California’s unaccountable homeless industrial complex – Whittier Daily News

The bag of tricks that California politicians are using to con voters into approving higher taxes and spending would impress David Copperfield.

Twice this years we’ve seen politicians pledge “accountability” for massive spending on homelessness in order to win votes for more massive spending on homelessness, while delaying the release of critical audits until after the election.

In the March 5 primary, Proposition 1 was a $6.3 billion bond for mental health facilities and housing, along with a requirement for counties to reallocate existing funding, to address the crisis of homelessness. Voters just barely agreed to it.

Then on April 9, the state auditor released a report revealing that $24 billion already spent on homelessness couldn’t be tracked to see if it actually did any good.

As icing on the cake, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed Assembly Bill 2570 in July. It would have required his administration to do an annual evaluation of the money the state sent to cities and counties to address the problem of homelessness. “I support increasing transparency and accountability for cities’ and counties’ use of state funding to address homelessness,” the governor insisted in his veto message.

Just not right now.

Something similar is happening in Los Angeles County, where the auditor-controller completed a highly critical report on the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s management of finance, contracts, risk and grants. The report was released on November 19, two weeks after the election in which L.A. County voters were asked to approve a sales tax increase to provide more than $1 billion per year for the same people to manage.

The sales tax hike, Measure A, was approved by more than a majority of voters, but less than the two-thirds margin that the state constitution requires for a tax increase dedicated to a specific purpose. This is another magician’s gimmick from the bag of tricks. In 2017, the state Supreme Court suggested, without really deciding, that if a tax increase is put on the ballot by a “citizens’ initiative” instead of by a government body, the constitution doesn’t apply, so the two-thirds vote isn’t necessary.

Appellate courts in California have treated the Supreme Court’s vague language as gospel, and now a “citizens’ initiative” tax increase can pass with a simple majority vote.

It doesn’t even matter if government officials admit to being behind the effort. After the November 5 election, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass proudly told the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association that she personally wrote part of Measure A. She took credit for authoring the “accountability” provisions.

Homelessness spending by the city of Los Angeles since March 2020 is currently the subject of a court-ordered audit to see where billions of dollars of public funds ended up. A federal judge wants to know why the spending doesn’t seem to have made a dent in the homelessness problem, which has only gotten worse as the city, county and state have spent more and more of your money on it.

The county auditor-controller’s report on spending by LAHSA, which is a joint powers authority created by the city and county of L.A. in 1993, reveals serious lapses in management.

For example, LAHSA handed out more than $50 million in cash advances to “various subrecipients” starting in Fiscal Year 2017-18 without establishing formal agreements for repayment. As of July 8, LAHSA has recovered only 5% of that money.