Head of Los Angeles Sans-Abri who resigns after the county has folded his agency

Va Lecia Adams Kellum, Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, announced her resignation on Friday just a few days after the Los Angeles County Supervisors voted to strip her agency over 300 million dollars and hundreds of workers.

Friday afternoon, in a letter given to the board of directors of the agency, Adams Kellum said that because of the decision: “The displacement of Lahsa’s main responsibilities to the County of Los Angeles is the right time for me to resign from CEO.”

Adams Kellum, whose agency has been under fire for several months, is committed to staying for a transition period 120 days or more if necessary.

Adams Kellum took the head of the agency in March 2023, at a time when it was in the middle of a push of historical growth, with new funds which take place in the homeless programs, but also faced an increased criticism for the disjointed services, poor accounting and, ultimately, the inability to reduce the number of people in the streets.

As a former head of the St. Joseph Center in Venice, which she helped to transform herself into a large home -free service provider, Adams Kellum has given experience to a job that had historically been in the hands of career bureaucrats and promised to fight against the well -documented shortcomings of the agency.

It brought a reputation for solving problems for its management of the cleaning of a solid homeless camp which grew up on the Venice beach and the walk during the pandemic. It was recognized for the design of the Campement Depression Program of Mayor Karen Bass, based on this experience.

However, even if it has experienced the success of accelerating the agency’s contract process, improving data management and reducing street home reductions in the past two years, its agency has been the subject of highly critical audits, which has in turn fed a growing clamor for structural change.

In an interview with Times on Friday, Adams Kellum said that she had not taken a new position but that she would stay in the Sans-Abri services.

“This is my mission in life,” she said. “I remain so firm in my commitment to attack homelessness and prevent it and make sure that it is rare, in short and non-dreading.”

Adams Kellum said that she had hoped at the last minute that her agency could “continue to synchronize with the city and the county with collaborative and real accent on the conduct of homelessness and the reduction of non-Slate roaming.

“I was hoping until the end that we could continue to do it but do better and different,” she said.

This was not the case.

On Tuesday, the supervisors voted 4 to 0 to withdraw its funding from Lahsa and placed it in a new homeless agency in the county. The county provides $ 348 million – about 40% of the annual Lahsa budget – and pays around 470 workers.

As part of the calendar of the board of directors, most of this money, and potentially all these workers, would be transferred to the new county agency by July 1, 2026.

In recent weeks, Adams Kellum had praised the work of his agency, including a decrease in the roaming of the street by more than 5% in the county and more than 10% in the city of last year.

Before Tuesday’s vote, the Comté supervisors allowed him to defend his agency. Rather than extending the courtesy to speak at him for a long time as guest manager, which Adams Kellum had done frequently before, President Kathryn Barger granted only an additional 30 seconds as a member of the public,

After talking for 90 seconds, his microphone was cut. “We have kept our promises,” she said after the county stopped broadcasting his words on their audio system.

Adams Kellum and his agency have been under fire for months. In response to critical audits, she has repeatedly recognized her faults and characterized her mission as that of reform problems that she inherited from previous administrations.

In her letter of resignation, she described half a dozen achievements, including a master rental program which quickly obtained 772 support units for a payment model, a prior payment model to obtain initial funding suppliers and create a refuge reservation system to launch in July.

“It has been known as a problem in the system for years not to know where the openings are and how it has an impact on references,” she said in the interview.

In November, the county auditor published a report concluding that the lax accounting procedures and ill-written contracts had prevented Lahsa from recovering millions of dollars which he had provided to his entrepreneurs in advance during the 2017-2018 financial year. (Lahsa officials replied by saying that the full reimbursement was only due in 2027.)

Another audit, demanded by a federal judge supervising a case involving the services of the homeless, revealed that Lahsa lacks sufficient financial surveillance to ensure that its entrepreneurs provide the services paid to them. This left the agency vulnerable to waste and fraud, said the audit.

The American district judge David O. Carter, the judge who commanded the audit, criticized Adams Kellum so as not to appear at a hearing where the conclusions were discussed. Said she was in Boston and wouldn’t be witnessing, Carter said it was “not acceptable to me”.

Adams Kellum sent a letter to the Court describing reforms by his agency to improve financial and contractual surveillance.

Carter, at her hearing, said that Lahsa had proposed “meaningless” promises. “And frankly, I don’t care,” he said. “If they were going to do it, they should have done it, or they should have given you a roadmap now … how they are going to do it.”

Adams Kellum has also aroused criticism for signing a $ 2.1 million contract between his agency and Upward Bound House, a non -profit group that employs her husband.

Barger said that the treatment with Adams Kellum of the problem was “sloppy”, while others called him a clear conflict of interest.

Adams Kellum said the contract, which she signed in May 2024, was sent to her for her electronic error signature. LAHSA officials said that the agency’s 10 members’ commission had already concluded this nine months earlier contract. When the article arrived at this meeting, Adams Kellum left the room, according to the report of the meeting.