A bid to shift control of Los Angeles homelessness programs to county hands collapsed Friday when a key meeting adjourned after roughly two minutes without taking any vote.
Mayor Karen Bass and four City Council members later issued a joint statement blaming organizers for failing to plan for the crowd size. “Today’s meeting broke down just two minutes after it began because the Board did not plan adequately for a large audience,” the officials said. “Angelenos want a voice in the future of homelessness services, and they were silenced today.”
The aborted session was convened by the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, the body that coordinates regional homelessness programs and federal funding streams, including housing placements, homelessness data and federal grant applications.
The meeting had been set to weigh a proposal transferring key administrative duties from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to LA County. County officials are pursuing consolidation of homelessness programs under their newly created Department of Homeless Services and Housing.
Bass, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Councilmembers Ysabel Jurado, Tim McOsker and Imelda Padilla immediately pushed back, insisting Los Angeles retain a meaningful role in administering programs, especially in placing unhoused residents into housing that city funds help build.
“The City must be able to help the people on our own streets by placing them into the housing that we build and fund in order to solve the homelessness crisis,” they said.
The officials highlighted a persistent grievance: Los Angeles spends hundreds of millions of dollars on housing yet lacks adequate authority to decide who occupies those units.
“The current proposal for County-only administration, recommended by the LA CoC Board, leaves no room for those voices to be heard,” they wrote. “Without collaboration and transparency, management of this complex issue will continue to falter, and worse, our unhoused neighbors will continue to suffer.”
The dispute surfaces amid a wider effort to restructure the region’s homelessness apparatus after years of criticism directed at LAHSA, the joint city-county agency founded in 1993.
City leaders have consistently argued that Los Angeles’ major financial contributions to homelessness programs should yield commensurate decision-making power over how those services function.
The Continuum of Care is expected to schedule another meeting, though no date had been announced as of Friday. Bass and the council members called on residents, business owners, advocates and service providers to attend the rescheduled session.
The Friday meeting’s rapid collapse left the governance question unresolved and intensified tensions between city and county officials over who will steer the region’s response to its homelessness emergency.
No new meeting date had been set by Friday evening.