Tag Archives: Tommy Kelly

Los Angeles City Government

The City Of Los Angeles Emergency Operations Center On East Temple Street Houses The Unified Homelessness Response Center — And A Lot Of Other Departments As Well — It’s Managed By Two Committees — The Emergency Management Committee — And The Emergency Operations Board — These Bodies Meet Inside The Emergency Operations Center — And Their Meetings Are Subject To The Brown Act — Which Means That The Public Can Attend — Inside The Building — Therefore At Least Sporadically It’s Open To The Public — Which Is Big News For Various Reasons — And LAPD Chief Michel Moore Chairs The Board — Although Not The Committee — Which Would Seem To Offer An Interesting Opportunity For General Public Comment

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The City of Los Angeles has an Emergency Operations Center situated at 500 E. Temple Street. There are a lot of different departments housed in the building, but of most interest to me is the Unified Homelessness Response Center. You may recall, if you follow my Twitter feed, that last November as part of our years-long quest to get accurate information about upcoming encampment sweeps, Tommy Kelly of Streetwatch Los Angeles and I went over to UHRC in person and demanded access to the schedules. And we were menaced by a confused-about-the-law cop and made to leave.

According to the cop at the time the building isn’t open to the public. This may or may not be true, but the fact that he said it at all explains how exceedingly interested I was to discover this very morning that the Emergency Operations Center is managed by two distinct committees, whose meetings seem to be open to the public. There’s the Emergency Management Committee and the Emergency Operations Board.

This last body is chaired by the Chief of Police, currently of course Michel Moore, and would therefore seem to offer an interesting and hitherto unexploited opportunity for public comment. You can sign up to receive agendas for both of these groups via email. There’s also an archive of old agendas and minutes on the Emergency Operations Center website — Here for the Board and here for the Committee.

I certainly plan to attend these meetings in the future when possible. It’ll be really something to get inside that building, to even be allowed to make video of the goings-on, without being menaced by loony-tunes know-nothings from LAPD. See you there, perhaps?!

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