The Brief

As L.A. residents continue to rank homelessness as a top concern, taxpayers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Mayor Karen Bass’ signature program Inside Safe to help get people off the streets and into motels.

Now an LAist review has found major errors in a recent data release that tracks where encampments have been cleared and how many people were brought inside from each council district.

It comes as some council members have questioned a lack of details about how the mayor’s office chooses which encampments to offer motel rooms to.

The data was the first — and so far only — detailed public listing of each encampment operation for Inside Safe, a program that started a year and a half ago.

About the data and errors

The data was provided to the City Council back in April by the L.A. Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), after the council ordered officials to gather it.

As LAist was analyzing the data last week, we reached out to all 15 council offices to verify the accuracy. That’s when problems with the data were pointed out to LAist by officials — problems that hadn’t previously been acknowledged publicly.

Click to compare the spreadsheets

Officials who prepared the spreadsheet acknowledge it had the following errors:

• It incorrectly labeled encampments located in multiple districts as only being in a single district. In one of those operations, 116 people were incorrectly labeled as all coming inside from Council District 1. The vast majority — about 100 — were actually in Council District 13, according to that district’s spokesperson. 
• It double-counted about 50 people who left Inside Safe motels, returned to an encampment, and then re-entered an Inside Safe motel.
• It listed incorrect dates for when encampment clearings took place. Among the problems: It showed an Inside Safe operation as starting before the mayor took office. The program didn’t launch until after she was sworn in.

Officials at the Homeless Services Authority acknowledged the errors in an interview with LAist and issued a correction this week for the City Council. The agency is overseen by Bass and other officials appointed by the mayor and county supervisors.

LAHSA official owns the errors

“I will own the errors in that report,” said Bevin Kuhn, who has been overseeing data at LAHSA on an interim basis since February. That’s when the previous data chief — Emily Vaughn Henry — left, before this data was compiled.

Kuhn was brought into the top data role at LAHSA by its CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, who formerly worked with Kuhn at the Westside service provider St. Joseph Center.

Kuhn said the data was compiled as she was starting in her new role, and that she did not take the time to thoroughly review the data before it went out for the council.

“This report unfortunately fell off my personal radar,” Kuhn said.

“There was nothing nefarious about it, and there was nothing hidden there.”

LAHSA fixed the errors, and the corrected report sent to the city on Tuesday is “100% accurate,” Kuhn said.

Kuhn said she’s learned to communicate if deadlines aren’t realistic, and to do a better job of educating staff to prevent data errors.

Adams Kellum said she believes overall that LAHSA’s data is much more accurate than in the past, but that mistakes do still happen. She said she’s been working to get LAHSA staff to feel more comfortable asking for more time to make sure data reports are correct, and owning up to mistakes.

“We know nothing will get better, and we won't be able to hone our interventions if we can't tell you what's working and what's not,” she told LAist.

Timing: Homeless count numbers coming soon

LAist discovered the errors as LAHSA prepares to release the widely-anticipated homeless count results on Friday.

Asked why the public should trust the point in time results, Adams Kellum said it’s important to note that the data for that is overseen and validated by researchers at the University of Southern California.

She acknowledged “data issues across our entire homeless delivery system,” noting that LAist has reported on many of them.

“We've made great strides,” Adams Kellum said, adding that Kuhn “is making a great improvement in our ability to stand behind the numbers and also share with you where there's gaps.”

“That's that transparency that we're trying to get to.”

The backstory

The data was collected under a City Council order in February, which was initiated by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez.

“I requested the data because this information was not forthcoming from the mayor's office when we were requesting these reports” previously, Rodriguez told LAist in an interview.

“My big problem is that there was a lot of dollars being spent, a lot of money being allocated, but there hasn't been a lot of accountability for who's getting what money, what is it going to — like, breaking down and distilling more of those details,” Rodriguez told LAist in an interview.

The mayor’s office should be ensuring transparency and accuracy for data about the mayor’s key program, Rodriguez said.

“The administrator of the program should be able to account for how the program operates and where the deployments are.”

LAist requested an interview with Bass and her top homelessness advisor, Lourdes Castro Ramirez. They have not responded.

Why there are still unanswered questions

Many City Council members say Inside Safe is making a real difference in the lives of their constituents — housed and unhoused alike. More than 2,700 people have come inside under the program, as of the latest data, of whom about 1,900 are still known to be in shelter or housing.

Still, lack of clarity around how decisions get made persists, which the City Council’s directive to collect data in February noted. The strategy “remains open to further definition,” states the motion.

