Under Legal Pressure, LA Mayor Promises To Publish Receipts On Homeless Spending

The public could soon have more answers about where L.A.’s homelessness dollars are going.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and a top homelessness official, at the urging of a federal judge, promised in court Monday to provide more transparency.

In an intense hearing in downtown L.A., Judge David O. Carter pressed officials to commit to posting invoices for homelessness spending on a public website starting within two weeks, as Carter prepares to oversee an audit into shelter beds and services. The hearing is part of a high-profile ongoing lawsuit filed by downtown business owners against the city of L.A., which resulted in a 2022 settlement that requires thousands more shelter beds in the city.

While settlements usually end lawsuits, the plaintiffs allege the city has failed to follow through on its commitments under that agreement. And Carter recently found the city misled the plaintiffs about efforts to implement the deal.

At Monday’s hearing, lawyers for the city and plaintiffs also announced they’d reached a deal on the scope of the audit. It was brokered by Carter during hours of tense negotiations in court.

Pointing to what he called a lack of transparency and accountability for spending, Carter said he wanted invoices posted showing what the city has paid for thousands of shelter beds.

He pushed for details to be provided for beds that fall under multiple umbrellas: the mayor’s signature shelter program Inside Safe, and nearly 20,000 beds the city promised as the result of two prior agreements in the lawsuit.

“The best auditor will be the public,” Carter said, pointing to a 2020 audit finding that accounting documents were missing into how millions were spent by an L.A. County homelessness program.

Carter raised questions during the hearing about whether too much public money is going toward administrative costs versus direct services and shelter for unhoused people.

“There will be an interest in which provider is actually providing something meaningful and which provider is submitting this underlying data to justify these invoices,” Carter said, adding that the 2020 audit found “they didn't have any records.”

Carter told Bass and L.A. City Council President Paul Krekorian, who was also in the courtroom, that they had the opportunity to be “first entity in the state that steps up with transparency. And if you do, I commend you.”

Bass agreed to provide the invoice records, along with Va Lecia Adams Kellum, the chief executive of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). LAHSA is a joint city-county agency that manages much of the city’s spending to try and address homelessness.

“Absolutely. 100% committed to doing that,” Adams Kellum said by phone as Carter asked her questions during the court proceedings.

The details of what will be delivered to the public

“The city will ensure that within two weeks,” it will provide supporting documentation on an ongoing basis for invoices — and make them publicly available — for the shelter beds Carter is interested in, Bass told the judge in court.

The promises came after Carter warned he could put officials under oath to ask about events last year that he said showed a lack of compliance with the 2022 settlement.

“We’ve reaffirmed our commitment to transparency and accountability,” Bass told LAist as she was leaving the hearing. “Within a couple of weeks we’ll have a website up that lists all of the invoices, so that you can see how much money was paid to various organizations and for what. So, including the underlying documentation.”

During the hearing, Carter read aloud quotes from a recent LAist article, where the mayor’s former homelessness chief Mercedes Marquez told an LAist reporter that she does “not want to be anybody’s scapegoat” over the alleged failure by the city to abide by the settlement terms.

“I hope we don’t have to go there frankly,” Carter said of calling witnesses about it, adding that he thinks the settlement agreement is being ignored.

“Let’s see who has the records and what they did with this money,” he said of the invoices and audit.

[Click here to read the official transcript of Monday’s court proceedings.]

Audit deal reached

Carter pushed city officials and the plaintiffs — a group of downtown business owners — to quickly reach a deal on the scope of the audit Carter plans to oversee into spending for shelter beds and services.

The judge warned that he could keep them in continuous court session until late into the night if they didn’t reach a deal.

By the end of Monday’s hearing around 5:30 p.m, all sides had agreed on the audit’s main scope, but plaintiff’s attorney Elizabeth Mitchell told Carter they still needed to sort out some details — “definitions of words and things that we think that a potential future auditor would benefit from having.” Carter set a 9 a.m. Thursday deadline to provide him with details on plans for the audit and the names of proposed auditors for the judge to choose from.

He set another hearing for Friday at 1 p.m. to discuss the proposal.

Carter rejected requests by the plaintiffs to audit fire department costs associated with responding to homelessness, and a request by unhoused advocates to audit the city’s anti-camping law, known as 41.18.