The judge overseeing a lawsuit brought by a coalition of downtown residents and business owners concerning the region\u2019s homelessness crisis Monday heard from an official with the consulting firm that assessed Los Angeles\u2019 data collection and performance reporting concerning programs for unsheltered people.<\/p>\n
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has been holding evidentiary hearings since last month in the lawsuit filed in March 2020 by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, which alleges the city and Los Angeles County have not done enough to address homelessness.<\/p>\n
The judge is mulling whether to hold the city in contempt for allegedly foot-dragging in meeting its obligations under the lawsuit\u2019s settlement agreement.<\/p>\n
Monday, Carter heard from Diane Rafferty, a managing director with Alvarez & Marsal\u2019s public sector services in Los Angeles, which examined the city\u2019s data collection efforts. Also testifying before the judge was Paul Webster, executive director of the L.A. Alliance.<\/p>\n
Both Rafferty and Webster testified to what the plaintiffs say were \u201csignificant delays\u201d faced by A&M auditors in completing their assessment last year.<\/p>\n
Carter signed off on a settlement in September 2023 in which the county agreed to supply an additional 3,000 beds for mental and substance abuse treatment by the end of next year and subsidies for 450 new board-and-care beds. The L.A. Alliance settled with the city in 2022, but later filed papers alleging the city was not meeting its obligations.<\/p>\n
The agreement requires the city to produce 12,915 shelter beds by June 2027.<\/p>\n
An independent assessment made public in March was unable to verify the number of homeless shelter beds the city claims to have created so far.<\/p>\n
Carter has written that the city has shown \u201ca consistent lack of cooperation and responsiveness \u2014 an unwillingness to provide documentation unless compelled by court order or media scrutiny.\u201d<\/p>\n
The judge has stopped short of finding that the city breached the settlement agreement on the whole, but is considering a contempt of court ruling for disobedience that could result in steep fines and other sanctions.<\/p>\n
According to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, chair of the city\u2019s Housing and Homeless Committee, litigation in the case \u201cis now dragging on in ways that feel very removed from the goal of providing shelter and housing to people living on LA\u2019s streets,\u201d she wrote in a letter posted recently on her website.<\/p>\n
Raman says Carter\u2019s \u201crepeated evidentiary hearings and resource-intensive data requests go far beyond our reporting obligations in the original settlement agreement. They are taxing an already strained system, and adding confusion and significant cost. In a city with limited funding and capacity, the court\u2019s demands are now actually taking away from the work of housing as many people as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The city must comply with the terms of the L.A. Alliance settlement agreement, Raman wrote, \u201c\u2026 but increasingly, I have felt that the transparent and fiscally responsible oversight that Angelenos deserve for our homelessness system will not be found in Judge Carter\u2019s courtroom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Contempt proceedings are expected to continue Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The judge overseeing a lawsuit brought by a coalition of downtown residents and business owners concerning the region\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":344486,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[38670,1582,276,206975,6616,2961,224,5337,10495,146084,206976],"class_list":["post-450415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-agreement","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-complying","tag-judge","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-settlement","tag-weighs","tag-whether"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115727971437927044","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}