On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Advisory voted to place a homelessness measure on the November ballot that would increase sales taxes by a quarter of a cent indefinitely.
It’s called the Affordable Housing, Homelessness Solutions and Prevention Now measure. The measure would repeal and replace Measure H’s 0.25-cent sales tax, which was approved in 2017, with a half-cent sales tax. Measure H’s tax was scheduled to expire in 2027.
Those behind the measure claim it would raise more than a billion dollars annually, and focus on building more affordable housing and boosting access to mental health treatment and substance abuse treatment.
According to City News Service, more than 80 organizations have backed the proposed measure, including the L.A. County Federation of Labor, California Community Foundation, United Way of Greater Los Angeles, and Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building among others.
In a statement obtained by Los Angeles Daily News, Elise Buik, president and CEO of United Way of Greater Los Angeles, one of the backers of the measure, called it “new, bold and critically important.”
“It will make sure that nearly 30,000 people currently receiving housing and services are not cut off from that critical support and pushed back into homelessness, while at the same time scaling up homelessness prevention and new strategies to make housing more affordable across L.A. County,” the statement read.
Miguel Santana, CEO of the California Community Foundation and a former Los Angeles city administrative officer, expressed his support for the initiative,
"The reason I'm here today and why CCF so proudly supports this initiative is this will provide long-term systemic and accountable change to get the results all Angelenos deserve," he said.
But Assemblyman Josh Hoover, who represents District 7, told KNX News’ Jon Baird that recent audits on the statewide level showed with all the money being spent on homelessness, there's no real accountability and no data to show that spending billions on the problem has made even a dent in it.
“We should be wary of any more dollars that we're spending on homelessness until we have metrics in place to actually track where the money is going,” he said. “Not only have we spent over 24 billion taxpayer dollars on this crisis and seen worse results, but we actually have no idea where any of the money has gone.”
Supervisor Kathryn Barger issued the following statement after the vote:
“Today’s action by the Board of Supervisors is purely ministerial in nature. Backers of this half-cent tax dutifully collected the number of signatures needed to qualify the initiative for the upcoming November ballot. The Registrar Recorder has completed validating those signatures and the Board voted today to submit the ordinance, without alteration, to the voters pursuant to Elections Code.
On June 19, the county Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's Office announced that the backers had collected enough valid signatures, adding that there were more than 410,000 petition signatures.
City News Service contributed to this article.
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