What’s happening today?
Amid a ‘divorce,’ two homelessness meetings, one at the city and the other at the county
LA City Council member Ysabel Jurado should be making her debut at LA city’s Homeless Strategy Committee meeting at 2:30 p.m. Jurado took over as chair of the committee overseeing homelessness, taking over for Nithya Raman (who described the change as politically motivated), and that also means a seat on this panel. Raman, when she was still chair of the council committee on homelessness, attended the meeting in June, when they last met.
The city’s homeless strategy committee should be discussing the Alliance lawsuit related “time limited subsidy” program that provides one or two year vouchers to cover rent. The time-limited subsidy program used to be called “rapid rehousing,” and it’s a program that assumes people will be able to begin paying their own rent after the one or two years are up. And those who participated in such programs were often promised they’d get attention from service providers and would have a support system for working up to when the assistance ran out.
The city’s strategy meeting also includes time set aside to discuss performance data on LA’s homelessness response that includes a presentation from the Los Angeles Housing Department. There is also supposed to be time set aside for a discussion with LAHSA, HACLA and LAHD about strategic direction and priorities.
LA county officials are also meeting this afternoon, as part of the Homelessness and Housing cluster at 2 p.m. The county’s discussion includes Redondo Beach council member Paige Kaluderovic presenting on alignment with the Executive Committee for Regional Homeless Alliance, and a presentation on key findings and takeaways from community input on the spending plan for Measure A, which is the recently approved tax measure to provide homelessness services as well fund affordable housing. Measure A is a descendant of the earlier quarter-cent sales tax that LA County voters approved under Measure H, which was primarily focused on funding services. Measure A increased the tax to a half-cent and made it permanent.
What just happened?
The Yes on Measure FD campaign put out polling results that showed that voters could be favoring their half-cent sales tax measure to raise revenue for the Los Angeles city fire department. Those who said they would vote in favor of the measure amounted to a health 55%, while those who would vote no made up 27% of the respondents.
Also tucked into the poll were results from questions they asked about the mayor’s race that shows that Nithya Raman and Karen Bass are close, although Raman has a slight edge with 35% of respondents saying they preferred her, compared to the 33% who said they preferred Bass. The poll also asked people about the City Attorney’s race, and the results showed that Marissa Roy (who garnered the most votes in the primary) was preferred by 28% of respondents, ahead of John McKinney, who got 21%. with a large number of people undecided – around 40% – still.
An interesting tidbit here is that UFLAC, the firefighter union that sponsored the half-cent sales tax measure, is sitting out the mayor’s race, which means the incumbent who is usually assumed to be favored to get another term won’t be getting firefighters’ backing, along with her challenger, Nithya Raman.
Jimmy Blackman, a spokesperson with UFLAC, told The LA Reporter that they held a membership vote last week that led to the union deciding to stay out of the mayor’s race. In the last election cycle – in which Karen Bass, then a member of Congress, and billionaire mall owner and real estate developer Rick Caruso were facing off – UFLAC had endorsed Caruso, and that endorsement was announced about a month before the general election (which is when LA city voters decide on city races that went into a runoff during the primary – some races get decided in the primary if a candidate gets more than 50% of the votes).