It’s not unusual for a public meeting to be canceled for lack of a quorum.
But there isn’t even a word for what happened Friday when a once-obscure board canceled a meeting to decide the future of homeless services in Los Angeles because too many people came to vote.
More than 1,500 potential voters signed up for a meeting of the Los Angeles Continuum of Care board to pick a replacement for the core duties of the beleaguered Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Under the board’s unusual charter, they all were eligible to vote merely because of their interest in homelessness.
The onslaught was organized by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who sent out a blast message through her communications networks urging people to join the meeting via Zoom to vote down the board’s recommendation that Los Angeles County assume those duties.
The response was overwhelming, but it didn’t work.
Over cries of foul from those who came in person, the board’s attorney Shayla Myers announced the meeting was canceled because the Zoom channel had a capacity of only 1,000.
Later, the board issued a formal statement saying, “The vote had to be continued today to ensure that all LA CoC members would be able to participate, given an unexpectedly high number of individuals who joined the online meeting.”
Bass and four City Council members then put out a statement lambasting the board for a failure that disenfranchised members.
“Without collaboration and transparency, management of this complex issue will continue to falter, and worse, our unhoused neighbors will continue to suffer,” the statement said.
The cancellation deepens a crisis over the region’s federally mandated homelessness functions. At stake is control over the annual homelessness count, the database that tracks every interaction with homeless people, the matching system that determines who receives housing and the responsibility for submitting applications for federal funding on behalf of dozens of local agencies.
The Trump administration touched off the crisis in June when it suspended LAHSA as the agency performing those functions, citing a history of mismanagement and possible fraud. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said local homeless service providers would have to apply directly to it for funding.
LAHSA contested the move in federal court. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter temporarily stayed the suspension, keeping LAHSA in place for now but allowing 60 days to choose a replacement to assume its duties.
That decision, upheld on appeal, put the onus on the Continuum of Care, an amorphous entity with a board and open membership that had long functioned as an appendage of LAHSA but actually had the statutory power to hire or fire the agency.
Carter ordered the CoC, as it is commonly called, to report on its recommendations Tuesday and set Oct. 27 as the date to name the new agency.
The CoC board, which includes representatives of homeless services contractors, hired outside consultants to set up an emergency bidding process and score the applicants. The City of Los Angeles applied for two of LAHSA’s functions, the homeless database and the matching system, but scored below Los Angeles County in both. The county applied for all four functions and won the recommendation.
The final step was a vote of the membership on Friday. The meltdown was foreseeable.
A member of LAHSA’s governing commission predicted it in an August LinkedIn post.
Noting that membership “consists of persons and entities interested in collaborative, solution-oriented planning to address homelessness in LA County,” Justin Szlasa concluded, “that could arguably include tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. No comprehensive list of general members currently exists,” and it would be almost impossible to compile one.
“As the LA CoC takes on more authority and moves out of the orbit of LAHSA, effort should be made to broaden and deepen engagement with stakeholders in our homeless response system … who are all, by definition, members of the LA CoC,” Szlasa wrote.
Bass turned that advice into a crash course. As enrollment in Friday’s Zoom passed the 1,000 mark, Myers, the CoC attorney, told those present in the downtown meeting room that “because we have reached capacity on Zoom and CoC members are not able to participate, we have to continue this.”
The board is now working to upgrade its Zoom account and has yet to set a new date.
Bass and the council members blamed the CoC for not planning adequately for a large audience. “Angelenos want a voice in the future of homelessness services, and they were silenced today. The current proposal for County-only administration, recommended by the LA CoC Board, leaves no room for those voices to be heard,” the statement said.
Ben Kay, chair of the CoC board, countered that it could not have anticipated the mayor and City Council using their “immense communications infrastructure to push public turnout” to defeat the recommendation.
“Suggesting the board was unprepared for the city’s unprecedented actions plays directly into the hands of HUD, which started all of this by saying the L.A. region shouldn’t be allowed to make its own decisions about homeless services,” Kay said.
In a statement Saturday, Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said that, “failing to hold yesterday’s meeting is unacceptable and erodes public trust.”
Horvath said the county is prepared to partner with every city in the county to “listen to their concerns, and work toward solutions that address them.”
The county has committed that the City of Los Angeles would “at a minimum” maintain its access to the database and matching system, Horvath said.
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
