Hundreds of homeless services workers, many with years of experience, were told in April that they would not have to worry about their job stability when the county pulls its funding from the Los Angeles Homelessness Authority — the removal of those funds will essentially gut the agency they currently work for.
The motion that the Board of Supervisors adopted at the time to defund LAHSA had promised to prioritize its workers when hiring for the new county homelessness services department that they were to set up over the coming year.
But in the months since, some LAHSA workers who have stuck around while some of their colleagues have found stabler positions elsewhere, say they have been left hanging, as they get mixed messages and little concrete information about how the county would actually prioritize them for jobs there.
Instead, workers who spoke to The LA Reporter shared that they were invited to three informational meetings in the past few months in which they were not able to participate in any meaningful or collaborative way.
At some of those meetings, they were instructed on how to navigate the county’s job application website, where they could apply for county positions, along with everyone else. Some said they had even been consulted on by county staff who were writing the descriptions for those jobs, which they’re now competing with other people to obtain. The newly named head of the county homeless services department, Sarah Mahin, last month also underscored that the current process does not actually prioritize LAHSA workers in the hiring process, but there were efforts to give them an advantage.
Liz Palomino, who works as an “interim housing coordinator” and has experience as a case manager at another service provider, said LAHSA workers were “shadowed by county representatives for the last several months” as job descriptions were being drafted, and their “professional expertise had been utilized to document our workflows and procedures.”
“They are intentionally recreating our job descriptions to preserve them, but they are not transitioning those individuals at LAHSA who are already in those roles,” Palomino told The LA Reporter.
Heather Varden, a union steward for the workers, told The LA Reporter that one of the main problems workers have been facing is a lack of detail and transparency around the hiring process. And now it does not seem like any real action has really taken place for the county officials to fulfill their promise to workers, not only in their motion, but under Measure A, a tax measure funding homeless services that also calls for current workers not to be displaced.
“We were basically lied to,” Varden said. “And now we’re finding out we would have to apply for jobs that are open to everyone.”
Varden and other LAHSA workers are speaking out ahead of Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors’ meeting in which discussion around hiring for the new County homelessness department is scheduled to take place. LAHSA workers are part of SEIU 721, but their contract is with LAHSA and not the county. They’re demanding much stronger language that would essentially reassign workers to the county, which was something county officials had considered, but declined to do because it was thought to take too long to do.
Homeless services workers rarely speak out on their working conditions, even as they have faced heavy workloads over the years. Unhoused residents frequently cite high turnover with their case workers when recounting to The LA Reporter their difficulties and frustrations around not being able to get housed.
But LAHSA workers like Varden and Palomino have been speaking more publicly, with Varden posting public statements, including an open letter, on her LinkedIn page. They have started to come out of the woodwork to share their worries to the media, including now to The LA Reporter, about the effect the dissolution of LAHSA is having on them. They have also pointed to uncertainties being heightened as the county faces a shortfall. Varden and others have penned a series of essays, most of them as yet unpublished, that detail their experiences. In one of the pieces, Palomino writes that what happened when the Board of Supervisors voted in April to stop funding LAHSA “broke something in us.”
“Staff morale, already low, found a new basement: more colleagues left, and those of us who remain are carrying heavier workloads, facing burnout, and wondering how much longer we can hold on,” Palomino wrote.
The lack of certainty about being able to transition to county roles has led to workers leaving LAHSA to find more stable jobs elsewhere, Palomino explained in her interview with The LA Reporter. Those such as herself and others sticking it out at LAHSA are now in a tough position, working with uncertainty while also needing to take on more work as people leave.
“We are doing our best,” Palomino said, but she shared that it has been “so disheartening. Its really heartbreaking.”
“We’re not asking for special treatment,” Varden, a community relations coordinator at LAHSA who has spent time doing outreach work. She described the environment at LAHSA as one of “collapse” and that has consequences for people living on the street, who need workers like themselves to be focused on doing their jobs. “Constant turnover destroys trust especially in homeless outreach and the public deserves transparency and the workers really deserve that transparency,” she said.
“When your workforce is working in fear of layoff, you don’t create stability for unhoused clients,” Varden said. “Right now, it feels like a collapse and not a plan. You can’t cut the people doing the work and not have outcomes on the streets.”
Varden, the union steward, said they “have members from multiple departments and classifications organizing around these concerns, attending meetings, and working together on statements and op-eds. The energy isn’t coming from a handful of people — it’s coming from workers across the system who are deeply alarmed and motivated to act.”
Another worker, E Abdel-Ghany, said that the thing they want people “to understand is that these promises that the county has been making have been made in writing through actual motions that they have passed and through the language of the voter-passed Measure A.”
