The Marxist Mayor of L.A. can not account for over $2 billion “spent” for the homeless. Now we find she and the city LIED about the number of beds they have provided the homeless.
“Court-appointed auditors were not able to verify that the city was actually following through on that commitment.
Officials at the L.A. Homeless Services Authority — who Mayor Karen Bass oversees — failed to provide records to the auditors for any spending on more than 1,400 rental subsidies the city was taking credit for in compliance reports submitted to the court.
“Very concerning” was how the court’s special master, Michele Martinez, put it at the most recent court hearing on March 27.”Is it time to open a corruption investigation on the Mayor and the City. Is it time a Special Master ran the City? How much more corruption and mismanagement before the State and Feds say NO more money to the financial bidet known as Los Angeles?
LA city officials told a court they were adding new beds for unhoused people. But auditors couldn’t verify over 1,400 of them
By Nick Gerda, LA1st, 5/15/25 https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/la-city-officials-new-beds-for-unhoused-auditors
L.A. city officials say they’ve been complying with a federal court requirement to create 6,000 new beds for unhoused Angelenos.
But there’s a problem.
Court-appointed auditors were not able to verify that the city was actually following through on that commitment.
Officials at the L.A. Homeless Services Authority — who Mayor Karen Bass oversees — failed to provide records to the auditors for any spending on more than 1,400 rental subsidies the city was taking credit for in compliance reports submitted to the court.
“Very concerning” was how the court’s special master, Michele Martinez, put it at the most recent court hearing on March 27.
She was seated next to U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter on the bench, with Bass in the jury box.
“I want you all to keep that in mind if we are not able to verify, you’re not going to be able to count those,” Martinez said. If the unverified subsidies are excluded, that would appear to mean the city was falling short of its court-enforced obligations under the agreement.
LAist asked for the spending data the day after that hearing. It took more than a dozen requests over the last month-and-a-half before LAHSA eventually provided LAist on Tuesday with the fuller spending records they had withheld from the court’s auditors.
The records, covering the fiscal year ending in June 2024, show no city role in paying for more than 1,400 of the rental subsidies the city was taking credit for to show compliance. The largest share of rental subsidies the city has been taking credit for were funded not by the city — as required under its court obligations — but by dollars L.A. County directly gave LAHSA, according to the newly-disclosed data.
LAHSA’s data indicates that the city was involved in paying for just 673 to 853 out of the 2,000-plus “scattered site” beds it has been counting toward compliance with the court agreement.
LAist has asked repeatedly for an explanation from city and LAHSA officials for why the city was counting more than 1,400 beds toward its obligations that LAHSA’s accounting shows no city role in funding. None has been provided.
A LAHSA spokesperson previously told LAist that “LAHSA stretches the City’s investment by braiding its money with other funding.”
LAHSA officials also have not answered why the full spending data was withheld from the court’s auditors.
LAHSA spokesperson Paul Rubenstein disputed that anything was withheld, pointing to a partial dataset that LAHSA provided to LAist in mid-April and that court-auditors had flagged as incomplete. He has not responded to repeated questions about why the full accounting was withheld for months from the court-overseen reviewers, and from LAist, until this week.
Bass didn’t respond to requests for comment. LAist had asked whether she has any concerns about the financial data being withheld, and whether the city has been taking credit for subsidies it’s not actually funding.
City spending is also overseen by the City Council. During the weeks-long email exchange with LAHSA, LAist copied the spokesperson for Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the council’s housing and homelessness committee. Raman was not immediately available to comment, according to the spokesperson.
And the city lawyer who submitted the compliance reports in question — Deputy City Attorney Arlene N. Hoang — did not respond to requests for comment.
Judge Carter is now demanding answers.
He scheduled a hearing for May 27 to hear evidence on whether the city breached its agreements to create more shelter.
Carter scheduled the hearing response to a filing by the plaintiffs — the downtown business group L.A. Alliance for Human Rights — requesting the judge find the city in violation. They want the court to seize control of city homelessness spending and hand it to a court-appointed receiver to oversee.
“Knowingly or unknowingly, the City was falsely reporting that it paid for and provided all 2,293 beds when it unequivocally did not,” L.A. Alliance attorney Elizabeth Mitchell wrote in a court filing last week requesting the receivership.
Shayla Myers, the lead attorney for unhoused people in the lawsuit, said she’s been raising concerns about the city’s claims about these beds for years.
“The city had an obligation to show they’ve actually been funding those beds,” she said. “The fact that can’t show that calls into question their compliance with court orders.”
