🐦 The LA Reporter, Issue 9: LA residents brace for federal shutdown 'hammer'

Many people who receive SNAP benefits (known as CalFresh in California) work, but get paid so little they need help to afford food. UCLA and UC Berkeley labor center researchers found in 2021 that two-thirds of fast-food workers were enrolled in some type of “safety net” program, including the SNAP food aid program.

In Los Angeles County, 29% of fast-food workers, or 50,000 people, had a family member who was receiving SNAP benefits, which are deposited onto EBT cards. Details about those findings can be found in the report, The Fast Food Industry and COVID-19 in Los Angeles. That report also found that the need for safety net programs did not really change based on how many hours someone in that industry worked. Researchers said they believed that the issue might be with the amount of the hourly wage people received.

Unhoused people on food stamps left out of the loop, may be more in need of prepared meals than groceries and pantry items. Mutual aid groups doing weekly or regular outreach at encampments around Los Angeles County report that local officials and outreach workers didn’t seem to have made the rounds to tell people at encampments that their CalFresh benefits would lapse in November due to the shutdown.

Maggie Clarke, an organizer with South Bay Mutual Aid Care Club, told The LA Reporter last week that they had to break the news to people that their CalFresh cards would not be replenished in November.

Clarke also said that while public officials have been referring people to food banks, the kind of perishable grocery items and dry goods like beans and pasta that you can get at the typical pantry may not work well for people who don’t have access to kitchens. So mutual aid groups like theirs, Clarke said, are trying to “ramp up” food distributions of prepared meals from their usual once a week schedule, since people may no longer be able to supplement with meals on their own during the rest of the week. Their group, which does outreach in the Harbor Area, is teaming up with other mutual aid groups to seek donations to help with that effort to increase food distribution at encampments.

USDA’s contingency fund wouldn’t cover a full month of SNAP benefits. While different states and nonprofits have sued the federal government to compel the USDA to release its $5 billion in back-up “contingency” funds to tide things over during the government shutdown, that wouldn’t stretch far enough cover the roughly $8 billion in SNAP benefits that usually go out to people each month, according to the National Association of Counties, which is helping Los Angeles and other counties stay up to date and advocate for their interests with the federal government. The group has also put together a resource hub that lays out some of the major effects the shutdown can have on counties.

LA County CEO laid out what’s to come, when ‘hammer’ drops on funding, in presentation to the Board of Supervisors last week. Interim LA County CEO Joe Nicchitta gave an update on the effects of the shutdown at the Board of Supervisors’ meeting last Tuesday, Oct. 28, reporting to Supervisors that there were “no bright signs on the horizon that Congress or the President will resolve their differences and re-open the government.”

Nicchitta shared a slide that “illustrates when the hammer will drop” the plots out the timeline for when certain programs would begin to lose funding. He said that funding for CalWORKs, a cash aid program, will continue until the end of the year, thanks to funding from the state. He said that Section 8 rental and housing assistance programs will also last until at least the end of the year. He added though that the “grim reality” is that funding for CalFresh, or the SNAP food benefits, is set to lapse in just a few days, on Nov. 1.

Their report also laid out how county departments are identifying funds in their budgets to provide aid to people. For example, the departments of Parks and Recreation and Mental Health are shifting funds to allow them to offer food programs.

The county also gave the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank $10 million to supplement local food pantries' food purchasing. The county is also encouraging faith-based organizations to start their fundraising campaigns earlier this season, and they’re also seeking support from philanthropic organizations through their Center for Strategic Partnerships. The next Board of Supervisors meeting is Tuesday, Nov. 4, at 11 a.m.

Local LA City and County leaders are coordinating resources in their communities. The LA County supervisors are working with the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank to identify pop-up food pantries and drive-throughs in their districts, and regularly disseminating updates on SNAP benefits and the effects of the federal shutdown. You can find the Board of Supervisors here, to follow their updates via their newsletters and social media, where many are posting food distribution locations. Information about what the county is doing can also be found by calling 211 or checking the top of their webpages, which now include the latest updates on the shutdown. Local pantries can also be looked up at the Food Bank’s pantry locater here.

LA city leaders like Mayor Karen Bass and LA City Council members have also put out flyers listing food distribution sites. They have been pointing people to their nearby city FamilySource center to get further connected to resources and information. Here is a directory to LA city’s elected officials, several of whom list places where people can pick up food.

The pause on SNAP benefits affects 5.5 million Californians and more than 1.5 million LA residents. In Los Angeles, the number of residents affected is at more than 1.5 million, according to the state Department of Social Services’s dashboard. This dashboard includes demographics of who is affected in each county. In Los Angeles County, about a third of recipients in 2024 were below the age of 18 years old.

