Tag Archives: Streets and Highways Code 36623

Business Improvement Districts, Los Angeles City Government

The Greater Leimert Park Village BID Renewed For Five Years Starting In 2020 — Despite LA City Clerk Holly Wolcott’s Declared Policy Of Not Using City Owned Properties To Tip A BID Over The Formation Threshold She Voted All The City Property Yes — Without These Votes The BID Would Have Overwhelmingly Failed To Be Created At Both The Petition Stage And At The Balloting Stage — The BID Was Thus Forced On Property Owners By The City Of Los Angeles — Which Is Not How Things Are Supposed To Work —This Smells Of Council Office Interference But As Usual It’s Going To Take Forever To Learn What’s Going On

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General background: This post is about the Greater Leimert Park Village Business Improvement District. I sued them over CPRA compliance in 2018 and they produced records and settled up with my lawyer, Anna von Herrmann, in 2019.
Technical background: There are two phases in the establishment of a business improvement district. The first is the petition stage. In order for the establishment process to move forward petitions in favor representing more than 50% of the total assessed value in the BID must be submitted. If this happens the process moves to the balloting stage. In order for the BID to be established ballots representing more than 50% of the total assessed value represented by the ballots received must vote in favor of formation.

Key point: To create a BID more than 50% of the total value must vote yes on petitions but only more than 50% of the value of received ballots must vote yes.1

Warning: The figures I use in this post come from this spreadsheet I made from the actual petitions and this other one I made from the actual ballots. I was forced to make my own spreadsheets because the City of LA would only provide the figures formatted as a PDF.2 None of the differences are enough to change any of the conclusions I draw from the numbers.

When the City of Los Angeles started up the modern version of its business improvement district program in 1994 the City Council required the City Clerk to vote yes on both BID petitions and ballots for City-owned property. In 2018, though, in apparent violation of this requirement, Clerk Holly Wolcott seems to have unilaterally decided not to vote her petitions yes until private owners of property had already brought support over the 50.1% threshold.

She stuck to this policy in 2020 with the Chinatown BID renewal fiasco to the point where Gil Cedillo introduced a motion requiring her to vote the petitions yes even though she was already required to do so by Council’s 1996 action. So isn’t it interesting that the Greater Leimert Park Village BID, which renewed in 2019 for five years beginning in 2020, would have failed to be established at both the petition stage and at the ballot stage if Wolcott hadn’t voted the City’s outrageously high 12.8% of the assessed property values in favor of formation?
Continue reading The Greater Leimert Park Village BID Renewed For Five Years Starting In 2020 — Despite LA City Clerk Holly Wolcott’s Declared Policy Of Not Using City Owned Properties To Tip A BID Over The Formation Threshold She Voted All The City Property Yes — Without These Votes The BID Would Have Overwhelmingly Failed To Be Created At Both The Petition Stage And At The Balloting Stage — The BID Was Thus Forced On Property Owners By The City Of Los Angeles — Which Is Not How Things Are Supposed To Work —This Smells Of Council Office Interference But As Usual It’s Going To Take Forever To Learn What’s Going On →

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Business Improvement Districts, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Two Interesting Protests Against BID Renewals In Hollywood — One By A Civil Engineer Attacking The Constitutional Adequacy Of Ed Henning’s Self-Plagiarized Boilerplate Engineering Report — The Other Somewhat Plausibly Accusing Kerry Morrison Of Complicity In The Payoff Of Transients To Harass Anti-BID Property Owners

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You may have noticed that the Property and Business Improvement Law of 1994 makes allowance for property owners in a proposed BID to file “protests,” which must be accounted for by the City during the establishment or renewal process.3 For whatever reason, possibly the mandate that the City make a determination regarding protests received,4 these protests show up in the relevant Council File for all the world to read! And sometimes they are really interesting! Like the two recent doozies I have for your pleasant perusal today!

◪ Setrak Kinian protest — this is against the renewing Hollywood Entertainment District BID, filed by a property owner in the old Sunset & Vine BID — the two BIDs are being unified in their current renewal — and has some essentially kooky but nevertheless fairly explanatory5 allegations against Ms. Kerry Morrison.

For instance, Kinian claims that her BID pays off homeless people to hang around the properties of BID opponents in order to encourage them to support the BID. He also makes the not-completely-implausible claim that one goal of the BID is to force smaller property owners to sell out to larger ones. The Council File for this renewal is CF 14-0855. As always, turn the page for some selected transcriptions and commentary.

