Pigeonhole Principle | Michael Kohlhaas dot org

I wrote yesterday about a troubling meeting of the Ethics Commission concerning revisions to the Municipal Lobbying Ordinance. The proposals are still very much in flux, and timely public comments are not only essential for swaying the wavering commissioners in the right direction, but the commissioners, no matter their other flaws, do seem to read them, so they’re likely to be effective if submitted over the next couple of months.¹

I had planned to write a letter to the Commission about all the issues together and publish it here as well, but the more I think about it the more I have to say. Thus I thought it would be much easier for everyone if I wrote about one issue at a time and then edited the posts down into a single letter to the Commission. Also, maybe you’ll find some of my ideas useful in framing your own letters, which should be sent to ethics.policy@lacity.org.

This post, then, is the first installment of that project, and the subject is the proposed change from a time-based registration requirement to a compensation-based requirement. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you’re surely not alone. Turn the page for an introduction to the issue and arguments in favor of making the change.
Continue reading In Defense Of A Change To A Compensation-Based Threshold For Lobbying Registration In Los Angeles →

Yesterday I took a little trip South on Flower Street to the dark horse Death Star of downtown, the South Park BID, to look over some public records that they’ve been holding out on since January 2017 and only coughed up because my lawyer can beat up their lawyer.² I found a hot mess of, among many, many problems, bizarrely damaged emails printed to PDF in random order with unintelligible OCR, missing attachments, purposely scrambled pages, and misnamed and poorly divided files. It’s going to take quite a while to put this nonsense into any kind of useful state,³ but I know a lot of my readers are wondering what’s up with shadowy BID consultant Tara Devine,⁴ so I thought I’d get the information concerning her up as fast as possible, even though it’s not yet in an ideal format.

The documents on Archive.Org — This is four gigantic PDF spools of emails and (hallelujah!) a bunch of invoices. They’re almost unusable, but single word search at least works. Phrase search not so much. The invoices are the really essential item, though, and are linked-to directly and described in the next line.
All invoices from Devine Strategies to SPBID since 2012 — This is damning with respect to constructing further reports to the Ethics Commission on Tara Devine’s unregistered lobbying. You may recall that my first attempt at this required an inordinate amount of painstaking analysis to prove a violation of the Municipal Lobbying Ordinance. With these invoices in hand the next few cases won’t be nearly as difficult to make.

That’s the big news, and you can turn the page if you’re in the mood for more detail and discussion. Note, though, that I’ll be posting about this material again once I get it revised into a more useful form.
Continue reading Massive Document Dump Concerning Shadowy BID Consultant Tara Devine — What Has She Been Up To Since Destroying Venice Beach And How She Is Probably In Way More Trouble Than Anyone Thought With Respect To Not Having Registered As A Lobbyist →