There’s a reason why we’ve made little progress in the fight against homelessness — it’s called “government not at work.”
The most recent egregious case of government dragging its feet in its so-called attempt to address homelessness in Los Angeles County, and specifically in Santa Monica, is the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority’s delay in reporting data after a headcount of people living on the streets was conducted almost a year ago.
In January of 2005, hundreds of volunteers took the time to survey thousands of people living on the streets of LA County’s 88 cities. That information is crucial for local governments and social service providers to determine how to allocate the millions of dollars they receive to help the down and out.
While preliminary data was released in June of last year, specific information on the homeless populations in certain cities hasn’t yet been made public. For more than six months, LAHSA has provided a host of excuses why the data hasn’t been released. Officials at the financially troubled agency — which is supposed to be the leading authority on homeless issues in the county — kept telling the public the data would be released “within weeks” for the better part of 2005.
Now it’s 2006 and LAHSA is saying it was the holidays that delayed them and a host of elected leaders in providing the information to the public. Officials cite “scheduling conflicts” among county and city leaders between Thanksgiving and New Year’s as the main reason for the delay. It’s not a secret that government is known to slow down during the holidays so employees and their bosses can attend all of their holiday parties and take their vacations. But the very people they are supposed be serving continue to shiver outside, watching the parties and holiday reveling from the sidewalks.
The delay also is attributed to the fact that an outside agency hired to prepare the report had to update it. That certainly doesn’t seem to be a very efficient system at LAHSA if they have to update information that should have been released months ago.
It would be nice to know what the demographics of Santa Monica’s homeless population are — without it there is no real effective way in knowing what kind of programming and support they need. And now that a year has passed, those demographics could have very likely changed.
These kinds of delays further the already apparent mistrust the public has with government. The lack of information makes the public assume that the data will be corrupted, skewed and interpreted by political players before taxpayers even get a chance to see the raw numbers.
The homeless count was billed by LAHSA as an unbiased analysis of the homeless population. But with the information kept secret by a governmental agency for nearly a year only leads us to believe that it will be nothing but biased.
Not only are tens of millions of dollars at stake, people’s lives are hanging in the balance. No more excuses. No more delays. Give us the report and stop putting the people LAHSA supposedly serves on hold.
