Homeless Agency’s Director May Quit

The head of the Los Angeles Homeless Authority may step down in the coming months, sources said Friday, just as the city is making a new push to clean up skid row.

Mitchell Netburn told authority board members Friday that he was looking for another job, sources close to the organization said. But he is expected to remain in place at least until the agency brings on a new chief financial officer, as soon as the end of this month.

The potential departure comes as the authority has been criticized for what some consider the region’s lackluster efforts at dealing with the homeless problem.

As the organization’s executive director, Netburn also is overseeing Bring LA Home, a blue-ribbon panel that has been criticized for lengthy delays in putting together a homeless action plan.

Compounding matters, the agency has been plagued by questions surrounding its financial management.

Last July, the city controller and the county auditor-controller found that the authority had a backlog of $5 million in unpaid bills from service providers. As a result, some have had to use loans and lines of credit to pay their staffs and vendors, jeopardizing their programs.

And last week, Mercedes Marquez, general manager of the Los Angeles Housing Department, wrote a letter to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa accusing the agency of mismanaging money and calling for an immediate audit.

Marquez wrote that because of accounting issues, the agency did not know that it had $1.54 million in unspent money that could be used to fund homeless programs.

In a letter of response, Netburn and Owen Newcomer, a Whittier councilman and chairman of the authority’s board of commissioners, took issue with Marquez’s assessment.

“LAHSA’s failings are that it has never had flexible resources available to it to help it manage through temporary cash flow [fluctuations] and that it has been too willing to ensure that frail homeless service providers received cash to ensure they were able to continue to provide vital services,” they wrote.

Asked Friday about whether Netburn would be leaving, Newcomer said an ad-hoc committee of the commission formed to evaluate Netburn’s work would continue that work.

This comes as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other city and state leaders have vowed to tackle the homeless issue. Last week, city officials toured New York’s Times Square to see how that city dealt with its homeless problem.

The Los Angeles Police Department has started a major crackdown in skid row, including an undercover operation aimed at the downtown district’s large drug market.

Meanwhile, state legislators have proposed measures designed to improve skid row and discourage the “dumping” of criminals and the mentally ill. With these moves in the works, there are lingering questions about the authority’s viability in its current configuration.

Councilwoman Jan Perry said Friday that officials were exploring shifting the organization’s governance to something similar to that of the Metropolitan Transit Authority -- which is administrated by a board that includes all five county supervisors, the mayor of Los Angeles and representatives from some other cities in the county.

The homeless agency was created in the early 1990s as a response to a series of legal wranglings over who was responsible for helping the region’s indigent.

It distributes $45 million to $60 million in public money a year for homeless services, most of it from federal funds. But how those funds are distributed has been a source of problems for the organization.