Gita O’Neill is the interim head of LAHSA.
Photo: LAHSA

By HANK WRIGHT

This is a city that has learned to look past certain things.

The tents. The riverbeds. The on-ramps at dusk. You drive past them on the 101 and you think: someone is handling this. Someone, somewhere in the apparatus of city government, is watching the money, tracking the numbers, asking the hard questions. This is Los Angeles. There are committees. There are chairs of committees. There is, presumably, a plan.

There is not a plan.

Policy analyst John Wickham said it plainly: “There are no dedicated policy staff on homelessness in the city government.”

The city spends nearly $1 billion a year on homelessness. In 2023-24, it allocated $1.28 billion. The City Controller later determined that $513 million of that went unspent. A federal task force is now examining more than $2 billion in unaccounted funds across Southern California. These are not allegations. These are the numbers.

Tim Campbell has been watching the numbers for some time. “Ten percent of the City’s budget is spent on homelessness,” he said, “and there are no staff people to advise the Council on homelessness? Each Councilperson has employees appointed to handle homelessness issues in their districts. Can’t they talk to each other?”

They cannot, apparently. Or they do not. The distinction hardly matters.

The city pays LAHSA $300 million a year. Campbell’s assessment is precise: “Nobody knows what taxpayers are getting for the money.”

Nithya Raman chairs the Council’s Homelessness Committee. There is no comprehensive policy. There are no milestones. There is no finish line.

At some point the question stops being about homelessness and starts being about something else entirely — about what a city believes it owes its people, and whether anyone in the building intends to find out.

Stop the payments. Audit the contracts. Build the budget from zero.

We have been here before. We know how this ends.

LAHSA MISSED AUDIT DEADLINE

Tim Cambell wrote today, March 19, that the LAHSA missed the filing deadline for its federally-required single annual audit, after the outside auditor contacted LAHSA’s Board Chair and CEO multiple times with no results.

Campbell, a longtime Westchester resident and veteran public servant who spent his career managing a municipal performance audit program, wrote in an email to CTN.

“I’ve never heard of a public agency missing its filing deadline, so I did a quick google search of the consequences.  They include:

“Missing a single annual audit deadline (usually 9 months after fiscal year-end or 30 days after receipt) can lead to severe consequences, including suspended federal funding, debarment from future awards, and costly penalties. Immediate action is required: notify your agency, file as soon as possible, and document the cause.

Consequences of Non-Compliance
Funding Suspension: Federal agencies may withhold funds, or suspend/terminate existing awards.
Debarment: Future federal award opportunities may be restricted.
Audit Findings: The late submission will be noted as a finding in the current and potentially future audits.
Penalties: Late 401(k) audits can result in Department of Labor (DOL) penalties of up to $1,100 per day.

“This is the agency entrusted with almost $1 billion in federal, state, and local funds, and it can’t even meet a deadline for a routine ministerial audit,” Campbell said. “I’ll leave it to you to decide how effective it would be as the region’s lead homelessness agency.”