Comments
iAUDIT! - Considered in the context of recent news stories, last week’s hearings in federal court highlight the leadership vacuum at the very top of our homelessness agencies. Like most complex organizations, municipal governments, such as cities and counties, employ a wide variety of people experienced in a many professions. As you might expect, police departments are staffed by trained and certified peace officers. But you’ll also find other professionals, like experts in finance and budget management, and those specializing in the often-arcane rules of human resources. My home department was Public Works, which, of course, was staffed by engineers and maintenance specialists. But my background is in finance and performance management. It was my job to make the engineers’ and others’ jobs easier by relieving them of the mundane administrative tasks that make government work, and by making operations as efficient as possible. My staff and I, in turn, were supported by departments dedicated to internal operations, like Finance and Human Resources. When all the parts worked together, my city was able to provide our residents with cost-efficient and effective services. The key is to put the people with the right skills in the right positions. It’s a simple concept but one that seems to have escaped leaders of LA’s homelessness programs.
LAHSA (the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority) has a staff of more than 800 people, many of whom are professionals in social work, among other helping professions. What is lacking, apparently, are managers skilled in finance, performance measurement, statistics, and above all, ethics. According to a whistleblower complaint released May 6, in early 2024, LAHSA’s then-CEO Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum fired her qualified and experienced Chief Finance Officer, Kristina Dixon, replacing her with Janine Trejo, a Finance Department employee since 2017. When Angela McGregor, writing for the Westside Current, asked LAHSA for Trejo’s professional biography, she received no response. McGregor could not find anything relating to Trejo’s qualifications on LAHSA’s website. Whatever those qualifications may be, the results of two damning audits, one from LA County’s Auditor and the other from the independent firm Alvarez & Marsal, (A&M), described, in detail, widespread financial mismanagement, including paying providers with no proof of performance, and sometimes without having properly executed contracts. It is a system so dysfunctional, it allowed Dr. Adams Kellum to “accidentally” approve more than $2 million in contracts to a nonprofit where her husband is a senior manager.
According to its organizational chart, LAHSA has several senior managers assigned to issues related to program performance. Kris Freed, a part-time manager whose position is budgeted at $330,000 per year, has the title of “Chief Executive Strategist”. There is also a Deputy Chief for Analytics, plus Directors of Information Technology and of Data Management, and more mid-managers and line employees. And yet, despite a structure--on paper--for effective program management, audits and reports have shown time and again LAHSA has no idea how many people its serves, how or if they are housed, what services they may or may not receive, or what happens to them after they leave the homelessness intervention system. The report from A&M incudes one example after another on LAHSA’s poor performance management, including contracts written so poorly, providers can define their own performance measures, and a service system so disjointed, the unhoused often have no idea what kind of services they should be receiving from which provider.
As for ethics, the concept seems not to be of the slightest concern at LAHSA’s top levels. Whistleblower complaints against Dr. Adams Kellum allege an array of unethical practices beyond the check-writing debacle. The allegations include withholding data about Mayor Bass’ flagship homelessness program, Inside Safe, that would have made the mayor’s efforts look “bad”. The former Deputy CIO said Adams Kellum ordered her to delete official emails that reflected poorly on her office. The fired CFO alleges she was terminated for, among other things, telling Adams Kellum taxpayer money could not be used to buy alcohol for LAHSA’s holiday party.
The recent hearings in federal court bring the lack of leadership into sharper focus, especially on the City’s part. According to a report from Westside Current, neither CAO Matt Szabo nor Deputy Mayor for Homelessness Dr. Etsemaye P. Agonafer could answer the most basic questions about the costs and performance of Inside Safe. Even though the program has spent more than $367 million and supposedly housed a mere 935 people in two years, leaders could not comment on the program’s costs and performance, repeatedly falling back on the meaningless trope that “its all about getting people inside”. If that were true, leaders would be more interested in making sure the numbers they quote are accurate or at least have some basis in fact. As we know from A&M’s report and other audits, few, if any, of the numbers quoted by the City and LAHSA are reliable or verifiable. They’re a mix of guesswork, repeat counts of the same people, and shaky statistics from providers who face no consequences if they misstate their numbers. In a dumbfounding admission of ignorance, Dr. Agonofer told LA Alliance for Human Rights lawyers she had only “skimmed” the agreement between the City and the Alliance, despite being appointed to her position more than a year ago, and despite its requirement to add thousands of new shelter beds to the City’s inventory. Her words echoed her boss, Karen Bass, who flippantly--and cynically--responded to A&M’s report by saying, “But it needs to be focused on the people and what their needs are, and not on the administration”, saying poor management can somehow be separated from poor results.
This attitude permeates homelessness leadership in Los Angeles. Besides the City's laissez faire attitude towards good governance, it explains why LAHSA's finances are a jumble of mismanagement, poor or nonexistent controls, and a casual concern for how providers are paid. In this environment, it’s perfectly acceptable that Dr. Adams Kellum would write checks to her husband's nonprofit and order her staff to withhold negative statistics about her friend Mayor Bass' signature Inside Safe program.
It is particularly interesting that the City’s high-priced contract law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, doesn’t seem to be challenging the testimony about the City’s lackluster performance. Rather, the attorneys’ objections were more about the technicalities of what should be subject to testimony as it relates to the settlement agreement. Regarding earlier testimony from Alliance Executive Director Paul Webster and members of A&M’s audit team, the Westside Current reported. “The audit found widespread failures in financial management, transparency, and program effectiveness between June 2020 and June 2024. The A&M audit identified approximately $2.3 billion in funding but concluded much of it could not be properly accounted for. Auditors reported inconsistent financial practices, unverified payments to service providers, and overlapping funding streams that obscured actual spending. They noted that nearly half of those placed in programs returned to homelessness, while fewer than one in four secured permanent housing”. Yet counsel for the City focused on the timing of the settlement agreement’s requirement for creating more shelter beds, arguing that other considerations are superfluous, as if the mere existence of a bed is sufficient to alleviate homelessness. Of course, that argument rings hollow when, as described in A&M’s report, and confirmed by a December 2023 L.A. City Controller audit, the City doesn’t know how many shelter beds it has nor how many are occupied. Indeed, Dr. Agonfer’s blasé attitude toward knowing what’s in the settlement agreement shows how unserious the City is about meeting its obligations to reduce homelessness. Whatever defense the City chooses, whether it’s based on finance or effectiveness, it is trying to defend the indefensible.
What we must remember is that to homelessness leadership and the advocacy lobby that supports them, it’s all about the optics; creating the appearance of compassion instead of implementing reforms that would actually get people off the street and into the treatment programs they need. It’s a shabby, disingenuous, amoral, cynical effort to maintain the status quo and protect the entrenched special interests that control the homelessness narrative in LA.
(Tim Campbell is a resident of Westchester who spent a career in the public service and managed a municipal performance audit program. He focuses on outcomes instead of process in his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA.)
