Tag Archives: Raquel K. Beard

CCEA Job Descriptions, Emails, Images and Emails from Richard Bloom’s September 2015 Visit to the Hollywood Entertainment District

Richard Bloom gets the old song-and-dance about the homeless while Steve Seyler looms in the background.
Richard Bloom gets the old song-and-dance about the homeless while Steve Seyler looms in the background.
Tonight I’m just announcing some miscellaneous documents from the Central City East Association and some more detailed information about Assemblyman Richard Bloom’s September 2015 visit to the Hollywood Entertainment District (which my colleagues have previously discussed). On the CCEA side, I have some some emails to and from Fred Faustino, CCEA deputy director of operations. Also I have job descriptions for CCEA Director of Operations and for CCEA Executive Director. This last one is going to come in extremely handy in a major project I’m working on, which I hope to be able to tell you about within the next few months. Turn the page for the HPOA news!
Continue reading CCEA Job Descriptions, Emails, Images and Emails from Richard Bloom’s September 2015 Visit to the Hollywood Entertainment District

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New Documents, Mostly Routine, although Assistant LAPD Chief Jorge Villegas Explicitly Acknowledges Limitations of Arrests as a Tool for Addressing Homelessness

Assistant Chief Jorge Villegas, LAPD: "As you know [homelessness] is an extremely complex issue to address.  It is not as simple as simply making an arrest.  As you know, we cannot arrest [our] way out of this complex social issue."
Assistant Chief Jorge Villegas, LAPD: “As you know [homelessness] is an extremely complex issue to address. It is not as simple as simply making an arrest. As you know, we cannot arrest [our] way out of this complex social issue.”
Today I uploaded documents from the DCBID, the Fashion District, and some emails from Raquel Beard to the Mayor’s office. The DCBID’s Operations Committee agendas are here, and according to Suzanne Holley this is all of them for which there are electronic copies. They don’t meet very often, it seems. Next up we have 2015 minutes and agendas for the Fashion District BID Board of Directors. There’s some interesting stuff here, although I haven’t had time to read them carefully. For instance, on February 26, 2015, the Board heard about the Central City Association’s plot to hire Rodriguez Strategies to fight the legalization of street vending in LA. The new information here is that Carol Schatz evidently pegged the cost at $60,000 and Kent Smith of the FDBID asked and received from the Board approval to donate $10,000. I think that, given how the original initiative expanded, including the hiring of subordinate publicists, that original estimate must have ended up to be quite low. In March Kent asked for and received from the board $5,000 to oppose Carol Liu’s Right to Rest Act. I really do wonder if this kind of political activism is a legal use of BID money, since it’s supposed to be used to provide services in the district above and beyond what the City provides. How, I wonder, is taking positions on state laws consistent with this charge? A question for another day, I guess. And finally, after the break, we have some emails from Raquel Beard of the CCEA to Eric Garcetti’s office.
Continue reading New Documents, Mostly Routine, although Assistant LAPD Chief Jorge Villegas Explicitly Acknowledges Limitations of Arrests as a Tool for Addressing Homelessness

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LACW, LACAN Lawsuit Against CCEA, City of LA, NOT Continued Until July Due to Successful-ish Ongoing Settlement Talks. Trial Still Set for April 26, 2016

Ammon Hennacy in Santa Monica in July, 1966.
Ammon Hennacy in Santa Monica in July, 1966.
NOTE: Clearly I can’t read. This is wrong. The joint proposed motion filed by the parties was DENIED by the court. Trial is still set for April 26, 2016.
According to pleadings filed on November 30, 2015, settlement talks in the lawsuit filed by Los Angeles Catholic Worker and the Los Angeles Community Action Network against the City of Los Angeles and the Central City East Association, which runs the Downtown Industrial District BID, are proceeding well. The parties filed a joint stipulation stating that they

…continue to engage in settlement negotiations and are actively exchanging proposals. The parties believe future talks will continue to be productive and are amenable to participating in further sessions with Judge Woehrle
[the magistrate judge in the case]. Because these early settlement conferences indicated a potential for resolution of this case, and because all parties are non-profits and government entities, the parties have attempted to delay incurring significant litigation expenses from discovery and motion practice while the parties have been actively engaged in settlement negotiations.

And there’s more of that kind of thing in the stipulation. Well, as the man said, “if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them.” On December 2, 2015, Judge Gutierrez filed an order pushing the trial date back three months to July 2016 to give the parties time to work everything out.
Continue reading LACW, LACAN Lawsuit Against CCEA, City of LA, NOT Continued Until July Due to Successful-ish Ongoing Settlement Talks. Trial Still Set for April 26, 2016

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New Emails from CCEA: Raquel K. Beard, Ed Camarillo, Estela Lopez (!), Etc.

