LOS ANGELES — The City Council called for a report Tuesday on the implications of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors' decision to move millions of dollars and hundreds of employees out of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
In a unanimous vote, council members requested the chief legislative analyst and the city administrative officer to provide information in the next 30 days about the impacts of the county's move to create a centralized homelessness department and how it will affect the city's homelessness contracts with LAHSA.
Staff will also report on potential changes in the coordination of services, data sharing and management of the regional homelessness response system without the joint county-city homelessness agency.
Councilwoman Nithya Raman, chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, who introduced a motion seeking the report on March 21, called it a "very important moment."
As the transition to wind down LAHSA advances, she said that any effort to address homelessness will require a level of investment that is "not likely to go down quickly over the next few years because of the scale of the crisis that previous leadership here in the city allowed to grow unchecked for long."
According to Raman, recent audits by the county and a federal judge highlighted two important facts. The first was a lack of performance tracking between dollars spent on homelessness and outcomes — an issue the city has taken steps to address with the formation of a new Housing Department bureau that will take on that responsibility.
"... Once we have that data, we can actually have a much better system in which every dollar is connected to improvement to the lives of people who are on our city streets, Raman said.
The second key finding was that the audits didn't uncover evidence of fraud, but rather poor financial controls at LAHSA, Raman said, which she described as "really troubling."
LAHSA would make payments to service providers, but didn't have processes in place to ensure that those services were being provided, the councilwoman explained.
Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, who has been a longstanding critic of LAHSA, emphasized that the report comes at a time when homeless spending in California has caught federal attention.
U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced Tuesday the formation of a Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force, which will investigate waste and corruption involving funds in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
"It is important that we, in fact, get a handle on, frankly, what many other cities have been able to do with their continuum of care," Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez previously introduced a motion calling for a city department on homelessness. She said such a move could help reduce redundancy.
"There is no greater moment in time for us to accelerate our separation from LAHSA; the county has already done it," Rodriguez said. "We need to continue to tee up our response in a manner that allows us to ensure that we don't have a break in outcomes."
Councilman Bob Blumenfield, the former chair of the budget committee, agreed that LAHSA has "fallen short." He wants the city to act quickly, hold the county accountable and figure out roles they will each play to ensure that the city isn't left saddled with what's left of LAHSA.
"We need to figure out how we extricate ourselves, as well," Blumenfield said. "The more and the better information (we have), the faster that we can work."
Last week, the county Board of Supervisors advanced a proposal to create its own department to coordinate regional homeless services, effectively de-funding LAHSA, a joint county-city agency that has long overseen such programs and that has come under fire for alleged bloat, waste and lack of transparency.
The new county agency is expected to be in place by Jan. 1, with all funding pulled from LAHSA and transferred to the new department by July 1, 2026.
LAHSA was created in 1993 to address homelessness in Los Angeles County. It is the lead entity that coordinates and manages federal, state, county and city funds for shelter, housing and services to people experiencing homelessness throughout the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, which encompasses all cities in the region — with the exceptions of Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale.
