Taxpayers group urges Bakersfield to commission outside performance audits of homeless services

Michael Turnipseed, representing the Kern County Taxpayers Association, urged the Bakersfield City Council on March 12 to commission outside performance audits of vendors that provide homeless services, saying recent reporting and audits in Los Angeles and Los Angeles County show weak financial controls and poor tracking of outcomes.

Turnipseed told the council that an audit ordered by a federal judge in Los Angeles and carried out by consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal found the city there could not track spending to specific homelessness outcomes, leaving the system “vulnerable to waste, fraud.” He said the Los Angeles findings echoed a November report by the Los Angeles County Auditor-Controller that documented lax accounting procedures and failures to reclaim or reconcile advances to contractors. “There’s absolutely no correlation between dollars in and dollars out,” Turnipseed said.

The Taxpayers Association representative recommended Bakersfield start a program of outside performance audits every five years, naming Moss Adams as an example of a reputable firm to perform the work. He also suggested the city and Kern County jointly commission one study where they share vendors to avoid duplicating effort.

Council Member Sonia Gonzales responded to Turnipseed’s remarks, saying homelessness is “the number 1 issue facing our community” and urging a data-driven review. “There’s a difference between activities and outputs and actually outcomes and reducing the number of people who are on the street and helping people move into housing,” Gonzales said. She said it is appropriate and timely to evaluate performance and “I would like to make a referral tonight that we … look at how we’re gonna evaluate our performance over, you know, over the last 5, 6 years.”

The record shows the city clerk received one speaker card for a non-agenda public statement. The transcript does not record a formal council vote or recorded action to commission an audit or to approve Gonzales’s referral at the March 12 meeting.

Council members and the speaker suggested coordination with Kern County because both jurisdictions use many of the same vendors, and a joint procurement for an audit could be more efficient. Specific costs, a study scope, timeline, and whether the council formally adopted a referral were not specified in the public portions of the meeting.