On the day a new local tax took effect to combat homelessness, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to create its own department to coordinate regional homeless services, effectively defunding the joint county-city agency that has long overseen such programs.
Under the plan approved Tuesday, the county agency is expected to be in place by Jan. 1, with all funding pulled from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and transferred to the new county department by July 1, 2026.
Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said she was too impatient to wait for LAHSA to improve.
“The status quo is not serving anyone. If we accept it, nothing will ever change,” she said. “This moment is about the county taking the dollars that taxpayers have entrusted to us and investing them in what works.”
The speed of the transition prompted some criticism from the public, including several members of the Los Angeles City Council who spoke to the board and urged more due diligence and coordination with the city before undercutting LAHSA.
“I want to make it clear to them what they're doing,” Councilmember Bob Blumenfield told KNX News’ Craig Fiegener. “It’s sort of like when you go into a store, if you break it, you buy it. And they're breaking up LAHSA, they also need to be taking on those responsibilities in the right way and coordinating and working with the city in a way that we haven’t seen.”
Mayor Karen Bass and Councilwoman Nithya Raman wrote a letter to board members asking them to reject the proposed new county department, insisting that progress has been made in the fight against homelessness in the past two years through the coordinated city-county agency, and "we must keep building on this and confronting our challenges, together."
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LAHSA has come under fire due to the persistent crisis of people living on the streets. The L.A. City Council has voted previously to study the possibility of parting ways with the agency, but it has not yet taken action to do so.
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