Tag Archives: Venice Beach BID

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

1 Comment

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 →

Share
Business Improvement Districts, Los Angeles City Government, Venice Beach BID

Here’s Actual Proof That Los Angeles City Clerk Holly Wolcott Is Refusing To Sign BID Establishment Petitions For LA City Property Until Half The Other Property Owners In The Proposed District Have Signed — This Is Not Exactly A Policy But Her “Preference” — According To Clerk Staff Anyway — Also See The Extraordinary Petulance Of Gil Cedillo’s Weirdo Flunky Jose Rodriguez When He Learns About It — And Turns Around And Covertly Threatens Clerk Staffer Rick Scott For Bearing The Bad News

Leave a comment

This is a quick update on a technical but highly consequential issue regarding City of Los Angeles property included in business improvement districts. The state law is very clear that BID assessments apply equally to public property, which means that the City of LA gets to vote on BID formation and renewal. Furthermore, in 1996, when the modern era of California BIDs began, the City Council told the City Clerk to always vote yes unless specifically directed otherwise.

Which of course led BID proponents to include as much City property as possible within their boundaries since it made establishment very significantly easier given the guaranteed favorable votes from the City. This strategy reached a hitherto unseen level of absurdity in 2016 with the Venice Beach BID establishment process, in which City property constituted 25.05% of the assessed value and the non-City property owners who signed pro-BID petitions for only 27.26%. The BID would never have been established without the automatic yes from the City.

This already absurd outcome was surpassed in 2017 with the renewal of the San Pedro Historic Waterfront BID. The proponents in that case included huge tracts of essentially empty parcels belonging to the Port of Los Angeles. They brought the City’s proportion of assessed value to 37.24%, which left only 26.04% non-City property owners in favor of the BID. The case of the San Pedro BID seems not to have been widely noticed at the time, but of course the outcry over the Venice Beach BID was monumental, and the City’s role in ensuring its existence was discussed at great length.

It hadn’t been clear exactly what was going on, but something regarding the voting of City property changed over at the City Clerk’s office after the San Pedro BID fiasco. I first heard about it in 2018 in relation to the Byzantine Latino Quarter BID when Donald Duckworth, BIDdological freak show specimen and BID establishment consultant, told his clients that the City of Los Angeles would no longer vote its petitions in favor of formation until 50% of the private property owners had already voted in favor.

As we’ve seen above, this would be a major change. If this policy had been in place in 2016 neither the Venice Beach BID nor the San Pedro Historic Waterfront BID would exist. But Duckworth is a liar and a fabulist and exceedingly unreliable, so while his testimony did in fact convince me that something was happening, it’s not really safe to assume that he’s telling his clients the full story or even accurately relating part of it.
Continue reading Here’s Actual Proof That Los Angeles City Clerk Holly Wolcott Is Refusing To Sign BID Establishment Petitions For LA City Property Until Half The Other Property Owners In The Proposed District Have Signed — This Is Not Exactly A Policy But Her “Preference” — According To Clerk Staff Anyway — Also See The Extraordinary Petulance Of Gil Cedillo’s Weirdo Flunky Jose Rodriguez When He Learns About It — And Turns Around And Covertly Threatens Clerk Staffer Rick Scott For Bearing The Bad News →

Share
Lawsuits, Public Records Act Pragmatics, Venice Beach BID

My Public Records Act Suit Against The Venice Beach BID Is Finally Over — They Handed Over The Records And Paid My Lawyer $21,000 — A Purely Avoidable Waste Of Money — But What Do They Care? — Not Their Damn Money

Leave a comment

Well, in case you missed it, in February 2017 I sent a request to the Venice Beach BID for various public records, and they ignored me and ignored me and ignored me, and finally I hired a lawyer, the incomparable Abenicio Cisneros, and in April 2018 he filed a suit against them seeking to enforce compliance with the damn law.

