After it was announced that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) is laying off over 300 employees due to budget cuts, many workers are reaching out to Mayor Karen Bass for help.
“What we have seen so far is chaos and confusion,” the letter states. “We have seen LA County agree to millions of dollars in payouts for their executives in the last six months. Meanwhile, hundreds of our workers are facing layoffs without any severance packages. “LAHSA is asking the county to maintain its commitment to hiring 315 employees to help combat the homelessness crisis. “These damages to LA’s homeless service system will echo throughout our streets and communities,” the letter continued. “Ultimately, this will mean more encampments, more preventable deaths in the streets, and more individuals and families with no other option but to live in unsafe and unacceptable conditions.”
The county has offered jobs to 69 outreach workers, with 68 of those positions in the mental health department, according to the county’s chief executive office. The county is also exploring options to create up to 158 additional jobs for LAHSA employees.
On April 20, LAHSA said it will issue layoff notices to 284 employees on April 30—with their final day of work scheduled for June 30, the last day of the fiscal year.
“I want to profoundly thank our staff for their unwavering dedication and hard work serving people experiencing homelessness across Los Angeles County,” interim LAHSA CEO Gita O’Neill said in a statement.
On April 20, Bass unveiled a 14.9 billion budget that would offset layoffs for multiple county jobs. “In a few short weeks, we’re going to have the World Cup here, and in another couple of years we will have the Olympics,” Bass responded. “I do believe, as I always have, that for the nation’s second-largest city, our force overall is relatively small, which is why we have the overtime hours and all of that,” Bass said in relation to expanding the LAPD workforce.
“At this point, right now, my goal is still to expand to where we should be, but this year, it’s about worrying about the department shrinking. I know that even though people might have their differences of opinion over the LAPD, I feel very confident that there’s no member of the city council that actually wants to see our force shrink.” The inside program will receive a substantial amount of funding to help keep mental health and housing advocate workers employed amid layoffs.
The budget is a proposal and has to be passed by the city council, with one member already opposed to it. “The mayor is required to provide a balanced budget, and last year she delivered a budget that had a billion-dollar budget deficit that then planned for 1,600 layoffs in order to balance that budget,” City Council member Nithya Raman said. “We managed to stave off those layoffs through the council process by cutting every single city service down to the bone, and every Angeleno can feel the impact of that.”
Raman is currently running against Bass in the mayoral election.