◪ Jim McQuiston protest — Against the renewing Hollywood Media District BID. McQuiston is a civil engineer and provides a really detailed6 denunciation of Ed Henning’s characteristically crapola engineer’s report. This is especially interesting to me given that one of my ongoing projects, which is to get the Board for Professional Engineers to take the preparation of engineering reports for BID formations seriously as the practice of civil engineering.7 The Council File for this renewal is CF 12-0963. Also Henning’s report is here. As always, turn the page for selected transcriptions and commentary.
Continue reading Two Interesting Protests Against BID Renewals In Hollywood — One By A Civil Engineer Attacking The Constitutional Adequacy Of Ed Henning’s Self-Plagiarized Boilerplate Engineering Report — The Other Somewhat Plausibly Accusing Kerry Morrison Of Complicity In The Payoff Of Transients To Harass Anti-BID Property Owners →

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Business Improvement Districts, Los Angeles City Government

The Los Angeles Unified School District Evidently Voids All Its BID Establishment Petitions By Adding A Limiting Clause — They Seem To Add The Same Clause To Their Actual Ballots But Evidently It Does Not Void Them — It’s Not Clear What’s Going On Here But Probably Something Is

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I recently received almost a thousand pages of emails between the Los Angeles City Clerk‘s office and correspondents at various BIDs. You can obtain the whole pile here on Archive.Org. Among these was this interesting little exchange between Clerk staffie Dennis Rader and notorious outlaw BID consultant Aaron Aulenta of Urban Place Consulting.

This post is dedicated to exploring the issues raised by this email. It’s unavoidably technical, so you may want to skip it. On the other hand, at least I’m not going to call anyone nasty names, which I know will please a certain perennially disgruntled audience segment. Boring or not, though, it touches on essential and little-explored issues of BIDology. The exchange began on May 7, 2018, when Aaron Aulenta emailed Dennis Rader:

I know you’re probably swamped at the moment with the ballot mail-out this week, but I had a quick lausd question. Do you know if they returned a petition for either Hollywood or Fashion without hand writing in the ‘approval conditioned upon’ phrase? In other words, did they return a petition that was officially counted?

Continue reading The Los Angeles Unified School District Evidently Voids All Its BID Establishment Petitions By Adding A Limiting Clause — They Seem To Add The Same Clause To Their Actual Ballots But Evidently It Does Not Void Them — It’s Not Clear What’s Going On Here But Probably Something Is →

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Business Improvement Districts, Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles City Government

What Does The City Of Los Angeles Consider “A Significant Number Of Protests” Against BID Formation Or Renewal? A Tragic Lesson From A Failed 2016 Attempt To Disestablish The Los Feliz Village BID

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Looking south along Vermont Avenue from Russell Avenue in 1974 (with a good old triangular RTD sign in the foreground!). The trees are bigger now, but otherwise is Los Feliz Village really better off 43 years later?
Long-time readers of this blog will recall that the locus classicus of operational BID policies in the City of Los Angeles is to be found in Council File 96-1972, which is too old to have actual documents online, but I scanned and published a number of them last year.8 Therein may be found the City’s BID Policy and Implementation Guidelines, which are meant to provide an L.A.-specific implementation of the Property and Business Improvement Law of 1994.

Chapter 2 of that law describes the process for establishment and renewal of a BID,9 and it’s remarkable how tentative, how conditional the process is. It’s well-known by this point that in order for a BID to be formed it’s necessary that property owners representing more than 50% of the assessed value be in favor.10 It’s necessary, but it by no means sufficient. Section 36625(a) very clearly leaves the question of formation up to the Council:

If the city council, following the public hearing, decides to establish a proposed property and business improvement district, the city council shall adopt a resolution of formation…

The only mandatory requirement with respect to BID establishment in the whole Chapter is found in Section 36623(b), which says that if owners holding 50% or more of the assessed value are opposed to the BID, not only can it not be formed, but no further attempts can be made to form it for a year.

And the discretionary nature of the process is reflected in the City’s BID Policy and Implementation Guidelines as well. Therein it states:11
The City Council can proceed with the BID if the protest is less than 50%. However, BID proponents are cautioned that they should not expect a favorable vote from the City Council with a significant number of protests.

From the context it’s clear that the policy means that there is some threshold of protest less than 50% with respect to which the Council will not establish the proposed BID even though the Property and BID Act would allow them to do so.

Thus the question arises as to what this threshold is. Well, it turns out that an episode early last year involving the Los Feliz Village BID sheds some light on this question.12 The short answer is that business owners13 representing 16.95% of the assessed value protested, an unprecedented number,14 and yet City Council renewed the BID unanimously. Turn the page for a detailed recounting of the tragic details!
Continue reading What Does The City Of Los Angeles Consider “A Significant Number Of Protests” Against BID Formation Or Renewal? A Tragic Lesson From A Failed 2016 Attempt To Disestablish The Los Feliz Village BID →

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