And now, finally, the case is done with the signing of this settlement agreement. Notably, the BID handed over the records and paid Cisneros $21,435 for his work on the case. This payoff is one hundred percent wasted money that the BID could have saved had they only complied with the law in the first place. But they did not. And I have another request in to them, so we’ll see if they learned their lesson. Meanwhile, behold a partial transcription of the agreement:
Continue reading My Public Records Act Suit Against The Venice Beach BID Is Finally Over — They Handed Over The Records And Paid My Lawyer $21,000 — A Purely Avoidable Waste Of Money — But What Do They Care? — Not Their Damn Money →

Share
Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, LAPD

Reefer Madness Is Alive And Well In The Hollywood Entertainment District BID! — Between 2016 and 2018 73% Of All Citations For Public Marijuana Use In the Entire City Of Los Angeles Were In the Hollywood BID — The Venice BID Is A Distant Second Place With 8% — Leaving A Mere 19% — Which Is Only 170 Citations — For The Entire Rest Of The City Of Los Angeles

Leave a comment

Even though marijuana use in California was formally legalized recently, it’s still against the law to use it in public per the California Health and Safety Code at §11362.3. And apparently Lolita Lopez, investigative reporter at NBCLA, is doing a story on how this plays out in Los Angeles, because on February 2, 2019 she filed a CPRA request with the City for a list of citations under this law from 2016 to the present. Her request was successful, and a few days later the LAPD handed over this spreadsheet, organized by reporting district.3

And public marijuana use is one of those laws that’s custom-made for differential enforcement against homeless people. Thus it occurred to me to take a look at this data in conjuction with BIDs, which are one of the main engines of differential enforcement in Los Angeles. And the data revealed something really interesting. There were 887 citations in the two years covered by the data. Of these citations, 645 occurred in only 6 reporting districts, which precisely cover the Hollywood Entertainment District BID. Also 71 occurred in two others, which precisely cover the Venice Beach BID. The other 171 were spread out pretty evenly across the whole rest of the City.

This means that 72.7% of all citations for public marijuana use in the entire City of Los Angeles since 2016 were issued in the Hollywood Entertainment District BID. And 8% were issued in the Venice Beach BID. It doesn’t take any kind of fancy statistical analysis to prove that this is a really significant result, almost certainly linked to Kerry Morrison and her BID’s well-known tactic of arresting every homeless person that they can lay their hands on for the most trivial possible matters, such as drinking in public or urinating in public. Evidently now we can add smoking marijuana in public to this list of homeless-criminalizing tactics employed by the BID.

The HPOA BID Patrol is famous for its aggressive arrest policies. In 2013 they were responsible for more than 7% of the arrests of homeless people in the entire City of Los Angeles. Their arrest rate has dropped precipitously in the last few years, but it is still unbelievably high. But since 2016 they have refused to provide data on their individual arrests in response to CPRA requests, so it hasn’t been possible to tell who they were arresting and why.4

However, each arrest that the BID Patrol makes results in some kind of action by the LAPD. And given that the LAPD doesn’t seem to expend much effort in arresting anyone for public marijuana use outside the BID, it’s not unreasonable to assume that these figures are a proxy for the BID’s interest in the differential enforcement of this law. If they’re not making these arrests themselves then the arrests are the result of some BID policy.

The situation in Venice is a little less clear, as the Venice Beach BID only started its security work sometime in 2017, and the Boardwalk is a likely place for the LAPD to practice its own style of selective enforcement without needing a BID to encourage it. But the moral of the story is still very clear. It’s illegal to smoke marijuana in public in Los Angeles, but effectively it’s illegal only if you’re homeless and only if you’re in the Hollywood BID. Turn the page for maps and charts!
Continue reading Reefer Madness Is Alive And Well In The Hollywood Entertainment District BID! — Between 2016 and 2018 73% Of All Citations For Public Marijuana Use In the Entire City Of Los Angeles Were In the Hollywood BID — The Venice BID Is A Distant Second Place With 8% — Leaving A Mere 19% — Which Is Only 170 Citations — For The Entire Rest Of The City Of Los Angeles →

