"Karen Bass's City Hall is Already Rigged" by Daniel Guss
No surprise about that, but so soon?
@TheGussReport - A column that I wrote last year, "Honest Services Fraud - How City Hall Rigged Its Herb Wesson Vote," detailed how sleazy LA City Hall can get when it wants a certain outcome, but doesn’t want the public to participate or know what goes on behind the scenes. I will have more on what this column is doing about that incident in the coming weeks.
But for now, a change of mayors from Eric Garcetti to Karen Bass hasn’t changed City Hall’s culture of corruption and backroom communications, which continue to deprive the public of a fair, honest and transparent government.
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Earlier this week, I published a column on how Larry Gross, a Garcetti holdover appointee to LA Animal Services (LAAS), used covert email accounts to conduct LAAS business outside of public view, including trying to influence Bass in her search for a general manager for the deadly, cruel and deceptively run agency.
While Gross is entitled to his opinions, as a city official he is not entitled to hide official communications or dodge California Public Records Act, CPRA, laws.
A day after my story was published, a grinning-but-defensive Gross publicly denied the allegations, saying on-the-record that they are “trumped-up,” without explaining how so.
Since Gross went there, let’s pull back the curtains to show exactly what’s going on.
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Gross recently used his private email account from his housing non-profit, Larry.Gross@CESinAction.org, instead of the official one posted on the LAAS website, Commissioner.Gross@yahoo.com, to forward and affirm to other city officials — including to some of their private email accounts — the sentiment in an obnoxious email from Kristen Stavola, Executive Director of Rescues Rock. Her diatribe focused on Bass’s supportive comments about LAAS volunteers and her vow to improve hideously cruel conditions there. Oddly, while Stavola’s email was to Bass, the mayor wasn’t openly cc’d, though Gross, Chris Thompson, the mayor’s chief of staff, and others were.
To view Stavola’s entire rant, in which she refers to LAAS volunteers and critics as “disgruntled” and as a “small, boisterous, disruptive group of malcontents,” click here.
Gross used his covert email account to forward Stavola’s rant, along with his own agreeing potshots at Bass, City Council president Paul Krekorian and the Los Angeles Times, to Solomon Rivera, chief of staff to Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, and the private email account of Larry Frank, an advisor to City Hall power players and a member of Bass’s transition team. Rivera had been screening LAAS commission candidates, and general manager-related matters, for Bass, at least until I reported on it in the last segment of my May 2 column.
When I asked Gross last week whether he was using covert email accounts to dodge CPRA rules while trying to influence Bass’s GM hiring decision, he said no and, among other things, “I have nothing to hide,” but repeatedly refused to identify the alternative email accounts he used, so obviously he has plenty to hide.
Gross’s circular argument, below, is that his “communication with Animal Services” is subject to CPRA laws, conveniently dodging the issue of other official communications he has with others, including city officials, in his role as a commissioner.
Instead of Rivera and Frank addressing the inappropriateness of these covert communications, Frank suggested to Gross that he raise his concerns with Veronica Gutierrez, a Bass deputy chief of staff. Separately, Rivera forwarded the Gross/Stavola emails to Jenny Delwood, another Bass deputy chief of staff.
I don’t know about you, but where I live, we call this one hell of a clusterfuck.
Which brings us to Gross’s purpose of using covert email.
Without the public seeing the communication, Gross wants the mayor to hire, Staycee Dains, the un-degreed Director of Animal Services for the City of Long Beach, whose LinkedIn page lists precisely zero quantifiable life-saving accomplishments in 17 years of employment with one catch-and-kill pound after another, masquerading as a debunked “no kill” facility.
Gross’s other goal was to denigrate another candidate, Judie Mancuso, as the choice of LAAS critics, though her support is widespread in humane and Sacramento legislative circles via her organization, Social Compassion in Legislation, SCIL.
To put it bluntly, Mancuso is a change agent and that scares the fuck out of people like Gross, because LAAS is rudderless under his and interim GM Annette Ramirez’s leadership.
Example: LAAS is, right now, inhumanely keeping scores of animals in crates (rather than kennels), drugged with a sedative called Trazadone for the anxiety these conditions cause as they are stuffed in inaccessible back rooms with extended periods of no daily exercise and socialization, as documented by the LA Times and confirmed by whistleblowing volunteers. If these animals’ families search for them at LAAS, there is no way for them to know they are sedated and hidden, making death a likelier outcome.
As recently as yesterday, Ramirez refused to allow me to photograph LAAS lobbies which lack signs that read, “your pet could be sedated in a back-room. Please ask for help if you cannot locate them in the kennels.” LAAS also fails to clearly advise people looking for lost pets that they are often transferred to other pounds throughout the city.
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The goal of Gross’s covert communications with other city officials was a rigged game, where his opinions could reach Bass, Gutierrez and Delwood et al, and simultaneously try to sink other candidates like Judie Mancuso, whose reputation over many years has been described as follows:
Christian Science Monitor (2022): “Rise in animal welfare laws? Thank Judie Mancuso.”
Orange County Register (2019): “Most Influential: If animals could vote, Judie Mancuso would be president. On Jan. 1, three laws will kick in that protect non-humans. Mancuso, of Laguna Beach, started them all.”
LA Times (2008): “The political education of Judie Mancuso.”
That’s what upsets people like Larry Gross; losing his grip on power and being exposed as the cause of so much catch, drug, warehouse and kill misery at LAAS.
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As described in another recent column of mine, those who oversee these matters in City Hall have grown paranoid and paralyzed when asked to address Gross’s covert activities.
New LA City Councilmembers Tim McOsker and Eunisses Hernandez, who chair committees overseeing Personnel and LAAS, respectively, either did not respond or wanted to screen questions. The office of Hydee Feldstein Soto, the new City Attorney, had promised a statement on Gross’s covert communications by early this week, but ultimately went silent. Solomon Rivera promised a response, but went silent a day later. And even the city’s Ethics department punted, saying that Gross hiding public records is a state law issue, but then oddly referred me back to the City Attorney’s office.
In other words, it’s the same feckless leadership that has sunk LA in virtually every other way. Only the names on the doors of City Hall offices have changed.
And then there’s the still-unresolved issue of this completely redacted LAAS email, and other public records, that City Hall continues to hide.
Stay tuned.
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(Daniel Guss, MBA, was nominated for three 2022 LA Press Club awards and was a runner-up in 2021 and 2020. He is City Editor for the Mayor Sam network, and has been a featured contributor for CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)