CREDIT SET TO HELP THE HOMELESS AGENCIES PROVIDED AID, COMPLAINED THEY WERE NOT PAID.

Byline: TROY ANDERSON Staff Writer

Alarmed that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is still lagging in its payments to groups that help the homeless, Los Angeles County supervisors voted Tuesday to extend the agency a line of credit.

The vote came even as officials raised concerns that LAHSA -- which is charged with helping the nation's largest homeless population -- has mismanaged its funds and has trouble paying various advocates that help the down-and-out.

A city-county report last month found LAHSA had only $700,000 in the bank to cover $5 million it owes to service providers, and the agency was more than 30 days late in meeting two-thirds of its obligations.

The New Image Emergency Shelter for the Homeless, which serves the homeless in Los Angeles and Long Beach, recently wrote to LAHSA complaining that it must continually borrow on its own line of credit while awaiting payment from LAHSA, Supervisors Don Knabe and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke wrote in a joint motion.

``This is a reality facing not only New Image, but many other critical service providers such as the Salvation Army that rely on timely funding from LAHSA and wait for months to be paid,'' the supervisors wrote.

Supervisors directed Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen to set aside $250,000 of LAHSA's $2 million budget for a line of credit; set aside $103,000 for more staff; and negotiated a deal with the city to share administrative costs of running the joint agency.

The supervisors had set aside the $2 million for LAHSA to help it avoid recurring fiscal problems.

Janssen said he understands the city intends to use a bank loan to fund the $250,000 for the line of credit and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has proposed putting much of the $2 million back into his homeless budget next fiscal year.

Villaraigosa had pulled the funding after learning that the agency had violated federal rules that ban the co-mingling of funds by using about $1.7 million in federal funds to bail out other programs.

At the time, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development threatened to pull the agency's $60 million in annual funding if the issue was not addressed.

Larry Adamson, a LAHSA commissioner, said the financial issues raised by HUD have been resolved.

``We have addressed those issues and implemented the financial policy amendments that were necessary to prohibit that type of activity from occurring again,''' Adamson said.

But Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the bigger issue is whether LAHSA is the proper agency to administer hundreds of millions of dollars to help the 90,000 people who are homeless on any given day in the county.

``The whole homeless advocacy world is busy talking about governance and structure and things that I guess, in an ivory tower, a university campus is very important to study up on the 11th floor of a social science building,'' Yaroslavsky said. ``But in terms of getting people who are on the streets ... who need help ... these debates are not doing them a hell of a lot of good.''

troy.anderson(at)dailynews.com

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