California Can't Account for Impact of $13 Billion

Ten years after California voters passed Proposition 63’s tax on millionaires to fund programs for the mentally ill, the state cannot document whether billions of dollars in funding have improved residents’ lives, according to a new report by the Little Hoover Commission.

 

The report, released by the oversight body on Tuesday, is the second in two years faulting the state for inadequately accounting for a program that has raised more than $13 billion.

 

Bureaucratic and technological shortcomings, the Little Hoover Commission said, make it difficult, if not impossible, to analyze the measure’s effect.

 

In a letter accompanying the report, commission Chairman Pedro Nava pointed to “overlapping and sometimes unaccountable bureaucracies” and to a panel – the Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission – that “still lacks teeth.”