Share
LAPD, Venice Beach BID

A Random Selection Of Emails Between Carl Lambert Or Mark Sokol And Various Cops Reveal Some Interesting Stuff About Venice — Lambert Divides Venice Neighborhood Council Members Into “Friendlies” And Otherwise — Sokol Arranged A Hotel Room For Officer Peggy Thusing In 2013 — The Venice BID Formation Process — Which Lambert Declared Began “Renaissance Of Venice” — Was Bankrolled By Brian Dror — Lambert Raised Money For Slavering Psychopath Mark Ryavec By Telling Homeless Horror Stories

1 Comment

I recently obtained a small collection of emails between Venice beat cops Kristan Delatori, Peggy Thusing, and the recently self-destructed Nicole Alberca5 and those fan favorite BIDdies Mark Sokol and Carl Lambert. You can peruse the whole set here on Archive dot Org, and in today’s post I’ll discuss a few high/low-lights!

OK, remember the Venice Neighborhood Council election in 2016? The outcome was widely interpreted by sane people as being yet another death blow administered to the longtime rotting corpse of Venice. And now, thanks to this June 2016 day-after email from Carl Lambert to undisclosed recipients including Nicole Alberca we learn that Lambert divides the winners up into friendlies and not-friendlies.

And we learn who the friendlies are! And that there is a supermajority of them! And we also learn that Carl Lambert sends late-night texts to Nicole Alberca! And they make her smile! All these Venice zillionaires and their pet cops are really far too cozy for our safety and comfort, I think.

Oh yes, of course you want to know the names! Well, the friendlies are: George Francisco, Melissa Diner, Matt Kline, Evan White, Matt Royce, Matt Shaw, Robert Thibodeau, Will Hawkins, John Reed, Steve Livigni, Sunny Bak, Cayley Lambur, Jim Murez, Michelle Meepos, and Laurie Burns. And the not friendly? They are Ira Koslow, Hugh Harrison, Ilana Marosi, Erin Darling, Colleen Saro, and Gina Maslow. Got it? And turn the page for more, more, more!
Continue reading A Random Selection Of Emails Between Carl Lambert Or Mark Sokol And Various Cops Reveal Some Interesting Stuff About Venice — Lambert Divides Venice Neighborhood Council Members Into “Friendlies” And Otherwise — Sokol Arranged A Hotel Room For Officer Peggy Thusing In 2013 — The Venice BID Formation Process — Which Lambert Declared Began “Renaissance Of Venice” — Was Bankrolled By Brian Dror — Lambert Raised Money For Slavering Psychopath Mark Ryavec By Telling Homeless Horror Stories →

Share
Business Improvement Districts, Venice Beach BID

The Board For Professional Engineers Finally Acknowledged Receipt Of My Complaint Against Incompetent BID Engineer Ed Henning — Only Four Months After I Submitted It — They Hired The Complaint Out To An Independent Expert For Review — Cause Obviously It’s Too Hot A Potato For Them To Handle In-House!

Leave a comment

Here’s a quick summary of the background. BID formations are required by the Property and Business Improvement District Law of 1994 to be supported by a report prepared by a licensed engineer.6 Putatively licensed engineer Ed Henning wrote the report for the ill-born Venice Beach BID.7 The California Board for Professional Engineers regulates the engineering profession and can investigate allegations of incompetence or negligence. Ed Henning’s report for the Venice Beach BID is awful, negligent, and incompetent. The fact that this nightmare of a BID was established on the basis of this horror show of a report is another sprinkling of salt on the writhing slug into which the money-driven fucked-upification of Venice has transformed my heart.

A complaint was made against Henning by a citizen of Venice but was rejected by the Board without being read because they claimed that writing BID reports didn’t constitute the practice of engineering. After a great deal of discussion with BPELSG executive officer Ric Moore, he agreed that in the future his office would not dismiss such complaints unread and therefore I took the time to submit a complaint against Henning to the Board.8 You can get a copy of the complaint itself here on Archive.Org.