Photograph attached to one of the emails I received recently from the CCEA.
Photograph attached to one of the emails I received recently from the CCEA.
Yesterday I got about a hundred pages of emails from CCEA Executive Director Raquel K. Beard. These are from September 1, 2015 through September 8, 2015 and supposedly comprise all nonexempt emails sent or received by anyone at the CCEA during that period. I haven’t read them carefully yet, so there may be undiscovered gems. One interesting thing is that there are a number of emails between Raquel and Estela Lopez. Estela was formerly Executive Director of the CCEA and Raquel was the Managing Director. Raquel left in 2012 to run Downtown Long Beach Associates, which, among other things, seems to manage a BID there.
Continue reading New Emails from CCEA: Raquel K. Beard, Ed Camarillo, Estela Lopez (!), Etc.

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Now Sashaying Down the Runway for your Délectation de la Haute Couture: A Preview of our Winter Collection of Fashion District BID Documents

This is what the Fashion District looks like on the Fashion District BID's instagram page and in its fevered imagination.  The reality is quite different and, frankly, way much more simpático.
This is what the Fashion District looks like on the Fashion District BID’s instagram page and in its fevered imagination. The reality is quite different and, frankly, way much more simpático.
I’m pleased to announce the arrival of the first batch of documents from the Fashion District BID. Mostly I decided to start collecting documents from them because of the recent lawsuit against them. I’m not collecting documents specifically about the lawsuit, but rather records which will allow researchers and interested parties to form an accurate understanding of the BID itself. There’s not much that’s super-interesting here yet, but links to what I have may be found after the break.
Continue reading Now Sashaying Down the Runway for your Délectation de la Haute Couture: A Preview of our Winter Collection of Fashion District BID Documents

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DCBID Shift Summaries, Carol Schatz Emails, CCEA Safety Team Materials

Carol Schatz about to grasp and crush someone or something and making the guy behind her on the right a little queasy.
Carol Schatz about to grasp and crush someone or something and making the guy behind her on the right a little queasy.
This evening I have the pleasure of announcing a big bunch of new documents, mostly from the DCBID, but a couple of choice bits from the CCEA as well.

• Over 500 shift summaries prepared by Universal Protection Service between January 1, 2015 and early October, 2015. You can browse them directly from here where you’ll also find a zip archive of the whole batch, or look for that same directory in the menu structure above at Documents/DCBID/Universal Protection Service/UPS Shift Summaries. No one here has had the time to look through these in detail yet.

• Fifty-three emails from/to Carol Schatz of the DCBID. These are available directly from here, and there’s also a zip archive of all of them. You can also get to them from the menu structure above if necessary. These are redacted mercilessly and almost certainly illegally (I’m working on that), but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. These are purportedly all of Carol Schatz’s DCBID emails for the third quarter of 2015, but, you know, I don’t think everything’s here. I’m working on that too. You’ll be hearing much more about this material in the near future.

And turn the page for the latest from the Downtown Death Star BID itself!
Continue reading DCBID Shift Summaries, Carol Schatz Emails, CCEA Safety Team Materials

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Many New Documents: CCEA, Media District, and HPOA.

Suzanne Holley, Chief Operating Something-or-Another with the DCBID and the Central City Association as well.
Suzanne Holley, Chief Operating Something-or-Another with the DCBID and the Central City Association as well. This image adorns this post for no reason whatsoever. I don’t even have any new documents from the DCBID.
Today is all documents, minimal commentary, no analysis:

  1. 2009 emails from HPOA about Sesame Street characters. See tag archive for context.
  2. Some new Universal Protection Service internal reports from the Media District. We already wrote about one of these. Here are a couple more.
  3. Many, many years worth of Board of Directors minutes from the CCEA provided by the ever-helpful-in-bizarro-world Raquel K. Beard. As always these people take no thought for making files sort properly in directories. I’ll fix this when I have time.
  4. A minimal number of CCEA committee minutes. According to Raquel K. Beard, “Committees do not meet monthly or quarterly, more so as needed,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. If you want a little puzzle to work out until someone around here gets time to write about it, you can think about why this item plus this email chain might add up to very, very bad news for the CCEA.


Image of Suzanne Holley is from a screenshot of this DCBID newsletter which, being a California public record, is in the public domain.

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Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 2, in which she Proposes to “Empower” BIDs (Including the Freaking CCEA?!?!) to Deal with Homelessness and, No Joke, to Pay Homeless People’s Parents to Let them Move Back In

