Despite the enormous budget to help the homeless, many are not helped.
(Editor’s note at the Council District 11 Candidate Forum on March 1, the candidates were asked about LAHSA and all expressed concern about the effectiveness of this large agency in helping the homeless. It seemed timely this article appeared in CityWatch on March 2. It is reprinted with permission.)
By TIM CAMPBELL
L.A. County’s Auditor/Controller released a scathing report on LAHSA’s (Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority) financial management in November 2024. The audit noted 16 deficiencies, several of which concerned the way providers were paid.
County auditors found LAHSA often paid providers late, demanded little or no proof of performance, and used restricted funds to improperly pay bills because there were insufficient funds in the correct accounts.
A few months later, the audit firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) issued an independent assessment of the City of LA’s homelessness programs. That assessment included a review of LAHSA’s invoice review process, since LAHSA pays providers and then bills the City. Like the County Auditor, A&M’s review found several systemic problems, including a culture that encouraged paying invoices with as little oversight as possible.
These reports were bad enough, but this past week the news got worse. On February 20, LAist reported LAHSA owes providers at least $69 million in late payments.
Provider executives are complaining they will have to cut back on services or close down entirely because they are not being paid.
LAHSA CFO Janine Trejo
The large nonprofit HOPICS claims LAHSA owes it $20 million. LAHSA CFO Janine Trejo said she has been working on the systemic problems that have caused the backup.
On February 27, the Westside Current published a story saying LAHSA was blaming the City for the payment backlog. The Current reported that since neither Trejo nor LAHSA CEO Gita O’Neill have done anything to improve the problem in the 16 months since the County Auditor’s report, the County Board of Supervisors asked the Auditor to perform a follow-up audit to see why nothing has been done.
The blame game is nothing new in LA’s homelessness universe. In November 2025, LAist published a story about how an 88-space Safe Camping site was unilaterally reduced to 44 by the provider, Urban Alchemy, (UA), and neither the City nor LAHSA knew or took action to reduce the amount of the contract for almost a year.
The reduction wasn’t discovered until LAHSA Commissioner Justin Szalsa and the court-appointed Special Master Michele Martiniez performed their own onsite inspections. Urban Alchemy claimed it reduced the number of beds when a City representative said the site’s budget was going to be reduced.
A UA spokesperson said LAHSA should have told the City the number of beds was reduced, while the City says it was up to LAHSA to change the contract. The safe camping debacle is a perfect example of the finger-pointing a federal judge described last year.
In a June 2025 order, federal Judge David Carter wrote, “The creation of LAHSA has, at times, enabled a cycle of blame-shifting. When data inconsistencies or compliance issues arise, the City points to LAHSA. In turn, LAHSA attributes its problems to a lack of information or cooperation from the City. This dynamic has fostered a system in which responsibility is routinely deflected, allowing both entities to evade accountability, with no single party willing to take responsibility.”
The County’s 2024 audit and A&M’s report are just two in a long history of negative findings about LAHSA’s financial mismanagement. In 2007, a HUD audit found LAHSA paid ineligible expenses and could not provide documentation to support its cash match for other organizations. HUD auditors cited LAHSA’s use of a poor financial management system for the problems.
In 2018, LA County’s Auditor-Controller made 16 findings of deficiencies meeting its recommendations from a previous audit, including solving an ongoing problem with sufficient staffing and contract oversight. In 2021, the County Auditor did a series of follow-up audits and found the same problems it described in the 2018 audit. If one thing is consistent, it is LAHSA’s steadfast refusal to implement changes that would make it fiscally responsible.
LAHSA’s poor fiscal management has created a vicious circle. The County Auditor said Finance allows providers to send invoices whenever they feel like it, and in whatever format they choose, so the Accounts Payable staff are getting bills at unpredictable times and in formats they may have to decipher before processing. This creates cash flow issues because no one knows when they can expect a bill to come in or how long it will take to approve.
