Property Owners

As the MTA moves closer to starting construction on a subway tunnel in downtown Los Angeles, some property owners have dug in for a fight. The big landlords fear that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's plans to build a massive trench on Flower Street will disrupt their businesses for years, costing millions of dollars in lost revenue. The four-story-deep canyon planned by the MTA would travel through more than two busy city blocks of the financial district, which includes popular destinations such as the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, the Central Library and the City National Plaza office and retail complex.

At the start of each morning, a private army of workers descends on downtown Los Angeles in bright-colored shirts, providing security, collecting trash, scrubbing graffiti, power-washing sidewalks and otherwise keeping downtown presentable. The crews work for downtown's network of business improvement districts and have become familiar parts of the area's fabric. Many in downtown credit the business improvement districts, or BIDs, with helping turn around the once-desolate downtown, providing the kind of aggressive maintenance and security services that City Hall simply cannot afford and helping to market the area to new investors.

Re "Rethinking Prop. 13," Editorial, Dec. 6 Proposition 30 raises taxes on everyone, landed and landless. That's fair. Nevertheless, the only part of Proposition 13 that should be revisited is the two-thirds vote requirement to legislate taxes. The 1% cap on the purchase price must be left alone. In California, property changes hands so often that there is no shortage of revenue. To go back to the days of levying taxes based on current market value would increase costs of administration and would be unfair to those who don't flip houses for sport.

So in addition to the taxes that every L.A. voter sees on Tuesday's ballot -- Propositions 30 , 38 and 39 , and Measure J -- you now also know about the parcel taxes in the Santa Monica Mountains area and the coming countywide parcel tax for storm water cleanup. Sometimes they show up at the ballot box, sometimes in the mail. But there's one more for you. Residents of part of downtown Los Angeles will get mail ballots next week asking them to vote on whether to tax property owners to repay bonds that would be sold to bring streetcars back to town after an absence of more than half a century.

Want to go to Bali or Bangkok? Now you can find accommodations in the Asia Pacific region with a new website. Name: Travelmob.com What it does: Connects travelers with property owners in the Asia Pacific region who are willing to rent space in their home - or their entire house or apartment - for brief periods. What's hot: You can view your search results by looking at a grid of room photos instead of a list. Then toggle between types of properties such as Unique, Scenic, Urban, Luxury, Budget, Nightlife or Beach, to name a few. If you don't know where in Thailand you want to go, search "Thailand," then narrow your results by the type of room.

The Prospect South Bay Medical Center in Redondo Beach is home to dozens of doctors' offices - cardiologists, obstetricians and an urgent care center. But for three years, the $11-million, 47,000-square-foot building disappeared from the Los Angeles County tax rolls. During that time, county officials acknowledge, they never sent a tax bill to the owner. The assessor's office forwarded the case of the missing building and 14 other questionable assessments to the Los Angeles County district attorney last month following inquiries from The Times.

Federal officials brought their war on medical marijuana dispensaries to Los Angeles on Tuesday, raiding several shops and issuing warning letters to dozens more. Officials at the U.S. attorney's office said it was the first large-scale federal action taken against cannabis shops in the city, and said more will probably follow. "We couldn't do all of L.A. at once," said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the office. "There's just too many stores. " The crackdown adds a dramatic element to the already tense fight over the fate of medical marijuana dispensaries in the city.

Re "On path to repairs," Aug. 28 Los Angeles has a new strategy on damaged sidewalks. City officials want to catalog the damage citywide, tally the total of what it would cost to repair the sidewalks and then ask property owners to tax themselves to pay for the work. Why spend $10 million to document what many property owners know already? Why not start dividing the $10 million to cover the cost of repairs that homeowners agree to pay half of? We did this for the pine tree that cracked the sidewalk outside my house.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge on Wednesday reduced the bail for Scott Schenter, a former county appraiser accused of falsifying documents and unlawfully lowering property values by $172 million on multimillion-dollar homes and businesses. Schenter's bail was reduced from $1.5 million to $100,000. Schenter was arrested in May and is facing 60 felony counts for allegedly falsifying records; he is at the center of a criminal probe involving the county assessor's office.

In the years after the real estate bubble burst in 2008, Santa Monica-based Douglas Emmett Inc.'s pleas for tax breaks on its portfolio of posh office buildings met with only modest success. Then in late 2010, John Noguez was elected Los Angeles County assessor. His biggest campaign contributors: Douglas Emmett's chief executive and his wife. Within months, Noguez's office slashed the taxable value of the company's properties by $307 million, four times what Douglas Emmett had received in the previous four years, according to a Times analysis of tax records.