The Brief

The city of L.A. is running into major data problems as the mayor’s office works to address homelessness — it was discovered this week that the city may be paying for services that were never used, such as motel rooms that sat empty.

Councilmembers learned new details about the issues, which include missing data points on people leaving motel shelters, during their housing and homelessness committee meeting this week.

“It’s just insanity,” said Councilmember Monica Rodriguez. “There's a fundamental problem with getting some very basic information here, and it's costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”

So far, the council has authorized $300 million for the Inside Safe motel shelter program since L.A. Mayor Karen Bass took office, an unprecedented spending level to try and move people off the streets and into housing at a time when the number of people experiencing homelessness continues to rise. The latest count shows nearly 33,000 people on L.A. streets are unhoused.

Tempers flare at meeting

The issue blew up Thursday at the meeting when a councilmember asked about missing data points about people who leave the Inside Safe motel shelter program.

The nonprofits that serve unhoused people are supposed to log when unhoused people exit the motel room program. But that requirement has not been enforced by LAHSA, which contracts with the providers and manages the data system. The agency’s system allows providers to “bypass” disclosing whether a person has left the program, said Emily Vaughn Henry, LAHSA’s deputy chief information officer.

That means the city might not know if it’s paying for empty motel rooms after people leave, councilmembers were told by the mayor’s top homelessness advisor in response to questions.

“That's horrifying,” Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said at the meeting Thursday. He also chairs the council’s budget committee.

“So we could be paying for weeks for an empty room, when somebody left two weeks earlier, and we could be using that room to house somebody?” Blumenfield asked.

Mercedes Marquez, who leads the mayor’s homelessness efforts, acknowledged that could be the case.

“If there was nothing else that was being done, you would be absolutely correct,” Marquez said in response to Blumenfield’s question.

The mayor’s office is doing its own checking of motel invoices to try to ensure they’re accurate, she said. But LAHSA’s incomplete data about exits is a real problem that makes it possible that the city does not know if it’s paying for empty rooms in some instances, Marquez added.

“I wouldn't tell you that it is never true that an extra day is paid for,” she said. “But it is not the usual because we're checking, and we check every invoice” before it’s paid.

‘Merry-go-round from hell’

Councilmember Rodriguez said she also is extremely frustrated by LAHSA’s data problems.

“How do we know that we're not leasing out rooms that are not in fact being utilized?” she said.

Rodriguez said these types of problems with LAHSA’s data have been going on for the six years she’s been on the council.

“Get me off this merry-go-round from hell,” Rodriguez said, referring to a pattern of councilmembers pressing for more transparency but, in her view, not getting it. “The idea that we continue to have the same conversation with the same agency and the same problems being uplifted, and no one can seem to learn this lesson – I don't understand.”

“It feels like we’re flying blind with the people’s money,” added Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson.

Data problems at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) long predate Bass’ term and the time that LAHSA’s CEO, who started in April, has been in charge.

Despite the issues, city councilmembers and the city’s top fiscal advisor do acknowledge major improvements in recent weeks to the accuracy and transparency of the data, which city leaders and the public rely on to know how many people receive which types of housing services – and whether those programs are working.

But huge problems remain, councilmembers say.

A threat to yank funding

Among those problems, according to councilmembers, is that city officials still don’t have direct access to LAHSA’s data. That’s despite the council providing LAHSA with millions more in funding over the last year in order to improve data access, they said.

Blumenfield said this is putting him on the verge of halting any more city dollars going to the region’s homeless services agency.

“I’m at the end of my rope on this,” Blumenfield said, adding that he’s “sick of us paying money without getting any data.”

“I want to stop any dollars going to LAHSA until we have access to this…that’s literally where I’m going.”

But while council members have threatened that repeatedly, Councilmember John Lee said it’s been an empty threat so far.

The council has “failed” to actually explore other options for homeless services, he said.

“If we were to make that choice, what would we do?” Lee said, adding that he shares his colleague’s frustrations about the data issues and supports looking into a replacement for LAHSA.

“Otherwise, every year we're going to be coming here and having the same exact conversations,” he said.