Well, that was in August 2018 and I heard nothing and I heard nothing and I heard nothing and a couple of times I sent polite little emails to Mr. Ric Moore just asking him could he confirm that he’d received the complaint and so forth and I heard nothing and nothing and nothing. Until this afternoon, which is when I received an email from our old friend Ms. Tiffany Criswell.

And Ms. Tiffany Criswell’s email informed me that not only had they received the complaint but that it had been given a code number and, most interesting of all, that the “complaint has been referred to an independent Expert Consultant for review.” Ms. Criswell was also careful to state that it’s essentially going to take forever to review and I shouldn’t hold my breath and so on. But damn! It feels like quite an accomplishment even to get this far. After the break you can read a full transcription of this email from Tiffany Criswell.
Continue reading The Board For Professional Engineers Finally Acknowledged Receipt Of My Complaint Against Incompetent BID Engineer Ed Henning — Only Four Months After I Submitted It — They Hired The Complaint Out To An Independent Expert For Review — Cause Obviously It’s Too Hot A Potato For Them To Handle In-House! →

Share
Business Improvement Districts

The South Park BID Failed To Even Negotiate Let Alone Execute A Contract With Tara Devine For Handling Their 2017 Renewal — They Didn’t Even Realize There Was No Contract Until My CPRA Request Called Their Attention To It — At Which Point Bob Buente Suggested Fraudulently Executing A Back-Dated Contract — But Worried This Would Haunt The Board If “we’re deposed because Tara does something nefarious” — Ellen Riotto — Who Has More Common Sense Than The Average Zeck Dreck — Advised Against It

Leave a comment

So in 2017, back when I was trying to understand Tara Devine’s BID consultancy work for the South Park BID, I sent the Parkies a CPRA request for her contract.9 At the time, twisted little minion Katie Kiefer, who quit the BID earlier this year and is now working for shockingly rapey CD14 repster José Huizar, kept telling me that the BID didn’t have any records responsive to my request. I found this impossible to believe, that putatively competent zillionaire business types would hire someone to do a job for which they’d be paid in the high five figures and not have a written contract explaining what they were expected to do.

It didn’t seem plausible10 so I assumed Katie Kiefer was playing word games with me, which was exactly the kind of crapola she was pulling at the time, all under the baleful influence of Carol Humiston, the world’s angriest CPRA lawyer, along with the rest of her 2017 Parkie buddies. You can read the whole correspondence here on Archive.Org if you’re interested.11 But now, thanks to the recent release of Bob Buente’s emails, a hyper-Aladdinesque trove of wonders provided to me by the ever-helpful Ellen Salome Riotto, current zeck dreck of the Parkers, the truth has come out and can now be explained!

I made my original request for Tara Devine’s contract on July 12, 2017. On July 13, 2017 the Parkies, hiding as usual behind their sinister masks, told me that there was no contract. And here’s where things get interesting! The next day, on July 14, 2017, Ellen Riotto emailed her executive committee and asked them if there even was a contract:

From: Ellen Riotto <ellen@southpark.la>
To: Robin Bieker <robin@biekerco.com>, “Sjordan@legends.net” <Sjordan@legends.net>, “daniel@jadeent.com” <daniel@jadeent.com>, “bbuente@1010dev.org” <bbuente@1010dev.org>, “JLall@ccala.org” <JLall@ccala.org>
Subject: Devine Strategies Contract approval

All,

Per the CA Public Records Act, we’ve been asked to disclose our contract with Tara. The only record we have on file is her proposal, attached. We do not have a final signed contract. We looked through meeting mins to see if we could track down a board vote to approve the proposal, but were unsuccessful. Do you recall if this decision was made by the executive committee?

