By Stephen Witt, Los Angeles County Politics
I’ve been a journalist a long time. In that time, I’ve never seen public agencies treat basic press deadlines with the kind of casual indifference I’ve encountered from Los Angeles County’s homeless services apparatus over the past two weeks.
The story so far: LACP asked the county’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing (HSH) five straightforward questions about the Trump administration’s “Treatment First” toolkit on Aug. 17. We gave a reasonable deadline and asked for confirmation the email had been received. Nine days later, and only after LACP had already published a story on the silence, HSH sent back a single defensive paragraph pointing to one chapter of the toolkit and declining further comment.
Then came the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). Same toolkit, same five questions sent Aug. 26, same clear deadline and request to confirm receipt. Aug. 28 came and went with nothing. A follow-up got an apology from spokesperson Chris Yee, who said he was “trying to see what I can get for you.”
Then silence again, an out-of-office reply, and a redirect to Chief of Staff Paul Rubenstein. LACP published a story on the non-response. Only after that did an actual statement arrive.
Normally, I’d update that story with LAHSA’s belated statement, but LAHSA is the agency that needs to be made an example of, and a quiet update doesn’t cut it.
This isn’t a small thing, and it isn’t personal pique on my part. These are highly paid, taxpayer-funded communications professionals, not overwhelmed volunteers. They’re the public-facing arm of agencies that manage hundreds of millions of dollars meant to get people off the street.
When a reporter asks clear, answerable questions with fair deadlines and gets silence, an apology, a broken email, and then a spin answer after the story comes out, that’s not an accident. That’s a pattern, and patterns are a choice.
It’s not just deadlines, either. Too many county comms teams recycle old press releases with no date on them, dressed up to look like the subject just happened.
As a former staff reporter covering rural Pennsylvania and later New York City, the biggest media market in the country, I’ve never once seen this treated as acceptable in either place.
Now, I get it. We journalists are the hacks and you comms people are the flacks, but we both have jobs to do. When you get an email from a reporter with questions and a reasonable deadline, confirm you received it, run it up the chain, and respond on time.
And send out current, dated press releases. I’m not naming names on that one. Ya’ll know who you are.
But be forewarned: if this continues, you’ll get called out in editorials like this one.
Just do the right thing because there’s a new sheriff in town, and its name is Los Angeles County Politics.