Asked how encampments are prioritized for Inside Safe, Mayor Bass’ office pointed LAist to a short description that says factors include “council district priorities, voluntary participation, encampment-specific needs (e.g., RVs, number of residents, size of encampment, safety/hazard issues, multiple jurisdictions), availability of interim housing, and service provider capacity."

Her office did not respond to follow-up questions, including what "council district priorities" means and how they’re decided.

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who chairs the council’s budget committee, called for “more transparency and accountability” about Inside Safe decisions in an interview with LAist.

He credited the mayor’s office with trying to prioritize encampments for Inside Safe in “a rational way,” but said “the decision process is not necessarily clear or inclusive of the entire council.”

“I think they're just trying to address a crisis. I don't think they have a clearly delineated process,” Blumenfield said.

The City Council is now stepping up its push for transparency about that. As part of its budget approval for the new fiscal year, the council is requiring detailed data about each Inside Safe operation on a regular basis — including, for the first time, how encampments were chosen.

As for the data errors uncovered by LAist, he said LAHSA’s data quality has been a longstanding problem and one that’s still “a big concern” for him.

LAHSA officials “certainly have asked us for more money for admin, for data, and we've provided that every time we've been asked,” he added.

“And we're spending a lot on making sure that they're resourced to provide the data.”

Tell LAist: The state of homelessness in your neighborhood

A three-judge panel ruled Wednesday that the new congressional maps created by California voters in the fall are legal and should remain in place, handing a win to state Democrats who hope the new districts will swing five congressional seats for their party next year.

The ruling denies a request by California Republicans and the Trump administration for the federal court in Los Angeles to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the maps created by Proposition 50.

In the 117-page ruling, the federal judges rejected GOP arguments that the new maps amounted to racial gerrymandering, which has been prohibited by the U.S. Supreme Court. The panel ruled 2-1, with the two Democratic appointees ruling for California and Judge Kenneth K. Lee, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, dissenting.

In the opinion, Judge Josephine Staton wrote that the panel’s conclusion “probably seems obvious to anyone who followed the news” about Proposition 50 last year. She noted that during the campaign, no one ever described the new maps as racially motivated — including the Republican plaintiffs.

“No one on either side of that debate characterized the map as a racial gerrymander,” the opinion states, noting that the California Republican Party called it a “political power grab to help Democrats retake Congress and impeach Trump,” and Attorney General Pamela J. Bondi deemed it a “redistricting power grab” for political gain.”

The judges also rejected Republican arguments that the voters’ intent did not matter. The majority wrote that voters clearly were endorsing the argument that both sides were making: that this was a partisan power grab, aimed at giving Democrats a leg up in the midterm elections and counteracting what GOP-led states were doing with their own districts.

Democrats celebrated the ruling.

“Republicans’ weak attempt to silence voters failed. California voters overwhelmingly supported Prop 50 — to respond to Trump’s rigging in Texas — and that is exactly what this court concluded,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

Newsom pushed lawmakers to put Proposition 50 on a special statewide ballot after Trump set off a mid-decade redistricting scramble by demanding Texas redraw its maps to benefit Republicans.

In his dissenting opinion, Lee wrote that race “likely played a predominant role in drawing at least one district because the smoking gun is in the hands of Paul Mitchell,” referring to a Democratic consultant who helped draw the new lines.

Lee argued that Mitchell publicly “boasted” about boosting Latino voting power in the 13th Congressional District in theCentral Valley, and that voter intent should not be the only basis for the court’s decision.

“To be sure, California’s main goal was to add more Democratic congressional seats. But that larger political gerrymandering plan does not allow California to smuggle in racially gerrymandered seats,” said Lee, who wrote that Democrats likely wanted to create a Latino majority district “as part of a racial spoils system to award a key constituency that may be drifting away from the Democratic party.”

The ruling could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Congressional candidates have until March 6 to file papers to run for office in the June primary.

Huntington Beach’s controversial former city attorney is running for state attorney general.

Michael Gates officially launched his campaign today and he will be going up against the current Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Gates has been an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump and his policies — and a continuous thorn in the side of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who is one of the most prominent critics of the president.

Gates was first elected city attorney in 2014 and easily won re-election twice since then. Over the years, Gates earned plenty of fans and enemies as he filed a barrage of lawsuits against California over state housing mandates and the city’s plans to require voters to show ID to cast a ballot, among other issues.

Gates left the city last year to work in the Trump administration and left his D.C. post in November to return to the beach city. He told LAist he missed Huntington Beach and his family and was hired back at the city as a chief assistant city attorney. The circumstances of his return made headlines.

In a video announcing his campaign, Gates said too many lawmakers in Sacramento spend their time "scheming" for ways to raise tax rates while leaving streets unsafe.