And according to a briefing by the California Budget & Policy Center, recent research found that if SNAP benefits aren’t available, 850,000 of the families that receive the aid in California would be living in poverty. Research has also found that poverty levels were reduced among children.

L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia is recommending that the city invest more into its unarmed responses to mental health emergencies, after he found major flaws in an older program, known as SMART (Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Team), that the Los Angeles Police Department operates.

Mejia this week released a report, On the Sideline, in which analysts in the controller’s office argue that the LAPD Mental Evaluation Unit seems to prioritize carrying out involuntary, 72-hour psychiatric holds on people experiencing mental health emergencies. They also argue that the role of clinicians who are part of those teams is often relegated to relieving officers from having to spend hours transporting people to hospitals and going through the process of carrying out such holds.

They argue that clinicians play second fiddle to patrol officers (who receive a one-time 36-hour training on mental health intervention techniques) and are underutilized, something that former interim police chief Dominic Choi has also said to Board of Police Commissioners.

For example, the existing policies call for people to be handcuffed before clinicians have a chance to talk to them, so they don’t get much of a chance to help with de-escalating a situation before officers opt to use force.

The types of mental health incidents that SMART would typically respond to also disproportionately involve Black and Unhoused Angelenos, and the biggest chunk of such incidents LAPD responds to involve people who are Hispanic.

Read the full story in The LA Reporter here.

Dozens of protesters who shut down part of the 110 Freeway on Dec. 13, 2023 to oppose Israel’s war in Gaza were granted an opportunity this week to get charges filed against them by LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto dismissed.

A total of 31 people had originally been charged, with two already completing eight hours of community services to gett their cases dismissed earlier this year. This week, the remaining 29 protesters accepted terms requiring them to complete 20 hours of community service, even though their lawyer had submitted eight hours, in exchange for having their charges dismissed. The misdemeanor charges they face include unlawful assembly, failure to disperse, failure to comply with a lawful order and obstruction of a public area. The judge had rejected an earlier effort by their lawyer to dismiss their case, according to The LA Times, reasoning that the protesters had created a public safety threat. 

Their lawyer, Colleen Flynn, told The LA Reporter last week that the protesters, many of whom were Jewish, had taken over the freeway two months after the war started, to call attention “to the catastrophe and horrors” that would end up continuing to play out over the next two years. She said they were “prescient.”

“They felt like they needed to really make a statement to the city, to the state, to the country, to the people in charge to really listen to other voices, especially other Jewish voices,” she said.

The group that helped to organize the protest has accused the city attorney of having an “anti-Palestinian bias” in filing her charges. Leo Shaffer, an organizer with the group IfNotNow-LA, issued a statement last week saying that while they “appreciate the judge’s decision to grant diversion to the peaceful protestors who were charged in this case, we maintain our position that these charges were clearly motivated by the city attorney’s anti-Palestinian bias and should have been dismissed on these grounds.” The City Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

The LA Times article on the protesters receiving diversion can be read here.

LA City Council member Eunisses Hernandez brings 27 unhoused people indoors as part of an intensive, state-funded effort: Her office received a $6.3 million grant last year to go through an intensive process of working with 70 individuals in her district to get them housed. The effort she embarked on over the nexxt few months involved a street medicine team, and coming up with individual plans for eventually getting people housed. Hernandez said that the first 27 people she is bringing indoors are part of an initial phase in the effort. For now, people are being sheltered at interim sites. The goal is to provide them with “time-limited” vouchers to help them pay for two years of rent. They’re now staying at facilities run by LA Global Care, Northeast New Beginnings tiny homes community, and Clare Matrix, a rehabilitation residence.

More candidates join LA city races in 2026: They include pastor and progressive community organizer Rae Chen Huang, who entered her name to challenge LA Mayor Karen Bass’s re-election bid. Two additional candidates Nikos Constant and Dylan Kendall have also recently entered the the 13th District City Council race, joining Colter Carlisle (famously the upstairs neighbor of the incumbent) in giving Hugo Soto-Martinez a challenge in his bid for a second term. The Controller’s race also now up to three people, with the entry into the ring of Zachary David Sokoloff, an executive at Hackman Capital Partners, which invests in and develops film and television production facilities.

What’s The LA Reporter been up to? The LA Reporter will host a story booth at the Really Really Free Market, a community event in which “neighbors and friends come together every month to reclaim public space and directly meet our basic needs- food, clothing, healthcare and community,” next Saturday, Nov. 8, from 2 to 6 p.m. Please come with your favorite stories, or even recipes, songs or book reviews. The event will be at 6279 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys, CA 9140. Last week, The LA Reporter’s Liz Chou guest-hosted on an episode of LA Podcast last week. You can catch up on that episode here (and listen to the latest episode that dropped today).

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