Let them eat audits
Depicted: Marie Antoinette (2006 film)
Back in 2024, SJ City Manager Jennifer Maguire imperiously tried to wave away a scathing state audit that faulted the City for mismanaging up to $300M (!) of taxpayer largesse on homelessness programs. Last week, we discovered that City staff has also failed to even meet the deadlines set by the state auditor for getting SJ's financial house in order. The East Bay Times' Ethan Varian uncovers the historie sordide, excerpted below.
Last April, a scathing state audit found San Jose had failed to adequately track the more than $300 million it spent combating homelessness over the previous three years as the number of unhoused residents grew. Now, the city is almost five months late in adopting auditors’ recommendations to ensure its spending is helping solve the crisis.
Some homeless advocates say the slow progress in adopting the recommendations is evidence the city is more focused on a recent push to close encampments than finding lasting solutions for its estimated 6,340 homeless residents.
“There’s not enough emphasis on taking care of the unhoused person and saving our citizens’ taxpayer dollars,” said Todd Langton, executive director of the volunteer-run homeless advocacy group Agape Silicon Valley. “They’re wasting a lot of dollars and lives by the way they’re handling homelessness.”
In April, the auditor also released a report finding California had failed to monitor its $24 billion in homelessness spending since 2018, stoking growing public frustration over the state’s homelessness response. The state’s lead homelessness agency has until March 2025 to adopt the auditor’s recommendations.
In its report, the auditor’s office said it “worked extensively” with San Jose to identify its homelessness spending, concluding the city lacked “the information necessary to easily assess the effectiveness” of those expenditures.
The auditor recommended developing a spending plan, and San Jose included a breakdown of its homelessness funding in this year’s budget. However, the auditor concluded the city had only “partially implemented” the recommendation because the budget does not specify how much money is coming from local, state and federal sources.
The auditor also asked the city to finalize its annual homelessness goals, which the city completed last year, fulfilling one of the seven recommendations. The goals include developing five new interim housing sites and conceiving a new strategy for prioritizing closing dangerous encampments.
The auditor’s office also asked San Jose to more closely scrutinize the performance of its nonprofit providers, which receive millions of dollars annually to operate supportive housing sites, homeless shelters and street outreach programs.
In its report, the auditor found one South Bay nonprofit, Destination: Home, vastly over-reported the number of households that received financial assistance through an $8 million homelessness prevention contract. The nonprofit said it reported the number accurately to the city.
The city is also behind in evaluating the impact of encampment closures, street outreach services and other public health and safety efforts on the health and well-being of homeless residents. The auditor determined city officials had developed some evaluation metrics, but not enough to satisfy the recommendation.
Read the whole thing here.
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