“California has lost its way," he said. "When I am your attorney general, we are going to be toughest on crime. ... We are going to restore public safety, law and order, up and down the state of California."

He said he would also prioritize election integrity and giving local cities (and not Sacramento) final say over construction. You can watch his full statement here:

Rene Lynch also contributed to this story.

Progressive forces in Los Angeles are taking aim at companies with bloated executive pay through a ballot initiative.

On Wednesday, a coalition led by hotel workers union Unite Here Local 11 launched a signature-gathering effort for a ballot proposition they called the "Overpaid CEO Tax." If the proposition makes the November ballot, it will ask voters to impose an additional city business tax on large companies with CEO pay that is exponentially higher than worker pay.

Representatives of some of Los Angeles' most powerful unions, including the Los Angeles teachers union UTLA, gathered in Hollywood to announce the launch. They spoke on the sidewalk outside of the Tesla Diner — a recently opened charging station and restaurant owned by world's richest man Elon Musk.

"A growing and dangerous divide is tearing Los Angeles apart. On the one side, corporate CEOs live in their own world," said Unite Here Local 11 co-president Kurt Petersen. "On the other side, workers … juggle two and three jobs, they make impossible choices between medicine and rent."

The initiative takes aim at big corporations. If passed by voters, the executive pay ordinance would impose an additional business tax on companies with at least 1,000 employees whose top executive makes more than 50 times the median worker pay in Los Angeles. Those funds would go toward low-income housing projects, sidewalk repairs and other projects.

The additional tax would be one to 10 times the typical city business tax. According to the city clerk's office, the current city business tax is between 0.1% and 0.425% of gross receipts.

The campaign is part of a bigger political fight over the coming Olympic Games and who will benefit from them.

The executive pay initiative is one of a series of competing ballot propositions launched by union and business interests after the Los Angeles City Council voted last year to raise the minimum wage for hotel and airport workers to $30 an hour by 2028.

That vote set off a cascade of responses from the companies it affected. A business group backed by Delta and United Airlines launched a referendum to repeal the wage increase. That effort eventually failed.

The fight around the so-called "Olympic wage" is still playing out. A coalition of business interests has introduced its own ballot initiative to eliminate the city business tax entirely. In December, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson introduced a motion to delay the $30 minimum wage by two years.

Campaigners for the executive pay tax will be on the ground as hype around the Olympics ramps up. Ticket registration opened for fans on Wednesday morning, the same day union leaders gathered in Hollywood.

To land the ballot initiative on the November ballot, campaigners have 120 days to gather around 140,000 signatures from registered voters in the city of Los Angeles.

Facing a loss of state and federal funding and increased costs, Los Angeles County officials are considering cutting homeless services and programs by more than 25% in the next budget year.

If approved next month, the spending plan presented to the Board of Supervisors Tuesday would trim $219 million from homeless services and programs, slashing county street outreach efforts in half and closing most of the sites for the Pathway Home encampment clearing program.

Several supervisors pushed back on aspects of the spending plan and urged county staff to find ways to avoid some of the proposed cuts.

“ I'm not particularly happy with everything that I'm seeing,” Supervisor Hilda Solis said. “I've heard from my providers that their people are disappointed.”

L.A. County’s new Department of Homeless Services and Housing drafted the spending plan. In a presentation to supervisors, officials said the deep cuts were necessary because of the rising costs of operating existing shelter beds and the loss of tens of millions in temporary state and federal funding.

The proposal comes after county voters approved Measure A in 2024 to increase the sales tax rate and double county dollars dedicated to addressing the homelessness crisis.

“This is really challenging, and we’re making recommendations that nobody wants to be making,” department Director Sarah Mahin told supervisors.

After the department published a draft of the plan in November, authorities changed the proposal to avoid more than $80 million in additional program cuts. They did that by securing $39 million one-time state grants and implementing about $45 million in other cost-saving measures, officials said.

Dozens of homeless service providers on Tuesday thanked county officials for shrinking the initial $303 million shortfall and urged them to avoid further cuts to services.

“We truly appreciate the progress you've made, but now the remaining shortfall is devastating for Los Angeles and for organizations like ours that are already stretched to the limit,” said Georgia Hawley of Midnight Mission, a homeless shelter in Skid Row.

Garrett Lee, of Department of Mental Health's HOME Team, collaborates with LAHSA’s Homeless Engagement Team during outreach in the targeted COVID-19 testing efforts in the homeless community in 2020.

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Courtesy of Los Angeles County

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What’s driving the deficit?

Several factors are driving the budget deficit projected for the fiscal year that begins in July, according to L.A. County’s homelessness department.

