Mayor Karen Bass announced she will step down from the LAHSA Commission effective Wednesday, September 9, after LAist reported in late August that she missed 13 of 21 commission meetings over a recent year period. Her office did not say whom she plans to appoint to the seat. The announcement came as the city works toward a homelessness system independent of LAHSA.
Bass's three-year term on the LAHSA Commission expired June 30, 2026, and she had remained on the commission past that date.
LAist · on the removal of LAHSA audit committee chair Justin Szlasa
The LAHSA Commission approved new committee assignments last week that removed Commissioner Justin Szlasa as chair of the three-member audit committee; commission chair Stephanie Graves, a Bass appointee, recommended the change and told LAist it was her "prerogative" without explaining her reasoning. Szlasa, an appointee of county Supervisor Kathryn Barger, had pressed LAHSA to finish a years-long audit of its failure to spend $7 million in federal grants; his replacement as audit chair is Charles Stringer, a Bass appointee.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter earlier called the camping-site capacity payments Szlasa identified "obvious fraud."