The Brief

L.A. County will stop sending hundreds of millions in taxpayer money each year to the troubled agency charged with serving the unhoused — a stinging admission by elected officials that the region's longstanding approach to homelessness has failed.

What the vote means

On a 4-0 vote Tuesday with one abstention, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors put in motion a plan to strip more than $300 million a year in taxpayer funding from the L.A. Homeless Services Authority — known as LAHSA — by the middle of next year. Instead, those funds will shift to the county’s direct oversight and control.

The funding shift was spearheaded by supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger. Horvath said the move was needed to fix a broken system and to make it more transparent and accountable.

“To engender the public’s trust, we must take action for a more centralized, effective, data-driven strategy to reduce homelessness,” she said. “Investments must be connected to outcomes — outcomes that this board ultimately must be responsible for. We have studied the homeless service system to death.”

Horvath added: “I want to be clear that this is not more government, it is better government.”

Speaking before the vote, Supervisor Janice Hahn said no one really defended LAHSA “because I don’t think anybody wants to.”

Why it matters

The move follows a series of harsh audits and a judge’s rebuke of the job LAHSA officials have done in recent years at managing and tracking spending — including an inability to properly account for billions in taxpayer dollars. That’s on top of a public growing increasingly impatient with L.A. government leaders’ handling of the crisis.

What do Los Angeles officials say?

The supervisors moved forward with seizing control despite being urged not to by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and several L.A. City Council members, who raised concerns that services could be disrupted and questioned if the new approach would be better.

“We are making forward movement. We must keep building on this and confronting our challenges, together,” Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman wrote in a joint letter to supervisors they distributed to media a few hours before Tuesday’s vote. She also appeared in person at today's meeting to address the board.

While LAHSA’s mismanagement has been a major concern, experts and advocates for unhoused people have said the main driver of the homelessness crisis in L.A. is rising housing costs amid short supply of homes.

What happens to LAHSA?

Tuesday’s decision by county supervisors leaves LAHSA’s fate uncertain.

Its largest funder is the county, with taxpayer funds making up 40% of the agency’s projected funding this fiscal year and an even larger share — 70% — of LAHSA’s administration budget.

Hundreds of LAHSA employees will likely have to leave the agency due to the funding shift. The county plan calls for giving priority to LAHSA employees for jobs in a new county department tasked with overseeing spending meant to help unhoused people get permanently off the streets.

LAHSA’s next largest funder is the city of L.A. at 35% of all revenue. The city is now exploring whether to follow in the county’s footsteps by pulling city funding and moving it under direct city control.

If both the city and county pull funding, LAHSA would dramatically slim down to far less than half its current size, handling a small subset of its current work. The agency’s ongoing work would include managing federal homelessness funds for the region, handling the annual point-in-time homeless count and overseeing the main data tracking system for homeless services, known as HMIS.

What will this change accomplish?

County officials say they’d have much better accountability and oversight of homelessness spending than what LAHSA does, while critics say it’s unclear whether the county would do any better than LAHSA.

“Our Board is taking full responsibility for the tax dollars we collect and distribute, ensuring transparency, efficiency, and real results for those we serve,” Barger said in a statement. “The buck stops here.”

The new effort to fight homelessness will be inspired by the county’s Housing for Health program, which is widely lauded. An evaluation by the RAND Corporation found Housing for Health did a better job of coordinating and providing care and services to unhoused people than other programs.

The county's renewed effort to fight homelessness promises transparency, in part by providing “clear expectations in its contracts, a range of support to help partners succeed, and oversight throughout,” according to a document provided by Horvath’s office.

The goal is also detailed monitoring to make sure that services are being delivered, according to that document.

The vote was 4-0-1. Who abstained?

Supervisor Holly Mitchell abstained from the vote and was the only supervisor not to support the move.

“If we go fast without a clear baseline of performance metrics that would actually enable us to determine if the new county homeless department is more effective at ending county homelessness, how will we know that we've actually built something that's better than what we are walking away from?" Mitchell said.

She said her colleagues were moving too fast with the 15-month transition to county control of the funding, calling the timeline “incredibly rushed.”