Vaughn Henry, the LAHSA official, responded that the holdup in giving data access is not from LAHSA but from L.A.’s Continuum of Care Board, which is a regional planning group that has 17 representatives of government, service providers, and people who have been unhoused. Vaughn said she supports giving the city direct access to the raw data.

Multiple city officials have told LAist that the lack of accurate data from LAHSA has made it difficult to hold leaders accountable, going back many years, because there often is no reliable measure of whether programs are working as intended.

How LAHSA is improving data quality

Va Lecia Adams Kellum, who inherited the data problems when she started as LAHSA’s chief in April, acknowledged this week that LAHSA “has long been challenged to produce data that is accurate and timely.”

At a news conference Tuesday marking her 100th day in office, she described a series of actions to try to fix it.

Adams Kellum said LAHSA has hired additional data staff and brought on an information technology consulting company, Gartner, which she described as an industry leader.

“Our team is working diligently every day to produce reports, on a weekly and bi-weekly basis,” she said.

“And that means working directly with the service providers, making sure we're curing data, making sure we're looking at the data, making sure that it's accurate and accessible.”

Among the changes LAHSA has made in the last couple of weeks is spelling out in their reports exactly how much of the data they believe is unreliable.

“We're being transparent, and we know that we can get better. And we know that our whole entire system has to function more effectively and be more data-driven,” Adams Kellum said in response to LAist’s questions Tuesday about the data problems.

‘Same song every two weeks’

At Thursday’s meeting, Harris-Dawson noted he and his colleagues keep expressing frustrations with LAHSA’s data at the twice-per-month committee meetings.

“It is beginning to sound unfortunately like a choir that sings the same song every two weeks,” he said, also expressing frustration about the issue.

But, he said, residents are demanding urgent action on homelessness.

His constituents who live in homes and own businesses aren’t so concerned about how much motel rooms are costing, he said. They want more encampments cleared.

“For them, they're not asking me about how much we're paying per night per room, or if the room is filled or not,” Harris-Dawson said.

“They're saying, ‘It's great that this encampment is gone. Can we get rid of the next one?’”

State and local lawmakers are joining immigrant rights groups in urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign a bill that would bar California law enforcement from moonlighting for ICE.

Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, who represents Angelenos from South L.A. to Mar Vista, introduced AB 1537 in January. If implemented, the bill would ban California police, sheriffs and other law enforcement from taking on second jobs that involve “arresting, detaining, transporting, or deporting” people.

The bill has made its way through the state legislature and is now on the governor’s desk. Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto it.

At a press conference outside L.A. City Hall on Wednesday, José Madera, who directs the Pasadena Job Center, pointed to multiple deaths involving federal immigration agents in recent months — from Minneapolis to Houston — and to a recent shooting in Austin. “We don't need our local police to be part of that violence,” he said.

“ICE is a lawless, rogue agency that is terrorizing our communities, separating our families and kidnapping our neighbors,” said Bruno Huizar, supervising policy manager at the California Immigrant Policy Center. “Governor Newsom must sign AB 1537 into law to protect Californians.”

L.A. City councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, whose own parents were undocumented, said it pained him to see immigrant parents go to work and to church in fear of being separated from their children.

“If you’re a public servant, you should be serving the public — not helping ICE tear families apart,” he added in a follow-up email statement.

The bill, dubbed “No side jobs for ICE” by its proponents, would also require officers to report secondary employment offers relating to immigration to their employers.

“If a law enforcement agent gets a conditional offer from an immigration enforcement agency, that will be part of their employment records. And that will be subject to a public records act request,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, a licensed attorney at the California Immigration Policy Center. “This is aimed at bringing transparency, so that we know how many officers are actually getting offers to work as an ICE agent or a Border Patrol agent.”

The Peace Officers Research Association of California, which represents officers across the state, has spoken out against the bill, arguing that “policies like this don’t improve public safety.” The Los Angeles Police Protective League did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

The bill is part of a growing effort to bar local law enforcement from engaging in the ongoing mass deportation effort. The L.A. City Council approved a motion in March, barring city employees from holding second jobs with federal immigration enforcement agencies.

In Santa Ana, the City Council recently adopted a policy that prohibits employees from obtaining outside work that involves federal immigration enforcement activities.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill aimed at protecting children who are abused.

