Third in a series

Re “County Throws Itself Over Homeless Steering Wheel”

Drama is building and perspiration is collecting.

To the surprise of everyone except committed calendar watchers, or calendar watchers who ought to be committed, July is a scant three days away.

When the seal is broken on the new month, County homeless officials have pledged to permit Culver City Housing Administrator Tevis Barnes to release the community’s supposedly current (unsheltered) homeless population.

Never mind that in an age when Instantaneous is the god many worship, Culver City’s homeless were polled 148 days ago.

Which means both the outlines and contents of the homeless population may have been sharply rearranged since then.

Ms. Barnes knows the community’s homeless population – or what it was on the last day of January.

There may have been births and deaths since then.

Since Ms. Barnes knows the homeless count, she ventured forth.

“I will tell you this,” she said.

With the Housing Administrator alone in her office, the interviewer doing a solo act in his office and Comey in an unknown location, there was no danger of Ms. Barnes’s disclosure going public. Until now.

“Without getting into specifics,  we did have some dramatic increases,” Ms. Barnes said.

“One thing I did find disturbing,” she said, boldly adding:

“I don’t care if LAHSA (Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority) gets mad about this.

“For the first time ever, we experienced a homeless family on the street.”

Ms. Barnes explained that the homeless count is divided into two sections, sheltered (which would include Upward Bound House residents) and unsheltered.

“We have families in our sheltered count,” she said. “But now we have a family living on the street, two adults and two minors.”

Meanwhile, it was confirmed that Culver City’s unsheltered count has risen from the 30s to the 40s, a record.

(To be eventually continued)