By The Epoch Times | Created at 2025-03-17 00:39:08 | Updated at 2025-03-17 06:03:58
5 hours ago
After an audit found an agency lost track of more than $2 billion, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will vote on creating a new department.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will vote April 1 on overhauling its homeless spending.
Announced on March 13 and advanced by Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger, the motion, if passed, would establish a new department to deal with homelessness services in an attempt to streamline the work previously done by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), an agency that the city and county are responsible for overseeing.
The $300 million taxpayer dollars the agency oversees would be returned to the county and be redirected to the new department to manage services to feed, clothe, and shelter the homeless population in Los Angeles.
Efforts to establish a new way of providing homelessness services in Los Angeles County began in earnest on Nov. 26, 2024, when the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to investigate the feasibility of creating a Blue-Ribbon Commission on Homelessness (BRCH), determining such an effort to be feasible.
The county’s goal is to replace LAHSA, which has come under fire for alleged mismanagement and inefficiencies, and improve the city’s homelessness situation.
“This is a chance for the County to learn from past mistakes and build a system of care that is set up to succeed and better serve those in need,” reads the motion.
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The new entity would be tasked with establishing a joint administrative team by April 25 to oversee the transition to the new department, which would lead the Greater Los Angeles Continuum of Care for those experiencing homelessness. Part of the process will be to transfer county funds from LAHSA to the county.
The motion followed an independent audit released on March 6 found that LAHSA had lost track of billions in homelessness services spending.
The audit, commissioned by federal District Judge David O. Carter and completed by Alvarez & Marsal Public Sector Services (A&M), could not quantify how the agency spent approximately $2.3 billion in funding for shelter, food, and other services earmarked for the homeless.
“Repetitive information gaps, coupled with a lack of accurate and complete data and documentation, posed significant obstacles to this assessment,” the report states.
“Insufficient financial accountability led to an inability to trace substantial funds allocated to the City Programs. Fragmented data systems across LAHSA, the City, and the County and inconsistent reporting formats made it challenging to verify spending and the number of beds or units reported by the City and LAHSA, track participant outcomes, and align financial data with performance metrics.”
A&M stated that key stakeholders did not monitor homelessness programs. The audit also found that LAHSA could not prove whether services were provided for invoiced items.
“The lack of uniform data standards and real-time oversight increased the risk of resource misallocation and limited the ability to assess the true impact of homelessness assistance services,” the report reads.
LAHSA said in a statement that the agency already identified the same issues in 2021.
“This audit calls out the siloed and fragmented nature of our region’s homeless response for driving poor data quality and integration, lack of contractual clarity, and disjointed services as major impediments to success and oversight. LAHSA’s own Ad Hoc Committee on Governance came to the same conclusion in 2021,” a LAHSA spokesperson told The Epoch Times in a statement. “Since then, LAHSA has advocated for creating a regional body to mandate collaboration between the City, County, and LAHSA, just as proposed in the court’s audit.”
In November 2024, Los Angeles County’s Chief Executive Office and LAHSA conducted a review of LAHSA, which had been requested by the Board of Supervisors in February 2024. LAHSA had been awarded $82.5 million through Measure H in the form of cash advances. LAHSA awarded $50.8 million to various subcontractors but failed to establish formal agreements for repaying the funds, and could only recoup $2.5 million as of July 8, 2024. LAHSA also could not provide comprehensive contract data, according to the review.
“LAHSA may not be able to recover all working capital advances and as a result, may not repay the County the full $82.5 million in advanced Measure H funds,” read a report on the county review.
“In addition, due to a lack of standards for conducting and documenting the results of their contract monitoring reviews, we could not determine whether LAHSA adequately monitored all their contracts to ensure subrecipients complied with their contract terms.”