The law, which went into effect this week, is named “Gabriel’s Law,” after Gabriel Fernandez — an 8-year-old boy in Palmdale who died in 2013 after being tortured and abused by his mother and her boyfriend.

“It devastated the community. Still has,” said State Assemblymember Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale), who worked on legislation related to Gabriel’s case for years. “It hasn't gone away, right? It’s something we still acknowledge.”

Since Fernandez’s death, the Antelope Valley has seen a number of high-profile child deaths at the hands of their parents.

The new law requires social workers to make sure a child gets emergency medical care when needed, and it makes it easier to prosecute social workers who knowingly falsify records.

Officials said there had been warning signs about Fernandez’s abuse, but social workers with the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services failed to follow up on them. The high-profile case prompted internal reforms in the agency.

What happened to Gabriel

Gabriel died in May 2013, after months of abuse from his mother and her boyfriend. He was found with a number of injuries, including a fractured skull, broken ribs and BB pellets lodged in his body. His mother and her boyfriend were both sentenced.

A teacher had reported signs of abuse to the county, but social workers did not remove him from the home. Then they ended the investigation. Prosecutors charged the social workers with child abuse, but the charges were later dismissed.

“He was literally tortured. And there were many, many, many documented events, and there are many encounters that he had with people that lacked follow-up,” Lackey said.

What does the law change?

Before this week, the law said that social workers may authorize care if a child needs immediate emergency care, but did not require it. Gabriel’s law requires a social worker to secure medical care for a child.

“ They call for an ambulance or escort the child to an emergency room— make sure a physician has the opportunity to provide some level of remedy and documentation of the injury,” Lackey said.

It also clarifies the law so that social workers who are guilty of falsifying or destroying public records can be imprisoned or fined.

Why did the law take so long to change?

Lackey’s previous legislative efforts related to Fernandez’s case failed over the years. He introduced at least five different pieces of legislation that failed to advance.

“I'm not even saying that I blame the pushback and the concern, because if you're too aggressive, there's a tendency to accuse people of wrongdoing when they are not guilty of wrongdoing, so we wanted to make sure that the balance was reasonable,” he said.

Lackey terms out this year. “We're trying to do something as a community to not only pay tribute to [Gabriel], but to prevent it from reoccurring,” he said.

The Los Angeles Fire Department has completed its investigation into the cause of the Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights but was unable to determine what caused it. 

In a press release, LAFD said the June 17 fire was caused by an “electrical event” that occurred on the roof of the building, “adjacent to a section of solar panels.” Despite a “comprehensive investigation,” the department could not determine what caused the electrical event.

“The Department’s thoughts remain with all those impacted by this deeply tragic incident,” Arson and Fire Investigation Chief Thomas Raymond said in a release.

In response to the inconclusive investigation, District 14 Councilmember Ysabel Jurado said, “LAFD’s finding that the cause remains undetermined does nothing to alleviate what Boyle Heights residents have endured and are still carrying: months of health concerns and disruption, along with unanswered questions about whether this site can safely operate again.”

“The fact that we still cannot explain how this catastrophe began is yet another reason I will continue opposing any permits to rebuild this facility,” Jurado said.

Recently, the LA City Council voted to withhold rebuilding permits for the Lineage warehouse until after the Los Angeles Fire Department completed its investigation. Earlier this month, Lineage Chief Executive Officer Greg Lehmkuhl told Boyle Heights Beat and The LA Local that the company had not decided whether to rebuild, saying, “We’re still focused on holding the right people accountable here and making sure that we’re continuing to support the community.”

The CEO’s comments came after Lineage sued solar power provider Altus Power, Inc. and its contractor, blaming them for the fire. Altus Power and its contractor dispute those claims.

In a statement following the completed investigation, Lineage said, “Today’s report from the Los Angeles Fire Department validates what we have known all along: This was a solar fire.”

The fire and subsequent cleanup of millions of pounds of rotting food caused a flood of issues for residents living in Boyle Heights, East LA and surrounding communities, including an infestation of flies and pests, nausea and headaches, higher utility bills and other health concerns. 

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Boyle Heights Beat senior reporter Alejandra Molina and LA Local reporter Christopher Damien contributed to this report.

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