Thanks

Ellen

The attached proposal she mentions in the email is available here. Also note that if she were following the law she would have asked these BIDdies if they had the records before she told me that they did not, but there’s not much to be done about that. And with that simple request, things really went off the rails!
Continue reading The South Park BID Failed To Even Negotiate Let Alone Execute A Contract With Tara Devine For Handling Their 2017 Renewal — They Didn’t Even Realize There Was No Contract Until My CPRA Request Called Their Attention To It — At Which Point Bob Buente Suggested Fraudulently Executing A Back-Dated Contract — But Worried This Would Haunt The Board If “we’re deposed because Tara does something nefarious” — Ellen Riotto — Who Has More Common Sense Than The Average Zeck Dreck — Advised Against It →

Share
Downtown Center BID

The Downtown Center BID Is The Latest In A Long Line Of BIDs To Change Up A Brown-Act-Deficient Agenda In Response To My Freely Offered Amateur Criticism — Someday, Lord, And It Won’t Be Long, All These Damn BIDs In Los Angeles Are Just Gonna Follow The Damn Law Right From The Start — In My Dreams, Anyway

Leave a comment

It’s quite a common occurrence around here for some random BID to send out yet another completely freaking illegal agenda or violate some other major requirement of the Brown Act and then, because I can’t send demand letters to all of them, I just drop them a friendly note and they, because you can’t argue with the truth, just go ahead and fix the damn agenda.

This is a useful pastime for all concerned. The BIDs get a free and easy lesson in how to follow the damn law,12 I get to write a blog post on the episode,13 and you, the faithful reader, get to hear about yet another technical violation of the Brown Act, which is really edumacational and why else is anyone even reading this damn blog if not to be edumacated? So like for instance the South Park BID does this on a regular basis, and the Venice BID has had an episode as well.

Oh, and I know I said above that you can’t argue with the truth, but actually the baddest BIDdies of them all of the moment, that unhinged flashmob of sick chuckleheads14 known to all students of BIDology as the Studio City BID, famous for having board members whose consciences are so guilty that they will not allow themselve to appear on camera, can in fact argue with the truth.15 This is why, after they refused to consider my friendly admonition that they were really blowing it with respect to the Brown Act, I had to send them a demand letter.16

But those Studio City-zens are the exception rather than the rule. Which brings us to today’s episode.17 It seems that on Monday, October 1, 2017, I received this agenda for a meeting of the Downtown Center BID’s executive committee, scheduled for yesterday morning. Thereon appeared this item:

IV. CLOSED SESSION
a. Personnel Matters, California Government Code §54957(b)(1) (ACTION) WOLK

And, you know, this is better than some attempts at describing closed sessions I’ve seen. At least they cited an actual code section as justification for closing it, which is more than many BIDdies will do. But it’s still not good enough, not nearly. These BIDdies gotta learn that a basic principal of the Brown Act is that what they say in a closed session might get to be a secret but what they’re doing in there rarely does. Read on for the gory details and what happened next!
Continue reading The Downtown Center BID Is The Latest In A Long Line Of BIDs To Change Up A Brown-Act-Deficient Agenda In Response To My Freely Offered Amateur Criticism — Someday, Lord, And It Won’t Be Long, All These Damn BIDs In Los Angeles Are Just Gonna Follow The Damn Law Right From The Start — In My Dreams, Anyway →

Share
Venice Beach BID

Donald Duckworth Was The Very First BID Consultant Involved With Venice Beach BID Formation — In June 2014 Debbie Dyner Harris Introduced El Duckie To Carl Lambert — Meetings Were Held — Duckworth Drafted Petitions And Gave Advice — Then El Duckie Seems To Have Stopped Returning Carl Lambert’s Emails —Then Nothing Until Tara Devine Took Over — Reason For That Not Yet Clear

Leave a comment

The story of Tara Devine and the Venice Beach BID has been told repeatedly and in great detail starting in 2016 when the ultimately successful push to establish this most-despised of Los Angeles BIDs18 was revived. But the pre-2016 history remains obscure, not least due to zeck dreck Devine’s obstreperous obstructionism with respect to providing public records.19

Of course, everything about this BID is interesting,20 so what a pleasant surprise it was to find in a recent release of goodies21 by BIDdological freak show specimen Donald Duckworth a series of emails from 2014 showing that when Mike Bonin first kicked off the Venice Beach BID formation process his staffie Debbie Dyner Harris turned to El Duckworth to hook up with criminal conspirator and founding BIDfather Carl Freaking Lambert to get the job done. Internal evidence strongly suggests that this was the beginning of the modern VBBID formation process.22 Strangely, Estela Lopez, the wickedest woman on Skid Row, was also slated to be involved.23

