Essential California

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Thursday, Aug. 29, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. A biting audit released Wednesday showed that L.A.’s top homeless outreach agency failed dramatically to meet the goals of its contract with the city of Los Angeles. The audit, which was released by Controller Ron Galperin, looked at the work of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The authority, which is commonly referred to as LAHSA, had been tasked with moving hundreds of people from the streets into housing, shelters or treatment for mental illness and substance abuse. As senior writer Doug Smith explained in his story for the paper, the audit found that, despite having more than doubled its staff of outreach workers in the last two years, LAHSA missed seven of nine goals during the 2017-18 fiscal year and five of eight last fiscal year. At a news conference, Galperin characterized the results as “shocking,” and said that the authority’s “outreach is fundamentally limited because it is reactive instead of being proactive,” with much of its time consumed by responding to calls about encampments throughout the city. “Peter Lynn, the authority’s executive director, called the audit misleading because it only studied measures that are ill-suited to determining the effectiveness of homeless outreach, and because it covered only the fraction of LAHSA’s system that is covered by the city contract,” Smith wrote.