A federal judge Friday ordered Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson to be available for a mediation session next week in efforts to resolve an impasse in a settlement between the city and a coalition of downtown residents and business owners concerning the region’s homelessness crisis.
The mediation session scheduled Monday in downtown Los Angeles stems from an evidentiary hearing that began last month to determine whether the city should be held in contempt for alleged foot-dragging in meeting its obligations under the agreement with the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights.
At this point, the hearing in which U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has been calling witnesses is scheduled to resume Jan. 12.
Through an order and agreement, the city is required to create more than 12,900 shelter spaces for homeless people and to remove about 10,000 tents and vehicles from the streets by June 2027.
The court has heard from city officials, a company hired to independently examine the city’s data collection efforts, L.A. Alliance directors and attorneys from both sides.
Carter signed off on a settlement in September 2023 in which the county agreed to supply an additional 3,000 beds for mental and substance abuse treatment by the end of next year and subsidies for 450 new board-and-care beds. The L.A. Alliance settled with the city in 2022, but later filed papers alleging the city was not meeting its obligations.
The independent assessment made public in March was unable to verify the number of homeless shelter beds the city claims to have created so far.
Carter has written that the city has shown “a consistent lack of cooperation and responsiveness — an unwillingness to provide documentation unless compelled by court order or media scrutiny.”
The judge has stopped short of finding that the city breached the settlement agreement on the whole, but is considering a contempt of court ruling for disobedience that could result in steep fines and other sanctions.
According to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, chair of the city’s Housing and Homeless Committee, litigation in the case “is now dragging on in ways that feel very removed from the goal of providing shelter and housing to people living on LA’s streets,” she wrote in a letter posted on her website.
Raman says Carter’s “repeated evidentiary hearings and resource-intensive data requests go far beyond our reporting obligations in the original settlement agreement. They are taxing an already strained system, and adding confusion and significant cost. In a city with limited funding and capacity, the court’s demands are now actually taking away from the work of housing as many people as possible.”
The city must comply with the terms of the L.A. Alliance settlement agreement, Raman wrote, “… but increasingly, I have felt that the transparent and fiscally responsible oversight that Angelenos deserve for our homelessness system will not be found in Judge Carter’s courtroom.”