“The fact that we are now years into the Roadmap agreement and there is still no substantiation of [the city funding] these beds — it undermines the court’s authority,” Myers added.
Who paid for the beds
The court-overseen deal at issue is known as the Roadmap agreement. Signed in the fall of 2020 as part of the L.A. Alliance lawsuit, the agreement requires the city to expand the number of shelter beds for unhoused people in the city of L.A. by adding 6,000 new beds — and paying for them.
The city “is responsible for all costs” for the beds, aside from the annual county payments to the city, according to the agreement.
Every three months, the city has been submitting required reports showing how it claims to be meeting its obligations under the Roadmap agreement.
On the city’s compliance reports, its largest line items are for over 2,000 beds at so-called “scattered sites” under the “Time Limited Subsidies” model or “TLS,” which pays for renting individual units on the private market.
But for the last several months, LAHSA did not provide the court’s auditors with any evidence of spending for most of the TLS beds the city reported for its compliance.
On March 28, LAist requested a breakdown of money spent on 2,293 “scattered site” homes the city claimed to be providing in a compliance report to the court last summer.
Nearly a week went by with no answers. So LAist asked again — seven more times over a two week period, copying Bass and some of her top staff.
LAHSA then provided a spreadsheet — but it didn’t include any of the spending information LAist requested. In fact, it didn’t show any spending information at all.
So LAist asked again.
LAHSA sent a second spreadsheet. But that too failed to show any spending for about 70% of those claimed beds. It showed funding for just 673 of the roughly 2,300 beds.
So LAist asked yet again, noting plans to publish an article on the issue.
On May 12 — a month-and-a-half after LAist started asking — LAHSA officials ultimately provided LAist with the accounting they had not provided the court’s auditors for months.
The records show city involvement in funding 853 of the beds. The rest were paid for by the county through Measure H funds and state grants to LAHSA meant for countywide services.
Measure H is a dedicated county funding stream that predated the court case, and had to be spent on homeless shelter and services regardless of the Roadmap agreement. There is no indication that the city had any role in arranging for this portion of the spending, despite taking credit for it in compliance reports submitted to the court.
A $1.7 million discrepancy
There’s also a $1.7 million discrepancy in the data LAHSA provided LAist — translating to 180 housing units claimed to be funded by the city.
The data LAHSA provided on April 15 showed $14.3 million in city spending on the scattered sites last fiscal year — all from state grants to the city.
But follow-up data LAHSA provided three weeks later showed the city spent $16 million on the same program across the same timeframe.
LAHSA officials, under CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum, did not acknowledge the retroactive change when they sent the second dataset.
The retroactive funding jump also means an increase in the number of housing units LAHSA claimed the city was funding last fiscal year under the Roadmap agreement — from 673 scattered sites to 853.
In response to questions from LAist, Rubenstein, a LAHSA spokesperson, said the April 15 spreadsheet did not include two projects totaling $1.7 million the city was paying for using grant money from the state.
Judge plans to hold hearing on whether agreement was breached
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit noticed the discrepancies in the city’s spending claims and are asking the court to intervene.
“The real-world equivalent would be if two people decided to pay for 10 pizzas for a total of $100. Person A paid $30 and Person B paid $70; combined they achieved a total purchase of 10 pizzas. But under no interpretation of the event could Person A claim to have purchased and provided all 10 pizzas,” Mitchell, the L.A. Alliance attorney, wrote in a court filing submitted last week.
It was “even more shocking” that LAHSA continued to fail to show any expenditures for about 1,600 of those beds, Mitchell wrote.
While the court-overseen audit only looked at the 2024 fiscal year, she added, “these scattered sites have been reported back to at least to July 2021 and continue to today.
“It is reasonable to assume that this same financial mismanagement and mis-accounting has occurred since the inception of the Roadmap Agreement and funding of the Scattered Site beds.”
The city responded in a written court filing to say it’s improper for the Alliance to seek an evidence-gathering hearing about whether the city violated the Roadmap agreement because the Alliance isn’t a party to the agreement.
Carter scheduled the May 27 hearing to discuss whether the city broke its promise to pay for the new beds. In the meantime, Carter has a separate hearing scheduled for Thursday to discuss what the auditors found.
He issued two orders requesting attendance at Thursday’s hearing from Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom, as well as other elected officials.
Hoang, the attorney for the city, informed Carter this week that Bass will not attend. Hoang wrote that it’s procedurally improper because lower-level officials can testify.
