PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Liz Hersh, the former director of Philadelphia’s Office of Homeless Services (OHS), said she welcomes an outside audit and an inspector general’s investigation of cost overruns while she was in charge.
Hersh ran OHS for nearly eight years, from 2016 to October 2023, and faced unprecedented challenges — the opioid crisis, the pandemic, the Parkway encampment — and she’s proud of her record.
“I make no apologies for prioritizing life-saving services throughout my administration and especially throughout the pandemic, the opioid crisis,” she told KYW Newsradio in an interview this week. “Unlike cities across the country, where they stopped providing those life-giving services [during the pandemic], we never closed our doors and we bucked national odds. In Philadelphia, homelessness went down by 22 % between 2018 and 2022.”
City officials say cost overruns began during the 2020 pandemic and accumulated until they totaled $14 million over four years.
Hersh attributes them to new funding streams that confounded the city’s financial system: federal money the city had never received before, new state grants, all with different rules and timetables, she said.
Overruns are not uncommon. The Philadelphia Fire Department went over budget by $14 million in one year, in 2023. Fleet services went $17 million over and subsidies to the Community College of Philadelphia were $16 million higher than budgeted that year alone.
OHS, though, also postponed payments to providers for months at a time. Hersh says she worked with the providers so they always had what they needed even as she grappled with accounting issues brought on by the pandemic.
“We would all get on the phone sometimes every day, every week, every month, whatever it took to resolve the issues,” Hersh said.
That's why she said she welcomes the scrutiny of her spending.
“I hope it will accelerate the city’s ability to respond to these emergencies when they arise so that the next time the people who are charged with saving lives have the tools that they need,” Hersh said.
City Council is conducting its own investigation. Council member Katherine Gilmore Richardson has even proposed a charter change to create an ombudsman just for OHS.
That is not on Hersh’s list of what the office needs.
“What the Office of Homeless Services needs is enough money to house every single person who is experiencing homelessness, and enough money to pay the providers so their employees aren’t making just $15 an hour and they can recruit and retain qualified people,” she said. “What I think the Office of Homeless Services needs is a modern financial infrastructure and staffing that supports the kind of complex funding situation we have in getting grants from local, state and federal dollars.
“And what I think the Office of Homeless Services needs is to be supported in investing in the men, women and children who are experiencing homelessness in Philadelphia — 70% of whom, in 2022, had never been homeless before. Let’s keep our eye on the ball.”