Therefore, LAHSA can’t match the revenue/funding stream to the expenditures, so it scrambles to find money wherever it can, which is why auditors found LAHSA moves money around improperly among restricted funds. The fact LAHSA itself submits funding requests to state and federal agencies late just makes it worse. The mismanagement is systemic and habitual.
LAHSA’s financial problems are just one manifestation of a much wider and more serious issue. Almost every person in an executive or senior management position in the City, County, or LAHSA has risen up through the ranks of LA’s homelessness industry.
Sarah Mahin
Sarah Mahin, the County’s choice to head its new Department of Housing and Homelessness, was LAHSA’s Director of Policy and Systems and ran the County’s Housing for Health program before being appointed to her new position.
When I reviewed the professional biographies of LAHSA’s executive team, I found at least 10 people came from St. Joseph Center. Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum, LAHSA’s former CEO, was St. Joseph’s CEO before she took the LAHSA position. A whistleblower complaint filed by two former LAHSA managers who said they were pushed out so Adams Kellum could hire her friends from St. Joseph Center was settled for $800,000 last year. One of the two managers who filed the lawsuit is Kristina Dixon, LAHSA’s former CFO. She claimed she was pushed out when she questioned Adams Kellum’s use of public funds for things like alcohol at a LAHSA holiday party.
The person who replaced Dixon was current CFO Janine Trejo. Although she was not one of Adams Kellum’s former St. Joeph Center appointees, her career is steeped in LAHSA’s corporate culture.
According to Transparent California, Trejo has worked for LAHSA since at least 2018. Under her watch, the County auditor found serious problems in its 2024 audit, and it appears nothing has changed.
Interestingly, in 2024, Westside Current reporter Angela McGregor asked LAHSA if Trejo has a CPA certification or other related qualifications to manage nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money; McGregor received no response–not even a standard resume. Evidently, Ms. Trejo is so immersed in LAHSA’s “business as usual” culture she has been unable to substantively respond to the County’s audits.
Amy Perkins
LAHSA’s Board of Commissioners is not immune to insider influence. Amy Perkins, the Commissioner appointed by Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, is Horvath’s Deputy for Homelessness. She also directed LAHSA’s Housing Central Command, which claims it is “a robust cross-agency collaboration committed to streamlining the rehousing process and maximizing utilization of the Permanent Supportive Housing inventory and federal and local grants.”
It’s hard to take cross-agency collaboration seriously if neither the City nor LAHSA can keep track of the number of campsites at a single Safe Camping location. As for her role in maximizing the availability of permanent supportive housing, perhaps she can explain why thousands of housing units have lain vacant for as much as two years while City and County agencies dither about occupancy. Other Commission members, with one or two exceptions, represent the advocacy and development communities, which have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
The point isn’t to question the competency or honesty of specific executives or managers, although some of their actions are certainly questionable.
The point is that nearly all decision-makers and those who are supposed to exercise governance come from the same environment. They simply cannot comprehend doing anything differently, and that includes imposing accountability on providers or on themselves.
Trejo was a LAHSA finance supervisor, so she rose up in an organization that sees nothing wrong with paying providers from improper funds or paying them with minimal documentation. Judging by her inaction since the County’s audit, she is behaviorally unable to even conceive of the changes needed to improve the Authority’s financial operations. Perkins, who is steeped in the milieu of the existing structure, cannot comprehend that performance measures and outcomes are more important than processes.
We cannot expect the people, who created the organizational disaster that is LA’s homelessness universe, to fix it. Nor should we tolerate a system that makes maintaining providers’ revenue streams its most important mission.
If 20 years of audits and reports have taught us anything, it is that we need leaders who will challenge the status quo and demand the fundamental changes that are needed to help the 73,000 people who sleep on LA’s streets every night.
(Tim Campbell is a longtime Westchester resident and veteran public servant who spent his career managing a municipal performance audit program. Drawing on decades of experience in government accountability, he brings a results-driven approach to civic oversight. In his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA, Campbell emphasizes outcomes over bureaucratic process, offering readers clear-eyed analyses of how local programs perform—and where they fall short. His work advocates for greater transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in Los Angeles government.)
