So it turns out that a major scandal involving a business improvement district has been brewing up in Burbank since September 2016. The short version of the story is that a Burbank BID violated the Brown Act and may have violated State laws forbidding the use of public funds in political campaigns. A local activist, David Spell, turned them in to the LA County DA and the Fair Political Practices Commission.1
In December 2016 the Burbank City Attorney published a fascinating report on the episode,2 which may shine a great deal of light on the legal status of BID assessments as public funds. Furthermore, Spell called for the Burbank City Council to hold a disestablishment hearing as required by Streets and Highways Code §36670(a)(1).3
The Board rejected this complaint with this letter, claiming that they do not consider the preparation of BID reports to be within their jurisdiction. There’s a transcription of this PDF at the very end of this post.
This is yet another example of how no one in the government, state or local, is willing to regulate BIDs at all or hold them accountable for anything.
One of the required elements of the process of forming a property based BID, imposed by the PBID Law at §36622(n), is:
… a detailed engineer’s report prepared by a registered professional engineer certified by the State of California supporting all assessments contemplated by the management district plan.
This subsection actually incorporates a requirement imposed on all special assessment districts4 by the California Constitution at Article XIIID(4)(b), which imposes the same requirement in slightly more general language, having as it does to apply to any kind of special assessment:
All assessments shall be supported by a detailed engineer’s report prepared by a registered professional engineer certified by the State of California.
One of the most neglected aspects of the Property and Business Improvement District Act, the fons et origo of the state’s grant of authority to establish, regulate, and control BIDs, is a limitation found in §36625(a)(6), which states:
The revenue from the levy of assessments within a district shall not be used to provide improvements, maintenance, or activities outside the district or for any purpose other than the purposes specified in the resolution of intention, as modified by the city council at the hearing concerning establishment of the district.
This places two essential limitations on how BIDs are allowed to spend the money they collect from property owners.5 First, BIDs must only spend their money on stuff inside their districts, and second they must only spend it on activities specified in the resolution of intention to form the district. In the City of Los Angeles, at least, these activities are specified by incorporating the BID’s management district plan, which is filed with the City Council at some point prior to the BID’s formation, into the ordinance of intention.6
Now, if you follow this blog even half-heartedly, you’re well aware that this statute is completely flouted by BIDs in the City of Los Angeles. For instance, Blair Besten’s lobbying over Skid Row, which isn’t part of the Historic Core BID at all, not to mention Hurricane Kerry Morrison’s indefatigable lobbying everyone in the whole freaking universe over reforms to the Public Records Act.
And of course, all of them, every last delusional white supremacist BID in the whole freaking City of Los Angeles lobbying7 against Proposition 47, a particularly half-witted example of which can be found here. Which brings us to today’s subject, which is that squarmy little love child of Jeff Zarrinnam and David Miscavige known to the world as the East Hollywood BID.
It seems that at their upcoming meeting,8 at least according to the agenda, they’re poised to discuss the following item:
Presentation on the Reducing Crime and Keeping California Safe Act of 2018…………….Michael Ziegler, Public Safety Consultant, Assemblymember Jim Cooper
Well, they’re operational now, friends! Yesterday morning the VBBID CEO, AKA President-For-Life Tara Devine, transmitted in interstate commerce9 an announcement of the BID’s first-ever meeting. Here are the documents involved:
The meeting is on Friday morning at 10 a.m. If you’re able and willing to attend and film the entire meeting, which is your absolute right under the Brown Act, please do so, as various prior commitments prevent me from attending. If you’d like some tips on how to film Brown Act meetings effectively, please get in touch!
OK, I have a tiny little story for you about a tiny little BID, the East Hollywood BID, located in beautiful EHo, a toponym commonly used by no living human being ever for East Hollywood.
On December 20, 2017, at 4:26 p.m., East Hollywood BID Boss Flunky Jacob Jauregui10 sent out an email to the EHBID mailing list announcing a special meeting to be held by teleconference on Friday, December 22.11 I noticed that there was no physical location given in the announcement or on the agenda. However, the Brown Act explicitly forbids this. See §54953(b), which requires that if teleconferencing is used there must by physical locations which are open to the public at which they can participate in the meeting.
Some of you may know Chris Loos, web designer to zillionaires, or at least to their zombie marionette cheerleaders slash anti-homeless hit squad over at the Central City East Association. He and his asshole buddy Steve Sharp13 run this zillionaire-front post-ethical propaganda outlet known as Urbanize.LA which is mostly famous for having published a Loos-lipped slab of crapola-deluxe about the Skid Row Neighborhood Council. Skid Row Voodoo Queen Estela Lopez was so pleased with Loos’s work that she fired off an email to her co-conspirators on the very day of its publication drawing their attention to it.