• Shelter bed cost increases: The rates L.A. County pays shelter bed operators went up last year. It will now pay 46% more — an increase of $86 million — to maintain the same 6,000 shelter beds, officials said.
  
• Funds expiring: Several temporary funding sources — totaling about $185 million — have ended or will end in the next fiscal year, officials said. That includes $38 million in federal COVID relief and more than $80 million in state funding.
  
• Consumer spending: Sales tax revenue from Measure A is projected to decrease by $14.5 million in the next fiscal year because consumer spending is down.
  
• Carry-over funds: There are fewer one-time funds available from previous budget years that can be rolled into the coming budget year, officials say.  That number is down by $18 million.
  

Measure A looms large

Last year, L.A. County started collecting revenue through Measure A. The additional 0.5% sales tax approved by voters to address homelessness is expected to generate about $1 billion for L.A. County next budget year. That’s double the revenue generated under the county’s previous homelessness sales tax ordinance.

On Tuesday, service providers said the county cuts don’t make sense to voters who approved Measure A.

“This is not what voters intended when they doubled the tax on themselves to address the homelessness crisis,” said Katie Hill, CEO of Union Station Homeless Services, a Pasadena homelessness nonprofit.

Dozens of homeless services employees lined up to echo that message and demanding officials restore the full budget.

" My request is that you please not approve this plan without filling the gap first,” said Erin Thompson of Inner City Law Center, a nonprofit law firm. “Please find the funds.

Deandra Davis, from the homeless service provider HOPICS, said cutting programs doesn't end up saving the county money in the long run. The costs get pushed elsewhere.

“We shift these costs to jails and hospitals," she said.

Under Measure A, about 60% of revenue has to go toward homeless services. That’s about $625 million for next budget year.

Nearly 36%, or $372 million, must go to the L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency to support housing development. County homelessness officials said that agency is expected to take on some of the homelessness prevention functions cut from the county’s homeless services budget.

“Measure A has given the overall system more tools to address the homelessness crisis, but fewer of them are held directly by the county,” Supervisor Janice Hahn said Tuesday.

Proposed reductions

L.A. County’s latest homelessness budget proposal includes a $92 million reduction for the county’s Pathway Home program, which moves unhoused Angelenos out of tent encampments by offering them hotel room beds. Pathway Home would be reduced from more than 1,200 beds at 20 project sites to 460 beds at seven sites, officials said.

Fewer beds for the program will mean more tent encampments in areas it serves, officials said.

Solis and fellow Supervisor Holly Mitchell said the program has been crucial for their constituents.

“This continuing attack on Pathway Home is problematic,” Mitchell said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We are clearly heading in a direction where our ability to ultimately resolve homelessness and address encampments and continue to make the progress we've seen in the last couple of years will be severely constrained."

Holly J. Mitchell, an LA County Supervisor who represents the second district.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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The budget plan also includes $127 million in reductions to other programs, including at least 100 frontline worker jobs. Outreach and prevention-related programs would be hit hardest, officials said.

Street outreach-related programs would be reduced by 60% and staffing in those programs would be cut by about half.

Mahin said parts of the county outside the city of Los Angeles will be disproportionately affected by reductions to outreach programs. Her department recommended reductions to certain outreach teams working outside city limits, but not in L.A.

That’s because of legal obligations under a settlement of a major homelessness lawsuit brought against the city and county by The L.A. Alliance for Human Rights.

“There is a requirement due to the L.A. Alliance for the county to maintain a certain level of outreach services in the city of L.A. through next fiscal year,” Mahin told LAist.

Critics of the spending plan urged supervisors to look at other parts of the budget to help save programs still on the chopping block.

Lily Clark of HOPICS told county officials the cuts would hurt her unhoused clients.

"What we can't do is eliminate the programs that prevent homelessness and expect the crisis to improve,” Clark said. “ Every subsidy cut, every outreach program lost, every navigation team dismantled, each one represents a person who will fall through the cracks.”

Next steps

Solis said on Tuesday that she hopes to see changes to outreach spending and other recommendations before approving the plan next month.

“ I know we're gonna have opportunity to try to make some adjustments,” she said.

Mahin told LAist her department has been “turning over couch cushions” looking for other sources of funding to help address the planned cuts and reductions.

“Unless people are bringing other funding solutions to the table,” Mahin said, “My question is: we can make changes, but what would you like to cut instead?”

Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said local programs are getting cut because state and federal dollars dried up and costs rose, not because L.A. County cut spending.

“ We cannot invent dollars we no longer receive,” Horvath said. “We're the only level of government that has actually increased our investment. Every other level of government has decreased, and we cannot backfill these gaps.”

The board is expected to vote on the proposed budget Feb. 3.