LA County's Unspent Billions, and Who Went Without

BUDGET - Los Angeles County's final budget for this fiscal year is $3.9 billion higher than the version adopted in June, and roughly $2 billion of that increase is simply unspent money carried over from last year. County officials describe this the way governments usually describe carryover: as prudent, as cushion, as evidence of a budget that didn't overspend. Angelenos should ask a harder question instead. In a county running jail mental health vacancy as high as 42 percent and an overall Department of Mental Health vacancy rate near 28 percent, in a county that a recent accounting found [it] sat on nearly half a billion dollars in homelessness funds last year alone, unspent money is rarely a sign that everything went fine. It is usually a sign that a position stayed empty, a program stalled, or a resident who needed help did not get it in time.

Start with the mental health numbers, because they are the clearest version of the pattern. The county's Department of Mental Health has publicly acknowledged a vacancy rate near 28 percent, driven by a nationwide shortage of behavioral health clinicians that is especially acute in California. A separate report on jail mental health staffing specifically found vacancy rates as high as 42 percent, improving only to roughly 16 percent after emergency hiring pushes, job fairs, and expanded recruitment. Every one of those vacant positions carries a budgeted salary. When the position sits empty for months, that salary doesn't disappear. It becomes unspent money that shows up, a year later, as a cushion in the next budget cycle. The county can accurately say it did not overspend on mental health staffing. It would be more honest to say it did not succeed in hiring the clinicians the budget already paid for, while residents in county jails and in the community went without care the money was supposed to provide.

The homelessness numbers are even starker. A review of city and county accounts found Los Angeles sat on nearly half a billion dollars in homelessness funds last year that went unspent, including tens of millions tied to Measure H carryover earmarked for specific commitments like the Skid Row Action Plan and other underfunded programs the Board of Supervisors had already directed staff to fund. The county's own homeless initiative has, in the same stretch, recommended tens of millions in cuts to homelessness spending citing a projected deficit, even as prior-year money sat uncommitted. Both things being true at once, cuts recommended for a lack of money, and hundreds of millions sitting unspent, is not a contradiction unique to LA County. It is what happens when bureaucratic friction, understaffed contracting offices, and slow-moving approval processes sit between an appropriation and the person it was meant to reach. But it means the public conversation about "scarcity" and the public conversation about "carryover" are, in LA County's own numbers, often describing the exact same dollars.

This is the part missing from the county's own framing of its $54.2 billion budget. Officials describe the $2 billion in carryover and $391.1 million in "budget stabilization savings" as responsible stewardship, money strategically reallocated rather than money that sat still while need went unmet. Some of it surely was strategic. But the county has not published, department by department, how much of that $2 billion reflects genuine savings versus how much reflects vacant positions, delayed contracts, and underspent program funds in exactly the areas, mental health, homelessness, social services, where the county simultaneously says it is stretched thin. Those are two different stories wearing the same dollar figure, and only the county has the data to tell them apart.

None of this means the county is hiding money or acting in bad faith. Government budgeting is genuinely difficult, clinician shortages are a statewide and national problem no single county can solve by writing a bigger check, and carryover funds often do get redirected to real needs the following year. But "we didn't spend it" and "we didn't need it" are not the same claim, and LA County's public messaging on this budget collapses the two. When a county with a 28 percent mental health vacancy rate reports nearly $2 billion in underspending, the responsible next question isn't how the money will be used this year. It's who went without the help that money was already budgeted to provide, and what the county is doing differently so that next year's "unspent funds" line doesn't quietly represent the same human cost all over again.

(Jose Navarro is a financial controller with more than 20 years of experience in public and nonprofit finance, and the publisher of The Navarro Report.)