What’s happening today?
Today is supposed to be the deadline for Lineage to complete the cleanup of their warehouse that caught fire on June 17. Mayor Karen Bass had given Lineage 45 days, and those days are up. But Lineage says that’s not so. As Bass, and City Council member Ysabel Jurado, took the company to task for missing the Friday deadline, Lineage representatives said that they were counting the 45 days starting from when the site was turned back over to them. That means that for them, it’s still day 37 of meeting the deadline, leaving them another week left to complete the cleanup. The full Lineage response on the deadline is on this page.
The City Council is meeting today and taking up a late scheduled motion by Council member Heather Hutt to intervene on a planning commission’s decision on permits to allow public dancing, and for alcohol to be sold and served up at a Koreatown banquet hall. The relatively short regular agenda includes items related to buying up Caltrans property for use by the parks department; the use of some city surplus property; the use of a parking lot in Little Tokyo for the 2028 Olympics; a lease agreement for a CD10 field office; an environmental study to allow the city to take over a property in San Pedro on Gaffey that includes a shooting range and ballfields; a development agreement for a downtown property on Flower, 7th and Hope streets; an appeal of a private high school project in CD5; and a renter protection grant from LACAHSA.
What just happened?
City Attorney’s Office’s dangling of mystery legal advice leads to another delay for the Venice Dell
The developers of the Venice Dell affordable housing project just experienced yet another delay, after the Board of Transportation Commissioners got enticed into hearing the tea from the City Attorney's Office on the project. The Mayor’s Office had sent the commission a letter telling them that the court has ordered that they rescind an earlier decision that ended up blocking the already long-delayed Venice Dell project. The developers, and a longtime advocate and resident of Venice, had taken to public comment to say that the delay was costing people’s lives, because the project, if it had been built earlier, would have housed people who are now unhoused in its planned 120 units.
While the mayor’s office’s representative, Anna Hovasapian, stood by the stance in their letter to the board that they wanted them to follow the court order – that came about as a result of a lawsuit by the developers – to rescind their order. But the offer of some mysterious and “important legal advice” from the City Attorney’s Office’s representative ended up being too hard for the board to pass up.
The advice would need to be delivered in a closed session, away from the eyes and ears of the public, according to John Heath, an attorney working under City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. He told the committee on Thursday, “This office has important legal advice to share… I would encourage you to schedule a full session, at the first practicable opportunity to enable us to provide you with a detailed briefing on this pending litigation, and the significant impact it could have on the city.”
Presumably the commission would now be scheduling a special meeting, with notice given that the board would be going into closed session to hear that advice.
Federal Judge David O. Carter, saying that Angelenos will die if the federal government suspends LA’s homeless services funding, orders a halt to those plans
LA’s bedraggled homeless services agency, LAHSA, was able to secure a preliminary injunction to prevent the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from suspending funding from their agency, at least for the time being.
And David O. Carter, the judge on the case, didn’t hold back on his opinions about HUD’s decision to suspend funding, calling it “rash.” Carter also threw the blame back onto HUD, writing that he has “no intention of discouraging investigations of fraud. But it can’t be denied that there have been years of inaction by HUD.”
Carter’s order, laid out in a 28-page ruling, grants a pause requested by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which goes by LAHSA for short and is a joint powers authority that has long handled the federal funds used to provide homeless services to people in Los Angeles, including in the overwhelming majority of the cities within the county.
Carter described the federal housing department’s move to suspend funding for LAHSA as “rash,” also writing that it would “significantly harm the public interest,” including leading to people dying.
“Inevitably, this suspension will result in deaths among the homeless and the displacement of over 11,000 unhoused individuals onto the streets and into the neighborhoods of Los Angeles,” Carter wrote in his order. “HUD needed to consider reasonable alternatives when it abruptly decided that the bill for LASHA’s dysfunction had come due.”
This is a transitional period for the agency, especially after the county pulled funding from local taxes to use toward standing up a separate county homeless services agency. Meanwhile, the city of Los Angeles, the other major partner in the LAHSA joint powers authority, needs more time to figure out what it will do on that front. City leaders have bristled at the likelihood of the county growing its power in deciding how homeless services are apportioned.
I didn’t know they had named First Street Courthouse.