Good morning, it’s Monday, July 13, and there is a heat advisory in effect. Also more humidity than usual. Be warned, especially if you’re inland.
1. Have you gotten a street sweeping ticket? It might’ve been bogus.
Many streets in the City of Los Angeles have signs banning parking on weekly street-sweeping days. Most streets, though, are only swept every other week, so you won’t get tickets for parking on off weeks.
At least, that’s what the Department of Transportation recently promised the L.A. Times.
But an exclusive L.A. Material analysis of city parking ticket data found that, in more than 12,500 instances over the last five years, LADOT has issued street cleaning tickets when there wasn’t actually any sweeping. That amounts to nearly $1 million in erroneous fines.
Roughly a sixth of the bum tickets were levied along a single corridor in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods in South L.A., where residents say they have to forgo grocery shopping when hit with the dreaded $73 citations.
LADOT says it regularly voids and refunds erroneous tickets. But it refused to provide data to prove it.
Our story includes a map so you can check whether your neighborhood got bad tickets. We also built a tool so you can check if you’re owed a refund.
2. A top Bass advisor is helping Lineage manage its response to the Boyle Heights fire.
Yusef Robb, a longtime political strategist, held an unusual role with the Bass administration: He was neither formally employed nor paid, but remained indispensable as a senior communications advisor. He also took a job last month advising Lineage, the cold storage company whose Boyle Heights facility burned for more than a week, sending smoke and noxious fumes through many Eastside neighborhoods.
The mayor’s office insisted Saturday that Yusef had not been involved with her response to the environmental catastrophe and its clean-up, now that he is working for the company at the center of it.
Hours after my colleague Julia Wick broke the story about Robb’s role on Saturday, Robb said he’d no longer be serving as an informal advisor to Mayor Karen Bass.
“I'm not going to let unnecessary distractions get in the way of the important things that need to be done, so I'm not extending my volunteer advisory work for the Mayor,” Robb said.
3. Here’s what’s happening this week.
MONDAY: LACMA will host a free, first-come, first-served children’s art workshop.
TUESDAY: LA28 will open applications to volunteer for the Olympics. Also, the Consulate General of France will put on an open-air concert to celebrate Bastille Day downtown. (The mood may depend on the outcome of France’s World Cup semifinal match against Spain earlier that day.)
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