Horvath pushed back.

“I reject that notion, when seven people a day die on our streets in Los Angeles County. Our need is urgent,” Horvath said, calling that county program the most successful in the region. “It is time to empower Housing for Health’s model."

Hahn also said the status quo is simply not working.

" It's been no secret that LAHSA has had its share of troubles, issues, contract delays, unaccounted funds, and the quality of services has become a repeated problem," she said.

What did LAHSA's leadership say in response?

LAHSA CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum and other LAHSA executives pleaded with supervisors to not pull the plug, saying much progress has been made in the two years she’s been in charge. She pointed to LAHSA’s numbers from last year’s point in time count showing a drop in street homelessness in the city of L.A.

“To enhance transparency, I promised that we would improve our operations — and we have,” Adams Kellums told the supervisors during the public comment period. “We've implemented 20 new data dashboards that provide unprecedented insight into how our system functions.”

Raman, who chairs the council’s housing and homelessness committee, also addressed the board on LAHSA's behalf, insisting that data coming out of the agency was getting better.

“What I fear most is that we are moving money from one bureaucracy to another,” Raman added.

Barger, however, said the current situation is untenable — pointing to what a federal judge described last week as ongoing failures at LAHSA.

“It couldn’t get any worse,” Barger said.

LAist reporter Aaron Schrank contributed to this story.

Read more LAist coverage:

• 5 takeaways from LA’s troubling new homelessness spending audit
• Judge blasts LA homeless spending as a ‘train wreck’ and threatens to seize control
• LA County supervisors to vote on pulling over $300 million out of homeless services agency
• Citing incomplete data, LAHSA announces drop in homelessness as county considers taking control of funding

A divided Los Angeles Unified School District Board voted 4-3 Tuesday to issue preliminary layoff notices to more than 3,000 employees, as part of a plan to reduce the budget after several years of spending more money than it brings in.

Even as California is poised to fund schools at record-high levels, Los Angeles Unified and other districts have grappled with increased costs. For example, LAUSD hired more staff to support students during the pandemic, and now the federal relief dollars that initially funded those positions are gone.

For the past two years, the district has relied on reserves to backfill a multi-billion-dollar deficit. The district projects a deficit of $877 million next school year, about 14% of the 2026-2027 budget.

Who’s being cut?

LAUSD staff estimate the proposed cuts impact less than 1% of the district’s more than 83,000 member workforce.

• 2,600 certificated and classified contract management employees and certificated administrators. 
• 657 central office and centrally funded classified positions. More than a third of these are IT technicians, by far the largest group.
• The plan also calls for reduced hours and pay for several dozen positions.

What's next?

The reduction in force vote is the first step in a monthslong process that could result in layoffs for a still-to-be-determined number of positions because impacted employees may be moved to other positions. Staff said the board would vote to finalize any un-rescinded layoff notices in May or June.

About 15% of California households lack access to high-speed internet, according to the latest report from UC Riverside. Researchers pointed to affordability as one of the biggest barriers to closing the persistent digital divide.

Edward Helderop, associate director at UCR’s Center for Geospatial Sciences and report author, told LAist that the findings weren't surprising.

“A lot of American households and California households don't have high-speed internet available at home,” Helderop said. “It's sort of just an unfortunate reality that that's the case for the state of California.”

What does the report say? 

Nearly one in seven households in California doesn’t have reliable internet access, according to the report. The biggest barrier continues to be affordability. Even in urban areas, like Los Angeles, where broadband internet is more widely available, the average monthly cost can range from $70 to $80 per month.

But in rural areas, broadband internet is still widely unavailable because of a lack of infrastructure investments from private companies. Only two-thirds of rural households have broadband access at home.

“This digital divide represents not just a technological failure, but a profound barrier to economic opportunity, educational advancement, and civic participation that undermines California’s potential for shared prosperity,” the report states.

Experts also call for mandatory broadband data transparency — internet providers should be required to publicly disclose their service speeds, pricing, reliability metrics and coverage areas.

“Private telecom companies administering the service, they're under no obligation to maintain publicly available data sets in the same way that you might get with other utilities,” Helderop said. “There are issues with the fact that the advertised speeds don't really match up with the actual speeds that people experience at home.”

