Seven years ago, Los Angeles County voters approved Measure H, a 0.25% county sales tax to fund homelessness prevention efforts for 10 years.
That year, the county reported that there were 55,048 people experiencing homelessness in the county on a given night.
The problem was so bad, and the promises of relief through Measure H so great, that this newspaper actually supported passage of the measure at the time.
“Governments throughout the county must do what they can to encourage greater home building,” the editorial board wrote. “They must behave responsibly with new tax revenues and must not take public trust or dollars for granted. A vote for this measure comes with the expectation that tangible results will be realized.”
Well, it’s been seven years. How are things going?
According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority in June, there were 75,312 people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County.
Needless to say, the desired results failed to materialize.
No doubt, the fundamental problem is that county officials have mismanaged the public funds and trust they’ve been given to solve this crisis.
We have heard critiques of Los Angeles’s approach for years from leaders across the political spectrum, from conservative Supervisor Kathryn Barger to democratic socialist Councilmember Nithya Raman. Many of those critiques have revolved around data and organizational issues.
Consider that just last month, federal Judge David O. Carter ripped into the county for failing to produce needed data to complete an audit into how funds intended to reduce homelessness are being spent.
“If there isn’t documentation of the work being done, it’s not being done. That can be our only conclusion,” Carter said.
It is in this context that Los Angeles County voters are being pitched Measure A, which would double the sales tax of Measure H and remove any sunset date. That means the tax will be permanent.
The measure shifts around how the money might be spent and includes a sweetener for unions by mandating 80% of the measure’s funding for “affordable housing” go toward projects that use union labor. This means potentially higher costs to build and fewer units built. Such mandates, according to a Rand study, increased construction costs for large projects built under Los Angeles’s Measure HHH by 15% and reduced the number of housing units brought online.
Proponents of the measure say this is all fine. That this will bring good-paying jobs.
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But, no, sorry, the goal here should be to reduce homelessness, not to create jobs for your political cronies. Anything that gets in the way of that isn’t worth doing.
Further, let’s not pretend a sales tax increase doesn’t come at a cost. Sales taxes are inherently regressive and hit the poor and middle class the hardest. At a time of relentlessly high prices, is now really the time to pile on more taxes on the already highly taxed residents of Los Angeles County?
We don’t think so. The taxpayers of Los Angeles County trusted their government with hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the last seven years. What they got were poor results and a sloppy and bloated homelessness bureaucracy.
Reject Measure A to force the county to go back to the drawing board, come up with a serious plan for reducing homelessness, and prove, clearly, that the public can and should trust them to reduce homelessness. Too many people are suffering while government bureaucrats fiddle. Don’t reward their incompetence with even more of your money.
No on Measure A.