What reveals the implosion of the homeless LA agency for the CA crisis

From Marisa KendallCalmness

This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

For three decades, the city and the Los Angeles County have ruled the biggest crisis of homelessness in California together.

They had equal words in major financing solutions and worked in tandem to coordinate housing programs through a joint agency for urban cities, called the Los Angeles homeless service service.

But after the crying audits criticizing the body of homeless, the county is explosion This joint agency starts from the beginning – despite the objections of LA Mayor Karen Bass. Now there are questions about how the shaking will affect more than 75,000 people living in LA.

This is the most dramatic recent example of a phenomenon that plays all over California. Cities that supply shelter beds and counties that provide decisive mental health and addiction treatment cannot effectively cope homelessness Unless they work well together. But too often they don’t.

In many cities, mayors publicly attack their counties because they fail to withdraw their weight. In San Diego, a Created shelter with 150 beds As a partnership between the city and the county, it is in danger, as both parties are arguing for who to pay for what. In the Valley of San Joaquin, the city of Turlook refuses to launch Stanislav County Finance shelter thereS A State bill This would force the counties to pay half the price of homeless shelters in the city, facing fierce discounts from the counties and were quickly gruntled.

There is no shortage of evidence why working together is useful. Cities do not have behavioral health services or fund these services. So, when residents of urban homeless shelters need mental health or treatment of addiction they often do, it falls into the county.

The cities of the California League and the California State Association of Counts even released a report in 2018, emphasizing the importance of cities and cities Addressing homelessness togetherS

There is no mandate from the state to expose how much of the responsibility it should fall into a city and how much it should fall into a county. Especially in narrow budget years like the one, cities do not want to pay for services that they could hand over to the county – and vice versa. And he neither wants to take the blame for dropping as they fight under the huge challenge of taking people out of the street.

While both sides are hit, the fate of the real shelters that provide rescue lines for real people hangs in balance.

“The lack of partnership between cities and counties around people living in shelter is a major problem,” said Senator Catherine BlexpirDemocrat from Encinitas whose Senate Bill 16 They would force the counties to bear half the price of urban shelters until they are changed in a way that weakens its proposed requirement.

Major Repair of La County

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority formed in the 1990s as a result of a series of court cases that claim that the homeless Angelenos do not have access to the district services. The Joint Agency had to remedy this problem by forcing the city and the county to work together.

City and district officials pointed out some of the good ones who came out of this partnership. The two organizations work together to improve the way they share client data in homelessness and mental health systems. They have a joint team of workers who can go anywhere in the county without being limited by the boundaries of their 88 cities, which, in addition to Los Angeles, include Long Beach and Glendale.

Last year the town of La saw a 10% reduction In street homelessness – the first double -digit reduction of at least nine years.

LA county voters have shown that they are ready to pay more to deal with homelessness when they supported sales tax to finance these programs in 2017 and in 2024, new money forced the homeless service authority to grow fast. Things didn’t go smoothly.

Two critical Audits Since November found that the agency is failure To properly track the costs and results. The advice of the Supervisory Authorities of La County vote Last month, it will withdraw more than $ 300 million – more than one -third of the joint agency’s funding – and over 700 employees from the joint body and a new district agency.

Then, in a quick order, the head of the Joint Agency said he would resignation and Federal Working Group announced that it would investigation The Fraud Agency. LA Municipal Council is given Pulling and its funding.

The result will be a complete renovation of how the district administers its homelessness programs planned to take about a year.

While the problems of the homeless authority were obvious, the gutting of the joint agency of the district – carried out for the objections of Mayor Bass – created more friction between the city and the district.

In a letter to the county before the vote, bass and council member Nighty Raman warn Extraction of funding from the Joint Agency “Create Monumental Disorders of the Advance We Achiece and performs the serious risk of deterioration of our homelessness crisis.”

In an interview, the vote of the county to do it anyway “feels like a breakdown of a relationship that is moving towards more confidence,” said Raman, who chaired the Housing and Homelessness Committee in the city.

Now, said Raman, programs that have received urban and district funds through the Joint Agency, as a $ 170 million program that provides two -year rent subsidies, are competing to understand how to divide the city and the county funds. She is also worried about shelter programs that fall through cracks during the transition.

“How will we make sure these shelters remain in place?” Raman asked.

The new agency will have increased accountability measures, which many audits have found that the old joint agency is missing. The agency will report to the county annually on its progress and quarterly on an online dashboard, said Cherry Todorof, CEO of the Initiative for Homeless Cities.

