`BURIED' HOMELESS STUDY FINALLY AIRED REPORT'S AUTHORS SAY PROBLEM'S FIXES LEFT OUT.

Byline: TROY ANDERSON Staff Writer

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority's 10-year plan to end county homelessness, released earlier this year, omitted more than two dozen significant recommendations, said authors of a study that was to form the plan's backbone.

And the authors charged Wednesday that while the expectation was that their three-year study, completed in June 2004, would be publicly vetted before being implemented, it was suppressed because of concern it would influence the November mayoral race.

The report had 25 action strategies, and each one has someone to carry it out, said Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable. The ``Bring LA Home'' report released in April uses pieces of this strategy, ``but a lot of it got left out.''

The roundtable undertook the LAHSA-commissioned study in 2002 with the Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty at the Weingart Center. Under terms of their more than $100,000 contract with LAHSA, the groups were barred from releasing their study to the public.

After an independent group filed a Freedom of Information Act request, LAHSA quietly released the study last month. The groups made the study public today.

The study was commissioned by LAHSA and headed by Mitchell Netburn, who resigned earlier this year after a city-county report faulted the agency's money management.

But Robin Conerly, interim executive director of LAHSA, said the agency just managed the process and did not suppress the report.

Conerly said the report includes ``very good, reasonable thinking'' in its recommendations, and she expects those to be integrated into the report as it becomes an implementation plan, rather than just a campaign strategy document.

Torie Osborn, senior adviser to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his point person on homelessness, said the report was commissioned by the original Bring LA Home commission named by former Mayor James Hahn. ``It came out in 2004 and was pretty much buried,'' Osborn said. ``I don't know the reasons for that. It's lost to institutional memory.''

The authors said they believe their recommendations -- compiled with the aid of hundreds of officials and community members -- remain timely and represent the only ``comprehensive and coordinated plan that identifies the organizations accountable for each action and specific benchmarks for outcomes.''

In their study -- ``10-Year Strategy to End Homelessness: Public Discussion Draft'' -- the authors recommended that various city and county agencies and philanthropic organizations hold meetings to discuss the strategies, which include reducing homelessness among welfare recipients and those released from jails, hospitals and foster care.

The plan also calls for obtaining commitments from public agencies to develop services and housing for the homeless, establish annual goals of reducing the number of homeless people and finding them jobs.

It also involves enrolling more disabled homeless people in Supplemental Security Income, obtaining more federal Section 8 housing-subsidy vouchers, providing more substance abuse and mental health treatment for the homeless and establishing an oversight agency to ensure the plan is carried out.

In the report, the authors wrote that the county's Department of Public Social Services has the largest institutional role in preventing and ending homelessness.

The authors wrote that 85 percent of the 254,000 people who were homeless some time in 2002 received welfare benefits. But Flaming said welfare cuts, rising housing costs and a lack of living-wage jobs have left those people unable to afford housing. The report also found the greatest scarcity of resources for homeless people in the Antelope and San Gabriel valleys. And the Antelope Valley has the highest percentage of homeless welfare recipients in the county at 34 percent. That compares to 12 percent in the San Gabriel Valley and 7 percent in the San Fernando Valley.

``In the Antelope Valley, we had social workers testify about emancipated foster kids who were digging foxholes in the fields to sleep at night because they had absolutely no shelter,'' Flaming said.

troy.anderson(at)dailynews.com

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