That “holds great weight in terms o accountability for our elected or appointed officials,” Abdel-Ghany said. “And as government employees ourselves, we also hold ourselves to that standard … And I believe the county is capable of doing that as well, if they are willing.”
Abdel-Ghany job at LAHSA is as a coordinator of “time-limited subsidies,” which are one or two-year rental subsidy that are frequently used to provide housing for people who are brought inside.
The LA County CEO’s Office responded to a request for comment from The LA Reporter on LAHSA workers’ concerns with a statement that said the county was “committed to creating as many pathways to employment as possible for LAHSA employees in HSH [Department of Homeless Services and Housing] and other County departments.”
The statement also said that “applicants from LAHSA with related experience will be noted and prioritized during the application process” and that county officials “will actively consult with SEIU Local 721 on the recruitment process of represented LAHSA employees to the County workforce, as directed by the Board of Supervisors’ April 1 motion.”
The CEO’s Office also pointed to a $303 million funding shortfall in their region that “will impact program capacity and require difficult but necessary decisions about how best to allocate limited resources. County officials are also in the middle “finalizing” the budget for the next fiscal year, beginning mid-2026, they wrote.
Varden and others told The LA Reporter that this response from the county appears to contradict what the county department’s director, Mahin, said last month, during a LAHSA commission meeting in which she was questioned about whether there was really a prioritization process in place. Mahin said it was not quite prioritization, but an “advantage” that was being given to LAHSA workers.
“There is no transparent prioritization process, no clear HR plan, and no defined pathway for LAHSA employees to move into County roles,” Varden said. “As an SEIU 721 steward, I can say plainly: this breaks the promises of Measure A and it breaks trust with the community that voted for it in good faith.”
Below is a breakdown of what process LA County officials opted to follow, including some history about what other options had also been offered to the board earlier this year for how to bring on LAHSA workers:
Sarah Mahin, the director for the new Los Angeles County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, provided some clarification to the LAHSA Commission last month, saying that the hiring process was not really prioritizing LAHSA workers, but rather giving them an “advantage.”
“It’s not prioritized, in that way,” Mahin told the commission. “We have a [Civil Service Rule] 13.04 process that the county enables us to do,” Mahin responded. “Expedited hiring, and in all our bulletins, we’re prioritizing people who have experience working in homeless services, so lots of staff have an advantage.”
The Civil Service Rule 13.04 is also known as “emergency appointments.” The language of the rule can be found here.
Varden and others have meanwhile pointed to another part of the Los Angeles County Charter, 56 3/4, that they said was also considered by the Board of Supervisors and would be a more direct transfer. The language of that charter section is on page 70 of the PDF, or page 47 of the Charter, which can be found here.
That option to exercise Charter Section 56 ¾ was discussed in the CEO’s Office in a “feasibility report” the office released in February. The report highlighted the benefits of going this route, saying that it offers a “viable path for placing LAHSA employees into County roles and can include examinations for the employees to be transferred into County service.”
It noted that this part of the charter will involve coming up with an agreement, getting further board authorizations, and coordination between the county and LAHSA, but that it gives workers more benefits, with CEO officials writing that “it also affords the county the option to credit time worked at LAHSA towards the transferring employees’ continuous county service for benefits and layoff seniority, if so desired.”
The CEO’s office discusses the use of Charter Section 56 ¾ on pages 4 and 5 of their February report, and ultimately, they recommended the “emergency appointment” process that follows the Civil Service Rule 13.04 process.
The reasoning used was that the emergency appointment process “is already established and offers an immediate and efficient solution for either the primary method of transferring LAHSA employees in lieu of a Transfer Agreement, or in conjunction with the Transfer Agreement process, which would provide a means for less senior LAHSA staff that would not meet the six-month service criteria under the Charter to apply for available positions.”
One of the LAHSA workers, Mitchell Quintanilla, who shared their perspectives in one of the essays shared with The LA Reporter, wrote that, “We were hopeful they would choose this option to preserve the workforce.”
“Then, they chose to utilize emergency appointments instead,” Quintinilla wrote. “We went from being assured that we would have jobs in the new organizational realignment to feeling as if we should get down on our knees and beg for jobs that we poured our hearts and souls into.”
Thank you for reading. If you have any tips, corrections, suggestions or musings for The LA Reporter, please send them to [email protected].
If you like what I do and want to keep The LA Reporter in the field, you can provide financial support to me here. And if you want a sticker with my logo on it, include your email in your Ko-Fi tip message to me! Feel free to make the message private.