Gavin Newsom's California put billions of tax dollars into a cannon, aimed it in the general direction of homeless "expert" NGOs, lit the fuse, and walked away. The BOOM came when someone started asking questions about where the $24 billion went. That day of reckoning is finally here. And we learn that Gavin Newsom and his Democrat super-majority in this one-party state have no idea where it went or whether it did any good whatsoever.
A new state audit — fought tooth and nail by Newsom, according to former state legislator turned Congressman Kevin Kiley, who called for the audit — has revealed that California was not tracking the spending.
The state has a $73 billion deficit for the year under Gavin Newsom. Now this.
Kiley called the results of the audit "infuriating."
The audit of homelessness spending in California is finally out, and the results are infuriating: "California spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness over the past five years but didn’t consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money actually improved the situation."…
— Kevin Kiley (@KevinKileyCA) April 9, 2024
Kiley wrote:
California spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness over the past five years but didn’t consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money actually improved the situation." I first asked for the audit in 2020, but Newsom intervened to kill it. Now we know why he didn't want his spending examined.
Last year, Assemblyman Josh Hoover got the audit approved, and the findings released today are even worse than I expected. The audit found that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness "stopped tracking spending on programs and whether programs were working in 2021. It also failed to collect and evaluate outcome data for these programs." Even a Democrat State Senator decried the "lack of transparency at every level.
Worse, so much money is being given out and combined with lax drug laws and even more lax prosecutions that the state has now attracted 32% more homeless. Kiley says, "half the nation's unsheltered homeless now live in our state. In short: California is spending more and more on homelessness and the problem continues to get worse worse and worse."
Interestingly, the legislative analyst's office reports that not only is California in massive debt but that there is exactly $24 billion the state assumed would be coming in that has not. There's only so much burden state apparatchiks can put on the backs of taxpayers. The analyst's office said that "recent revenue collections data reflect even further weakness relative to those estimates. Specifically, our forecast is about $24 billion below the Governor’s budget across 2022‑23 to 2024‑25."
The analyst can add to the waste trough the $24 billion sacrificed by taxpayers to throw at homeless programs that weren't tracked.
Meanwhile, back at the audit, the bean counters looked at two cities to determine how they spent the money. San Diego and San José (they're putting the accent over the 'e' these days — equity, you understand) accounts were examined:
[N]either city could definitively identify all its revenues and expenditures related to its homelessness efforts because neither has an established mechanism, such as a spending plan, to track and report its spending.
Although both cities provide tens of millions of dollars for homelessness programs and services through agreements with external service providers, such as nonprofits, neither city evaluated the effectiveness of its agreements.
So, the town once known for Naval efficiency and now run by leftists, and the HQ for Silicon Valley, also run by leftists, can't count.
Moreover, they established no mechanism to measure if any of the cash was doing any good.
San Diego has generally established clear performance measures, such as specifying the number of people the service provider will assist, to enable it to assess whether the providers’ efforts are an effective use of funds. However, San José has not consistently done so. Furthermore, neither city has evaluated the effectiveness of the programs it provides to address the profound health and safety risks associated with unsheltered homelessness. [emphasis added].
The auditor said that those cities use "interim housing as a way to provide shelter for people experiencing homelessness, but they both need to develop additional permanent housing," which is bunk. The housing first model is imploding before our very eyes.
Right or wrong, you'd think these guys would know how many people they were putting into this interim housing. Nope.
“For example, in a $1.6 million agreement for interim housing and supportive services, the housing commission did not specify how many people the provider should serve or set a target for occupancy," the auditor said.
They had no goals, no benchmarks, but lots of money.
California has a bad track record of guilting people into spending more on stuff and then completely misspending it.
California biffed COVID spending — losing $30 billion in unemployment payments to criminals, Nigerian princes, and state prisoners. The woman who was supposed to oversee these expenditures, Julie Su, failed up to Joe Biden's labor department. Though she's so awful that she's never been confirmed, she was able to paper over her malfeasance by new rule-making at the federal level. I wrote about that in my recent West Coast, Messed Coast™ column at PJ Media.
Now this.
Gavin Newsom is waiting for a blithering and demented Joe Biden to get out of the presidential race so he can take his 8X10 glossies and convince America to let him take this blundering plunder nationwide.
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