Gentle reader,
Very few people watched the livestreamed program Public Safety in L.A. with Mayor Karen Bass: A KNX News Town Hall on April 16, the day after her State of the City address at City Hall; as of this morning, the YouTube video has less than 500 views.
We only found it after a stray reference in a Los Angeles Times story about the mayor’s mysterious new development initiative LA4LA:
“Bass, at a recent town hall hosted by KNX News, revealed that she had launched a failed ‘crusade’ to purchase a partially completed downtown skyscraper, which became a national spectacle after it was tagged with graffiti on just about every floor, and use it for affordable housing. An estimate for the unfinished building came in at $850 million, she said, and it would probably have to be torn down.”
So we found the archived YouTube video—the program was also on the radio and streamed on TikTok—used the AI transcript to find this portion of the Q&A, and hit play. What we heard was shocking, and not just because of what Karen Bass says.
This short video of multiple gaffes about Oceanwide Plaza that Bass made in her KNX Town Hall might look like gotcha journalism, but it's dead serious—and scary. If the Mayor of Los Angeles is this ignorant, then who is the true architect of the horrible austerity budget released by her office?
Also disturbing: KNX Town Hall moderators Mike Simpson and Charles Feldman failed to challenge any of Bass' misstatements about Oceanwide Plaza, Jose Huizar's corruption sentencing and the LA Grand Hotel, as if they, too are not informed about these high profile issues.
And in the Times, Dakota Smith and her editors also missed the glaring mistake of describing a full city block comprised of a retail mall with three unfinished towers on top as a single building.
None of them caught the mayor’s shocking conflation of the abandoned and blighted Oceanwide Plaza development with the LA Grand Hotel, which is open for business and has sucked up a huge percentage of the city’s budget for the Inside Safe emergency housing program. Although Oceanwide Plaza was referenced in the prosecution of Jose Huizar’s co-conspirator, Deputy Mayor Ray Chan, the owners of this project have not been indicted or tried.
The LA Grand Hotel is the building that is owned by a convicted fugitive from justice, not Oceanwide Plaza. The formerly homeless people who are living there are supposed to be moved to the Mayfair Hotel, which the mayor purchased at millions more than its market value, and despite neighborhood opposition.
This isn’t particularly complicated. But the Mayor and the journalists charged with interpreting her remarks appear baffled, and they’re all failing to do their jobs and serve the public.
As she was running for Mayor, Karen Bass never mentioned the elephant in City Hall chambers: multiple indictments for public corruption around land use. Once she won her seat, she left most of Eric Garcetti’s land use team in place, and continued to talk around the issue.
Five days after Karen Bass went off script and suggested that buildings owned by convicted criminals might be ripe for seizure, she fell victim to a bizarre and frightening home invasion incident, during an unexplained gap in her round-the-clock LAPD security detail.
Late yesterday, California State Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the filing of 11 felony charges against Diana Maria Teran, head of the Los Angeles County District’s Attorney’s Justice System Integrity Division (JSID), charged with prosecuting police and attorney misconduct. A warrant has been issued for her arrest. Her attorney James Spertus counters that the alleged crimes were simply her doing her former job, providing oversight to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and that she has been cooperating with the California DOJ investigation.
This afternoon at 1:30pm, Teran’s colleague, Deputy DA Casey Higgins of the Public Integrity unit is back in the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, seeking documents that the Los Angeles City Attorney is refusing to turn over for the prosecution of indicted councilman Curren Price.
The Price case is a big deal, especially coming immediately after the US DOJ folded up its L.A. public corruption unit after closing out the Jose Huizar cases, leaving many co-conspirators in the city family uncharged.
Maybe this is a good case. But to cast a shadow over the DA's office just as it seeks to convince a judge to compel release of bombshell public corruption documents is a choice. We’ll let you know what happens in court today, and continue to provide you with truthful information so you can understand what’s actually happening in Los Angeles, a city that needs every set of caring eyes and hands and minds it can muster if it’s going to get through these challenging times intact.
Update: Nothing happened at the Curren Price hearing on 4/25/2024. The case documents were apparently misplaced by a clerk and sent to a different courtroom, so Judge Kerry L. White didn’t get an opportunity to read them before the hearing. The parties agreed to return to his courtroom on June 5 at 1:30pm to hopefully decide the matter. We’ll continue to report on this case, so stay tuned… And on 5/8/2024, City Council President Paul Krekorian restored Curren Price’s committee assignments, returning the indicted councilmember to a full workload.
We’ve got two tours this weekend, a bookshop and literary history stroll around Downtown’s historic core on Saturday, then a rare Sunday afternoon outing through the beauties and mysteries of Franklin Village Old Hollywood. Join us, do!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
Psst… If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar and a subscriber edition of this newsletter, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. You can share this post to win subscriber perks. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking and bus tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS
• Downtown Los Angeles is for Book Lovers (Sat. 4/27) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood (Sun. 4/28) • Alvarado Terrace & South Bonnie Brae Tract (Sat. 5/4) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (Sat. 5/11) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (Sat. 5/18) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sat. 5/25) • POP – Preserving Our Past (Sat. 6/1) • Westlake Park (Sat. 6/8) • Highland Park Arroyo (Sat. 6/15) • Film Noir / Real Noir (Sat. 6/29) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 7/13) • Know Your Downtown L.A.: Tunnels To Towers To The Dutch Chocolate Shop (7/27) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (8/31)
Mayor Karen Bass finally says something about Downtown LA real estate corruption, exposes herself as an empty pantsuit