Researchers also recommend that broadband providers be regulated as utilities, like water and power, monitoring rates, quality and service obligations.

“When we regulate something like a utility, it comes with a few regulations that we take for granted,” Helderop said. “Something like a universal service obligation, in which the utility … their primary motive is to provide universal service, so to provide the service to every household in California.”

As a public utility, officials could ensure that providers are offering the same type of service to every household in the state, as well as regulate rates.

Why it matters 

Norma Fernandez, CEO at Everyone On, said access to affordable, high-speed internet is a basic necessity.

"Still, too many families, particularly those in under-resourced communities, predominantly of color, are still left out,” Fernandez said. “Expanding reliable connectivity means addressing affordability, investing in community-centered solutions, and ensuring that digital access is part of every policy conversation."

Digital equity advocates say they see the need from local families every day, but available data doesn’t reflect that.

“On the maps, families appear to live in ‘connected’ neighborhoods, but in reality, they still can’t afford to get online because the monopoly provider’s plans are unaffordable,” Natalie Gonzalez, director at Digital Equity Los Angeles. “The provider-reported broadband maps don’t match what residents experience on the ground, and that gap has real consequences.”

In L.A., for example, hundreds of thousands of households lack reliable internet, but only a fraction qualify for public funding because available data says they’re already served, Gonzalez added.

“Public investment alone doesn’t guarantee equity if the underlying data is flawed,” Gonzalez said. “When the only data regulators have come from the providers themselves, the providers end up defining reality. Communities are then forced to prove they’re disconnected, without access to the same information the companies use to claim coverage.”

Cristal Mojica, digital equity expert at the Michelson Center for Public Policy, said pricing data is intentionally obscured.

“It makes it harder for people to shop around between internet plans,” Mojica told LAist. “It makes it really challenging for our state legislators to be effective and make effective decisions around affordability when they have to try to dig around for that information themselves.”

What’s next? 

California has already invested $6 billion for broadband –called the “Middle-Mile” project –through Senate Bill 156. The 2021 law is the largest state investment in broadband in U.S. history to get more people online.

Helderop explained that broadband investments are typically made possible through grants or loans to private telecom companies, making the state’s investment critical.

“It's the first time that any state, or any government in the United States, is taking it upon themselves to build and then own the infrastructure at the end of it,” Helderop said. “I would say that's probably the primary reason that we don't have universal broadband available to households in the United States right now.”

When completed, the “Middle-Mile” project will open markets to new providers and reduce monopolies, Helderop added.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s widow, Crystal Hefner, is raising the alarm over her late husband’s foundation collecting about 3,000 of his personal scrapbooks and his diary, which she says contain thousands of nude images of women, some of whom might have been minors at the time the photos were taken.

In a press conference Tuesday, Hefner and her attorney, Gloria Allred, announced they’ve filed regulatory complaints with California and Illinois attorneys general, asking them to investigate the foundation’s handling of the scrapbooks. The complaints were filed to both attorneys general because the foundation is registered to do business in California but incorporated in Illinois.

“I believe they include women and possibly girls who never agreed to lifelong possession of their naked images and who have no transparency into where their photos are, how they’re being stored or what will happen to them next,” Hefner said.

She added the diary includes names of women he slept with, notes of sexual acts and other explicit details.

Hefner said she was asked to resign from her position as CEO and president of the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation on Monday after raising concerns about the materials. She said after she declined to resign, she was removed from her role.

She said she was told the scrapbooks may be in a storage facility in California. Allred says they were informed that the foundation plans to digitize them, but it’s unclear what it plans to do with them.

“This is not archival preservation. This is not history. This is control. I am deeply worried about these images getting out,” Hefner said. “Artificial intelligence, deepfakes, digital scanning, online marketplaces and data breaches means that once images leave secure custody, the harm is irreversible. A single security failure could devastate thousands of lives.”

In addition to asking for an investigation into the foundation’s handling of the materials, it also asks the attorneys general to take appropriate actions to secure those images.

LAist has reached out to the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation for comment.