Alisa Orduna at the Sunset-Vine BID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015.  Is anyone, anyone at all, listening to what's coming out of this woman's mouth?
Alisa Orduna at the Sunset-Vine BID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015. Is anyone, anyone at all, listening to what’s coming out of this woman’s mouth?
Yesterday we presented part 1 of our coverage of Garcetti aide Alisa Orduna’s visit to the Sunset-Vine BID meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, in which, among other nonsense, she announced that part of what the state of emergency means to the BIDs is that Garcetti is going to spend a million bucks on iPads for the BID Patrol. Today we bring you part two, in which she proposes to empower the BID Patrol (as well as the currently-being-sued-in-freaking-federal-court-for-how-they-deal-with-the-homeless Central City East no less) to deal with homelessness since they’re front-line responders, according to her. As if, with their guns, their shackles, their COINTELPRO-style surveillance of their critics, their freaking blessing by the LAPD, their locking up of every harmless heladero that falls into their clutches, their arrests of over 1000 homeless people per year, they weren’t freaking empowered enough. What’s next? Nuclear weapons? DEATH RAYS? Anyway, you can watch the whole thing here (try Chrome if Firefox acts wonky) and, as always, there’s a transcription after the break. Here’s what Alisa said:

but what’s the role for BIDs? I mean, so many of our BID officers are front line on the street. I met with Central City East BID, this BID, there was another BID, um, I forgot, but, you know, there was another BID that we’ve just been talking to, and the spike in violence, spike in substance abuse, the spike in, um, families, so it’s people with children that are out on the street in these encampments and often are abandoned, sometimes if their parents are active substance abusers, just the spike in the number of people, the spike in, the sense of permanency, I would say, with encampments, when before they’ve been, you know, none of this is [unintelligible], but someone may have been in a sleeping bag at the bus stop, but now, those coming in [unintelligible], they’re out in San Pedro, there was like a block-long encampment, that was pretty sturdy, you wouldn’t just be able to go in and take it down, you know, at some point, there was carpentry skills keeping it up, so it’s, it’s, how do we, how do we, adjust this, and what are, what do you guys see, and what’s, how can we empower BIDs so that, that information that they’re seeing and that experience that they’re having is fed back into us as policy-makers and we can together come [unintelligible] a solution.
Continue reading Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 2, in which she Proposes to “Empower” BIDs (Including the Freaking CCEA?!?!) to Deal with Homelessness and, No Joke, to Pay Homeless People’s Parents to Let them Move Back In

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Downtown Industrial District BID / Central City East Association Documents Now Available

White skin and red blood on Skid Row.
White skin and red blood on Skid Row.
I recently started requesting documents from the Central City East Association (CCEA), which runs the Downtown Industrial District BID. I’m not sure why, it was just a whim, but the executive directrix, a lady named Raquel Beard (who long-time readers may remember for her stunningly weird remarks about sidewalk vending), turned out to be so delightfully trollable that I’m just going to keep it up for a while. I can already see a couple of ways it might develop into a long game, but I’m keeping schtum about that for now. Meanwhile, take a look at what I got today. You can begin with CCEA in the Documents menu above. Also, here is a page for the new subdirectory. After the break I describe things in more detail, if you’re interested.
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Kerry Morrison: Hollywood Businesses too Feeble to Survive Free Market Without Municipally Enforced Draconian Anticompetitive Pinko Racist Regulatory Capture

Street vendor in Manhattan destroying the prosperity of the city, laying waste to the comfort and privilege of rich white people, and generally ruining EVERYTHING!!
Street vendor in Manhattan destroying the prosperity of the city, laying waste to the comfort and privilege of rich white people, and generally ruining EVERYTHING! And now the city of Los Angeles intends to forcibly convert Hollywood into a cultural and economic wasteland like New York City by allowing such miscreants to operate with impunity on our streets. “Not on our watch,” say BIDs.
Street food is one of the signature pleasures of the great cosmopolitan cities of the world. Practically alone amongst its peers, though, Los Angeles forbids vending on its public rights of way. This is because there are really no bounds to the willingness of the economic elites of this city to prohibit anything that normal human beings enjoy if by doing so they can stick a dagger in the neck of the poor. They will certainly destroy the village in order to save it.
Hollywood BIDs destroying the city of Los Angeles in order to save it from its own misguided sense of sanity
Representative of the Hollywood BIDs metaphorically destroying the city of Los Angeles in order to save it from perceived (albeit delusionally) unintended consequences of an all-too-rare outburst of sanity with regard to its street-vending policy.
Case in point: the City Council recently began to discuss legalizing street vending in Los Angeles. Sane people everywhere rejoice at this attempt to allow civilization to flourish and also bring an estimated half-billion dollars worth of economic activity out of the shadows and onto the bottom line. There’s a hot dog in the public manger, though.

The BIDs and their minions have leapt into coordinated action! They are in a cyclonic tizzy, explaining fast and loud how the unintended consequences of the sane and harmless choice to legalize street vending will ruin everything. It will e.g. impoverish small businesses, encourage crime, cause the unauthorized commercial use of public trash cans, cause the unauthorized non-use of public trash cans, provide increased funding to criminal street gangs, encourage armed robbery, cause diseases, and even more stuff too weird to list here. Think we’re exaggerating? Read on!
Continue reading Kerry Morrison: Hollywood Businesses too Feeble to Survive Free Market Without Municipally Enforced Draconian Anticompetitive Pinko Racist Regulatory Capture

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