As you may already know quite well, in the City of Los Angeles, people are required by the Municipal Lobbying Ordinance to register with the Ethics Commission if they’re compensated for 30 hours of lobbying activity over three consecutive months.14 This year I’ve been working on reporting BID consultants to the Ethics Commission for failure to comply. So far I’ve filed two complaints, both against Tara Devine, one for her work on the Venice Beach BID and another for her work on the South Park BID.
But consultants aren’t the only BID people who spend their time trying to influence municipal legislation.15 BID staff actually spend a huge amount of time on this as well, and they never ever register as lobbyists. Also, they have never, in the entire history of Los Angeles, ever been called to account for failing to register. In fact, they’ve fought vigorously against the very idea that their work is even subject to the MLO.16
Alleged bigamist and CD9 rep Curren Price to developers: Want to build a car dealership? Gimme $50,000 to pay for another damn business improvement district!Maybe you’ve heard about the impending move of Honda of Downtown Los Angeles to a gigantic new five story building on Martin Luther King Blvd. at Hoover. Building projects of this size don’t happen in Los Angeles without a lot of involvement of the relevant Council District, which in this case is CD9, repped by Alleged bigamist Curren Price.19 The various negotiations and agreements are typically formalized in a development agreement between the City and the developer, and this is no exception. You can read the whole thing here, although it’s a heavyweight 35MB PDF download, so click with care.
And one of the typical elements of these development agreements is a statement of the public benefits that are expected to result from the project. These typically include financial contributions to this or that cause favored by the Councilmember, introduced by the phrase “Additionally, as consideration for this Agreement, Developer agrees to provide the following…” In this case, there are two of these (found on page 7 of the agreement, here’s a PDF of just the relevant page, also find a transcription after the break).
The first is $100,000 for present and future employees of Honda of DTLA to attend LA Trade Tech.20 The other contribution to the putative public benefit is $50,000 to pay a BID consultant for the formation of a new business improvement district in CD9. CD9 presently has three BIDs, which are the Figueroa Corridor BID, the Central Avenue Historic District BID, and the shadowy South Los Angeles Industrial Tract BID, so this would make a fourth.
Originally I thought that this new dealership would be located in the Figueroa Corridor BID, but a glance at their map reveals that the north side of MLK is the BID’s southern boundary, which is why, I suppose, that a new BID is necessary. Anyway, there’s no real moral to this story, although I admit it’s pretty jarring to see the formation of yet another damn BID pitched as a public benefit.
It’s a long term project of mine to turn in as many BID consultants as possible to the City Ethics Commission for failing to register as lobbyists. So far, though, I’ve only managed to report Tara Devine for her work on the Venice Beach BID because the work is so involved. Such a report has two essential components:
An argument that a specific BID consultant was paid for sufficiently many hours over sufficiently few months to trigger the registration requirement found in the MLO at LAMC §48.07(A).
It occurred to me recently that the first argument will be the same for all BID consultants, and that therefore it would be possible to streamline the reporting process by writing it up in a generic format that would apply to any given BID consultant. So that’s what I did, and you can read the result here. I will be using this to make a number of complaints against BID consultants in the near future, which I will report on here.
So it seems that the Port of Los Angeles has something called a small business enterprise program, in which they “provide additional opportunities for small businesses to participate in professional service and construction contracts … in a manner that reflects the diversity of the City of Los Angeles.” (see this PDF for details).
And it also seems that the San Pedro BID contracts with the Port every summer to run trolleys around downtown San Pedro. And as part of the contract, the Port requires the BID to complete an Affadavit of Company Status. And part of the status is whether the contractor is a small business or not. As you can see from the PDF or from the image that appears somewhere near this sentence, the San Pedro BID21 claims to be a “Very Small Business Enterprise” (“VSBE”) which is an extra-small form of Small Business Enterprise (“SBE”). Screenshot of the San Pedro BID’s contractor status affadavit showing their claim to be a “very small business enterprise.”
Of course, with all such programs it’s important to have clear definitions, and the Port of LA has laid theirs out for all to see in the cover sheet of this certification form, which all contractors are required to fill out and submit with a notarized signature under penalty of perjury. The relevant bit for our purposes is:
The Harbor Department defines a SBE as an independently owned and operated business that is not dominant in its field and meets criteria set forth by the Small Business Administration in Title 13, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 121.
