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LA WATCHDOG - By voting NO on Measure A, the $1.1 billion half cent increase in our sales tax designed to support services to the homeless, we can send a message to Mayor Bass that we demand increased transparency and accountability in our City government.
Take Measure A. To date, we have not seen any detailed plan on how to address the homeless situation that plagues our City and County. Yes, we get numerous press releases telling us how people in encampments are being placed in shelters. But we don’t hear about the many that are returning to the streets.
It is time for the Mayor, the City Council, and the rest of the Homeless Industrial Complex to be honest with us and give us verifiable facts and figures in an understandable format. And the City needs to provide us with a detailed plan, not just tell us that we will need to spend $22 billion to address homelessness. This is just good money after bad.
Federal District Court David Carter authorized Alvarez and Marcel, an internationally recognized consulting and auditing firm, to prepare an audit on homeless expenditures and progress because he did not trust the information he received from the City and County. He even demanded that Mayor Bass and Supervisor Horvath appear in his court to explain what the hell was going on. This audit has not been completed because the clueless and disorganized homeless organizations have not been able to provide reliable information.
Exhibit two is the City’s budget. As mentioned in the recent Los Angeles Times editorial, LA is Broke, the “city is not living within its means.” Underlying the City’s fiscal emergency are the budget busting labor agreements that were negotiated behind closed doors and approved by the City Council and Mayor without any public hearings. To help fund the depleted Reserve Fund that was raided for over $300 million to fund last year’s deficit, the City will probably issue at least $150-200 million in Judgement Obligation Bonds to fund this year’s deficit. Of course, funding operating deficits with long term debt is a cardinal sin that only leads to more trouble in the future.
But when will the City tell us what the hell is going on and how it intends to balance the budget and eliminate the Structural Deficit?
Finally, the City Mayor is delaying appointing a new DWP Ratepayer Advocate. In March of 2023, the Mayor was informed that the appointment Fred Pickel expired in December of 2023. It took the Mayor over seven months to appoint her members to the Citizens Selection Committee. And today, a year later, no new appointment has been made to this very important office designed to oversee the reasonableness of our water and power rates that are expected to quadruple over the next ten years to support over $100 billion in capital expenditures to address climate change. More than likely, City Hall does not like independent oversight when they are picking our pockets.
There are numerous other examples of the lack of transparency and accountability: pet projects, corruption, planning and real estate developments, lunar cratered streets, broken sidewalks, poorly maintained parks, unfunded pension liabilities, hotel subsidies, inefficient operations, information technology to name a few.
By voting NO on Measure A, we can send a message to Mayor Bass that it is time for the City to clean up its act. No more bass-ackwards form of government.
(Jack Humphreville writes LA Watchdog for CityWatch. He is the President of the DWP Advocacy Committee, the Budget and DWP representative for the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council, and a Neighborhood Council Budget Advocate. He can be reached at: [email protected].)