Working within the existing county infrastructure, the new agency will take advantage of the tools that the county has been using for decades to account for costs and monitoring of progress, said Sarah Mahin, director of the County Housing Program, which will be a model for the new agency.

LA LA Lindsay Horwat County Supervisor, who runs the plan to create the new agency, said the intention is not to protect the city from its efforts for homelessness, but to be more effective by consolidating the services for homeless ones, which are provided in more than a dozen different district departments. The county will also review all existing contracts and will cancel those who do not produce results, she said.

“The city will be as involved as they choose to be,” Horwat said.

A battle over a shelter in San Diego

This year town Speech, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria attacked her colleagues in the county because of their “inaction” by helping people suffering from mental illness and addiction. Last month, he again placed the explosion county in his email newsletter, saying he must “strengthen” to save the shelter for homeless.

“Generally speaking, I would say where the city responds to this with an approach to all the hands of the deck, I do not think that the same can be said for my county or other cities,” Gloria said in an interview with Calmatters.

This tension came to the head with a dispute over the Rosecrans shelter, where 150 people sleep in two -storey beds in a giant tent placed in the parking lot of the psychiatric hospital in the county. The city manages the shelter and the district provides behavioral health services, land and utilities through connection with the neighboring hospital.

The county is preparing to demolish a free building at this site, which will interrupt the connection of the shelter with water, sewage and energy.

Now the fate of the shelter residents is in the air. Gloria wants the county to pay for the recovery of utilities, which is estimated to cost $ 2 million. He also wants the county to move the shelter residents, most of whom fight mental illness or addiction. They cannot stay in the shelter during the demolition, he said – it will be too destructive.

Spencer Katz, Director of Strategic Initiatives for San Diego County Head Terra Lawson-time, disagrees. There is no reason for people not to live in the shelter during the demolition, he said.

“With regard to the mayor who is neither an expert in demolition nor behavioral health, this statement simply does not hold water,” he said.

Lawson-Remer has suggested that you use $ 800,000 in residual federal funds to recover Covid to pay for utilities, Katz said, and she wants to work with the city to find the rest of the money.

But Gloria has suggested that the shelter ends as he stares in A budget deficit of $ 258 millionS

The city and the county have until July 1, when their current agreement expires, to find a solution.

Newsom calls the mayor of Turlock

Meanwhile in the San Joaquin Valley, another dispute over urban cities of homelessness caught the attention of Governor Gavin NewoS

“Truly ridiculous lack of local leadership – an absolute moral failure,” Governor said last month of XS

He was talking about the city of Turlok, which has refusal To allow Stanislaus County to support an existing homeless shelter in the city. The county awarded nearly $ 270,000 state funding for a 50 bed shelter. But the money depended on the cooperation of the city, which will have to write a letter of support and distribute a marker 1 dollar for the program.

The city said no.

“It’s not about the dollar – it’s about accountability,” Turlok Mayor Amy Bubblek said in an interview with Calmatters. The shelter is open at night, but during the day the people who sleep there have nowhere to go – and nowhere to use the bathroom, Boblak said. As a result, nearby enterprises complain of public urination and other interruptions, she said. The mayor asked us to take care, the organization that manages the shelter, to hold his bathroom open during the day, but they were unable to reach an agreement, she said.

Stanislav Terry Wow’s supervisory authority called the city’s refusal “quite disappointing.” People at the shelter need help, he said, and closing the program will not make them go.

“I don’t know how you can turn your back on these people and just let them die there,” he said.

We are interested in us did not answer a request for comment. In a statement to CBS13We take care to say that he may be forced to close the shelter without this funding.

Bill would make the counties pay more

Thehe Bill, introduced by Blexpir, the State Senator of Encinitas, would require the counties to cover half of the costs of operating shelters for homeless in the city so that they could be eligible for financing state homelessness. The counties came out against this mandate and Blaxpeir removed it from the bill.

It was a disappointment for the mayor of San Jose Matt Mahan. It boosts to open about 1000 new temporary residential units this year, most in converted motels and small homes – and wants Santa Clara County to provide services for managing residents.

“We have generally reached our limit,” Mahan said. “We can’t discourage Core City Services, which are already disadvantaged. So if the county is not intervened … we can no longer scale, which means we leave thousands of people out.”

Santa Clara Susan Ellenberg’s supervisor said the city and the district are already working together on many shelter programs. But she objected to the forcing of the county to pay for services.

“Without having control over the number of shelters or small homes that the city decides to build,” she said, “We have no control over our budget.”

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.