The story begins on June 5, 2014 when Debbie Dyner Harris emailed El Duckworth with a little proposition:

Hi Don. I hope all is well. The Councilmember is hosting several property owners and business owners along Ocean Front Walk in Venice at a meeting this Monday, June 9, to discuss creating a BID. He was wondering if you’d be able to attend, to help answer any questions on the creation and operation of a BID, and providing your insight. We will be joined by Miranda Paster of the City Clerk’s office, as well as the founding director and the current president of Central City East’s BID.

I am sorry for the late notice, we’ve been trying to develop our agenda. It will be held this Monday, June 9, at 9:45am in our Westchester community room. I hope you can make it!

Thanks,
Debbie

And turn the page for the rest of the story, along with links to and transcriptions of the evidence!
Continue reading Donald Duckworth Was The Very First BID Consultant Involved With Venice Beach BID Formation — In June 2014 Debbie Dyner Harris Introduced El Duckie To Carl Lambert — Meetings Were Held — Duckworth Drafted Petitions And Gave Advice — Then El Duckie Seems To Have Stopped Returning Carl Lambert’s Emails —Then Nothing Until Tara Devine Took Over — Reason For That Not Yet Clear →

Share
Los Angeles City Government, Venice Beach BID

Tara Devine Accuses Rita Moreno Of Harboring Prejudice Against The Venice Beach BID And Of Badmouthing Her And Her Damn BID To Property Owners — And Of Being Too Dumb To Understand BIDs And Of Not Being Able To Read — Rita Moreno Accuses Tara Devine Of Badmouthing The City To Property Owners — Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?! — Oh, And More On Tara Devine’s September 26, 2017 Surgery, The Swiss Army Knife Of Excuses For Nonperformance Of Contractual And Statutory Obligations

Leave a comment

As you no doubt recall, in April 2017 I was forced by the weirdo intransigence of Ms. Tara Devine to file a writ petition against the Venice Beach BID because they could not, would not, comply with the damn public records act for essentially years on end. And in June Tara Devine started handing over records, with more handed over in July. She’s evidently producing a batch a month even though she promised more, because just the other day I got a set of 284 emails between her and the City of Los Angeles, and I published them as usual on Archive.Org for your edification and pleasure.24

And there is a lot of good stuff in this set, but first a little more background. You will, of course, recall that the Venice Beach BID, despite being funded by the City starting in January 2017, didn’t even have a Board meeting until January 2018 and didn’t begin providing services until many months after that. This series of egregious failures led to a great deal of tension between the BIDdies and the City. So much so that in May 2018 the BIDdies got called on the carpet at City Hall and were also forced, much against their will, to refund all the money they’d collected for 2017.

And it seems that, obviously at least in hindsight, these serious consequences in 2018 arose from a great deal of tension between the City and the BID in 2017. The text for today’s sermon is a series of emails from October of that year between Tara Devine and Rita Moreno of the City Clerk which demonstrates exactly that.

It all started when Rita Moreno asked Tara Devine why the BID didn’t even have a working phone, which was forcing the City to field the outpouring of complaints from property owners who had paid a ton of money but were receiving nothing for it. Tara Devine, as is her angry and unprofessional little wont, flipped out on Rita Moreno, and the whole vitriolic exchange with links and transcriptions is right after the break!
Continue reading Tara Devine Accuses Rita Moreno Of Harboring Prejudice Against The Venice Beach BID And Of Badmouthing Her And Her Damn BID To Property Owners — And Of Being Too Dumb To Understand BIDs And Of Not Being Able To Read — Rita Moreno Accuses Tara Devine Of Badmouthing The City To Property Owners — Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?! — Oh, And More On Tara Devine’s September 26, 2017 Surgery, The Swiss Army Knife Of Excuses For Nonperformance Of Contractual And Statutory Obligations →

Share