Venice Overnight Parking and Homeless

The Venice Stake­hold­ers As­so­ci­ation filed mul­tiple pub­lic re­cords re­quests with the city of Los Angeles — por­tions of which were re­peatedly denied.

After fi­nally fil­ing a law­suit, the city agreed to turn over doc­u­ments. Some of those doc­u­ments proved sus­pi­cions of the Venice Stake­hold­ers — that a city em­ploy­ee who worked for May­or Ant­o­nio Vil­larai­gosa was work­ing be­hind-the-scenes and post­ing in­flam­mat­ory mes­sages un­der a pseud­onym on a com­munity web site. That em­ploy­ee, James Bick­hart, was later dis­cip­lined. He was sus­pen­ded for one week.