An attorney who handles homelessness policy in the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office has been selected as the interim chief executive for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to guide the troubled agency through a year of downsizing.
An agenda item posted Tuesday would authorize Wendy Greuel, chair of the 10-member LAHSA commission, to negotiate a 12-month contract with Gita O’Neill, a career city attorney.
A vote is scheduled for Friday, the day current chief executive Va Lecia Adams Kellum has set to leave the agency she led for two and a half years. Adams Kellum announced her intent to step down shortly after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted in March to form a new county homelessness department that will oversee funds currently administered by LAHSA.
Other than O’Neill’s monthly base salary of $30,833.30, approximately $370,000 a year, LAHSA released no information about the candidate who emerged at the top during a months-long search. The City Attorney’s office did not respond to a request for O’Neill’s resume. O’Neill did not respond to a call from The Times. Her LinkedIn page says she has worked in the City Attorney’s office for just under 24 years.
As interim CEO, O’Neill will be responsible for reshaping the joint city-county authority as it loses about 40% of its $875 million budget and seeks to leave behind a tumultuous period in which it was harshly criticized in a series of audits for poor contract and data management.
A 2024 report by the Los Angeles County Auditor found that lax accounting procedures resulted in the failure to reclaim millions of dollars in cash advances to contractors and to pay other contractors on time, even when funds were available.
Those deficiencies were already known when Adams Kellum was hired in January of 2023 with a mandate to fix them. In her defense, she argued that the county audit primarily covered a period before she took the job.
But critics say progress has been far too slow.
Early this year an audit commissioned by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter found that LAHSA lacks sufficient financial oversight to ensure that its contractors deliver the services they are paid to provide, leaving the agency vulnerable to waste and fraud.
The supervisors’ vote to pull back from the agency followed soon after.
As a result of the vote, more than 700 county workers will be transferred to the new agency by Jan. 1. Six months later, the new department will finish taking on hundreds more employees from LAHSA.
