Thank you LA Times for featuring LAHSA’s CEO, Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum, in the L. A. Influential project! Dr. Adams Kellum is recognized in “The Civic Center” category, which highlights people who work tirelessly to better our community. It’s an honor for our CEO to be recognized for her leadership and her commitment to finding solutions to LA’s homelessness crisis. Photo and caption from LinkIn 2023.
By TIM CAMPBELL
Before you read any further, let me be clear. The Los Angeles Homelessness Services Authority (LAHSA) needs to be shut down as soon as possible.
While the Board of Supervisors and LA’s City Council dither and talk about “studies” and “reports” to find alternatives to LAHSA’s bungled response to homelessness, $5.4 million per day disappear into an unaccountable homelessness system (based on annual expenditures of about $2 billion) and seven people die on the streets every night. Every day our elected officials fail to act, more money is wasted, and more lives are lost.
The results of an independent audit from Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) released March 6 showed neither LAHSA nor the City have exercised even basic governance over homelessness funding and programs. As devastating as the assessment’s findings are, one particular issue tells us why LAHSA needs to be shut down.
As LAist reports, “Among the payments that have had no performance reports to LAHSA were $1.7 million last year to [LAHSA CEO] Adams Kellum’s husband’s employer, under a $2.1 million contract. Adams Kellum signed the contract in a breach of ethics rules, according to a records request response to LAist.
Another with no performance reports was a $60,000 LAHSA consulting contract for Adams Kellum to advise the mayor in the six weeks leading up to becoming LAHSA’s CEO, according to a records response to LAist.” Not only did Adams Kellum approve contracts to her husband’s nonprofit, that organization, like many others covered in the audit, provided no justification for its payments.
Yet the real problem isn’t the inherent corruption of a spouse using taxpayer money to write checks to her husband’s employer. The real problem—and the real reason LAHSA need to go—is that to Adams Kellum, it was just another contract, and for all their bloviating about ethics, neither the City Council nor Board of Supervisors have done anything to discipline her.
It’s not just Adams Kellum. LA’s entire homelessness system operates as one vast insiders’ club, with personal, familial, and financial ties valued far more than results. Considering that context, a few million dollars paid to a family member’s nonprofit is simply business as usual.
Reforming homelessness interventions isn’t a matter of firing Adams Kellum (although she would have been fired by almost any other public agency). It’s not a matter of implementing real performance measures on providers. It’s not about improving financial systems. LAHSA has to go because it’s based on maintaining the status quo, funding and supporting programs that don’t work and refusing to even consider alternatives.
LAHSA is designed to perpetuate a broken system and cannot operate under any other model. A&M’s assessment provides all the evidence one needs to understand the current system’s priorities: LAHSA’s grants managers prioritize getting payments to providers as quickly as possible regardless of lack of documentation.
The Authority’s contracts are written to reward processes instead of results, and managers routinely approve amendments that are often more than the original amount. Realistically, by the time you dismissed everyone involved in perpetuating this system, there would be almost nobody left.
But we also must remember LAHSA is just one part of the City-LAHSA-County troika of homelessness programs. Folding LAHSA’s duties as a funding conduit and the County’s designated Continuum of Care into the equally dysfunctional City and County systems would do little to improve things. A&M’s audit started out as a review of City programs, because they could not produce proof of their own effectiveness.
The assessment expanded to include LAHSA because the City pays it for almost all homeless services. The audit report provides plenty of evidence the City is just as complicit in maintaining the status quo as LAHSA.
The only thing that may save LA’s homelessness interventions is complete restructuring. The fact that transitional shelters have more in common with Dickensian madhouses than supportive service centers is proof enough that the current structure doesn’t work.
The City and County must relinquish their political power over programming (where individual Council members often sign contracts with the same providers LAHSA uses) and create a central agency with the authority to implement policies regionally.
Those policies must be based on outcomes instead of processes and break away from large corporate nonprofits that exist mainly to fill their own coffers. All organizations take their tone from the top. Executives must bring a single-minded focus on performance to a new centralized agency.
Providers should be treated as what they are—contractors. Contracts must be written with enforceable performance metrics, and there must be penalties if contractors fail to meet those metrics. Because homeless populations are not homogenous, policies should favor smaller, more nimble providers who can meet local needs while the central authority ensures their activities support larger regional goals.
Creating a new agency is not a recommendation made flippantly just because of one audit. You must consider A&M’s report in the context of a long trail of reports and audits stretching back years.
The reports have come from state agencies, county government, the City Controller, and even advocacy groups. News stories are filled with stories from the unhoused themselves, who tell reporters of their horrific experiences in shelters and on the streets, and of being abandoned or bounced from one provider to another. Virtually nothing about the current system works for the benefit of the homeless themselves.
Will our current leadership take the lead in reforming homelessness programs? Probably not. They are no more aware of the corrupt and ineffective structure in which they operate than a fish is aware that its wet.
Excellent. And if the mayor and other elected officials don’t know about this mismanagement of money, then they all need to be removed, recalled and/or fired. There needs to be a DOGE in Los Angeles to account for the millions and millions of dollars that continue to go unaccounted.