lack Of Internet Access. She And Her Minions Also Gave Personalized Registration Assistance To Scott Gray And Carol Schatz. What’s Wrong With This Picture? →

Announcements, Central City East Association, Skid Row Neighborhood Council

300-Ish Pages of Estela Lopez’s Emails From The Last Few Months, Including Discussions Of Homelessness, Skid Row NC, Why The Freaking LAPD Doesn’t Bust More Protest Marches Like BIDs Want Them To, Operation Clean Streets, The California Public Records Act, And So On And On And On…

April 9, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

I just recently received a few hundred pages of emails from Estela Lopez, voodoo queen of the Central City East Association, and they are available on Archive.Org and also directly from static storage. Most of it is the unmitigatedly tedious bullshit with which these BIDdies fill their lives and their inboxes, but, as usual, there are a few interesting items. I already wrote the other day about Estela Lopez’s aggressive foray into CPRAlandia, and here are a few other items that are worth looking at individually:

Estela Lopez flirting with LAPD Sgt. Michael Flanagan — by calling him “Sarge.” Doesn’t it just make your knees etc. go all ooshly-gooshly when badge-BIDdies call cops by overly familiar swackety-swickety-nackety-nicknames? Our beloved Ms. Kerry Morrison is famous for this. Something about heavily armed protectors of the property rights of zillionaires brings it out of them, I guess.
Batty little fusspot Blair Besten to E. Lopez on a recent CPRA decision — by the California Supreme Court making it very clear that public records on private devices are still public records. I’m glad to see Blair Besten is keeping up with the laws on public records. If only she would start following the laws as well as keeping up with them! Note also how she doesn’t need to explain to Estela why she’s sending this information. She’s sending it because of me.
A long discussion between E. Lopez, General Jeff — and Mike Fong of DONE about meeting locations for the Skid Row Neighborhood Council thing, with Estela Lopez demonstrating her characteristically poker-faced ice-water-veined terroristic civility. We’re not envisioning her as the Wicked Queen just randomly, you know.

And turn the page for two more examples, and to learn why, which I bet you didn’t even know that they were doing, the LAPD was praying for rain in January!
Continue reading 300-Ish Pages of Estela Lopez’s Emails From The Last Few Months, Including Discussions Of Homelessness, Skid Row NC, Why The Freaking LAPD Doesn’t Bust More Protest Marches Like BIDs Want Them To, Operation Clean Streets, The California Public Records Act, And So On And On And On… →