Mayor Karen Bass and Siti Ati in the meeting room of City Hall in late March. Heidi Feldstein Soto has announced that she has found the perfect person to prevent 1,500 former homeless residents of Skid Row from losing their homes again.

After years of mismanagement, Tennant’s non-profit landlord Skid Row Housing Trust went bankrupt financially.pair petitioned the judge to place the trust’s 29 buildings under trusteeship headed by Mark Adams.

“He’s the most experienced health and safety recipient I’ve found in California,” said Feldstein Soto, who spearheaded the decision, with Adams watching from behind. “He has the breadth and depth of expertise that we think we need.”

What the city attorney didn’t mention was that Adams hosted a fundraising event for her in October, and that Adams and his associates donated at least $8,500 to her campaign. Campaign finance records show.

Three months after the press conference announcing his appointment as trustee, Feldstein Soto stood before a city council committee and admitted he had made a mistake. He said Adams misrepresented his ability to raise capital, made little progress in improving the terms of his tenants, and failed to report his spending as required.

Two weeks ago, at the city’s request, the judge sought and accepted Adams’ resignation.

An examination of Adams’ history would have raised concerns that Feldstein Soto might have escaped missteps.

A Times review of Adams’ past lawsuits, released shortly after Adams took office, found property owners losing their homes, tenants in danger of being evicted, and judges and local governments finding Adams’ firm in the six figures. Multiple instances of high billings have come to light. Some similar issues arose when Mr. Adams oversaw the trust’s portfolio.

Government ethics experts said the trustee system is not a contract with the city, so Adams’ appointment does not violate competitive bidding or campaign finance rules.

However, they were troubled by the decision to give Adams favorable and unlimited no-bid positions without a formal background check, especially since he was a campaign financier.

“Did the city consult a judge and defend the donor, or the most qualified person?” says Jessica Levinson, Loyola Law School professor and former chairman of the city’s ethics committee.

Sean McMorris, Transparency, Ethics, and Accountability Program Manager at California Common Causes, a good government nonprofit, said Feldstein Soto’s actions were a “clear dereliction of duty” and a money-making campaign. Said it looks like politics.

“They should have done some due diligence, even in a quick way,” McMorris said. “I think it’s alarming to miss all these red flags.

In an interview with The Times, Feldstein Soto said: Others in the city knew about Adams’ political contributions even before she recommended him as a recipient. He is widely considered the state’s most experienced recipient, so he said his donation was pointless and that the trust’s failure required the city to take immediate action.

“We were in a position to act,” Feldstein-Soto said. “Call me congratulations Mary if you will. He was the only solution possible within the deadline with the funds and the experience that we thought we could get the job done.”

But Feldstein Soto said he had concerns before Adams was hired. She said she threatened to quit her job the day before the city requested Mr. Adams’ appointment because he had arranged a loan at a 15% interest rate, much higher than Mr. Adams had originally proposed.

“Do you think it’s very regrettable that the city hired someone who misrepresented itself?” Feldstein Soto said. “Of course I will.”

Adams told The Times he was outspoken about the terms of the loan he could secure, saying it was Feldstein Soto who failed to deliver on his promise of low-interest charity funding.

“I wish I had done more research into the city’s attorney background before taking on this assignment,” Adams said.

The trustee system is already costing us a lot.

City officials believe the outstanding bills during Adams’ tenure could include: More than $3 million, hundreds of thousands of which went to Adams and his company, California Receivership Group. Two weeks ago, the city council had to approve a $10 million emergency loan to pay Adams’ debts and keep the trust property, and it’s likely that more taxpayer money will be needed in the coming months. . And the trust’s 1,500 tenants face further delays in improving poor living conditions.

Adams declined to answer a question from The Times about campaign donations. He has been a trustee of 300 cases in California for nearly 25 years, and the Times has previously spotlighted only a handful of cases where judges and others questioned his performance. was claiming.

Adams said in a previous interview that he had always wanted to do a trusteeship in Los Angeles, but that city leaders weren’t interested in the idea. He approached Feldstein Soto at an event last summer, thinking she might be more docile given her background as a bankruptcy attorney and familiarity with her trustee system. .

“I was rather hopeful that we might finally make it through Los Angeles,” Adams said in May.

Adams gave Feldstein Soto the maximum amount allowed for an individual donor of $1,500 in early October, one of the few donations he’s made to the city government in the past decade, according to campaign finance records. was one of gold.

Ms. Adams then hosted a fundraiser for her, the city attorney said. On Oct. 26, less than two weeks before Election Day, Adams’ wife, the company’s administrator and security officer, and two partners at the Beverly Hills-based law firm Irvin Cohen & Jessup, confirmed that Adams would This is a law firm that I frequently use in litigation involving trusts. According to campaign records, the issue was donated to Feldstein Soto. All but one of his donations were up to $1,500, and most of the donations went to candidates in little, if any, other cities.

Feldstein Soto’s campaign finance chief and political consultant did not respond to additional questions from The Times asking for an account of everyone who contributed to Adams’ fundraiser.

Feldstein Soto said he was already interested in the trusteeship system, believing it could improve conditions for tenants in troubled buildings.

After taking office, Feldstein Soto consulted Adams about incidents that may have occurred elsewhere in the city. Feldstein Soto said he came up with the trustee’s portfolio trustee after the interim chief executive of the trust told city and state officials in mid-March that the nonprofit was closing the building for lack of funds. It was after I had sent a letter stating that I might have to. And contacted Adams about it.

Feldstein Soto said the city was unable to conduct a formal background check on Adams because of the compressed schedule. Instead, Adams’ name flowed to all the trust authorities and trust property lenders in the city, but no one opposed him, she said.

“At no point in this process did I act alone,” she said.

Attorney Manny Abascal, who represents Skid Row Housing Trust, said he supported the city attorney’s recommended trustee system and Adams’ choice. Abascal was unaware of Adams’ campaign contributions, but she said she was impressed with the receiver in her interviews, as well as reviewing the company’s past lawsuits on her website. rice field. He agreed with Feldstein Soto that time pressure made deeper investigation difficult.

“I’m really bad at saying ‘I failed.’ You picked Mark, you should have picked someone else,” Abascal said.

Nonetheless, there was an opportunity for due diligence prior to Adams’ election. Trust executives announced an impending bankruptcy a month before writing to the city, and months earlier they had told city officials of the dire prospects. Even after the city received the letter in March, it took two weeks for the city to file a trustee appointment with the courts.

Mariah Thompson, an attorney for California District Legal Assistance, a nonprofit that has represented tenants in at least four Adams custody cases over the past 15 years, said warning signs about Adams were easy to spot.

“Things like this have happened many times,” Thompson said. “For jurisdictions to continue using this company is like a deliberate disregard for the few people they do the tiniest bit of research for or advocate for affordable housing for low-income people. If you talk to them, they’ll be able to tell you exactly what’s going to happen.”

At a press conference in March, Bass said the trusteeship would offer a “permanent solution” to the trust problem, adding that Adams’ choice was a “hard work” with Feldstein Soto. affirmed.

But amid the growing controversy surrounding Adams, Mr. Bass has not substantially commented on the trusteeship. The mayor did not respond to The Times’ list of questions about why the office did not scrutinize Mr. Adams or whether Mr. Adams was aware of his contributions to the city’s attorney before he was elected.

Levinson, a Loyola law professor, said the failure of the trustee system is yet another example of how the city is frustrating homeless residents and frustrating Angeleno residents who want action.

“There are real people affected,” she says. “And there are voters and voters who look at this humanitarian crisis and just think, ‘Oh, this is why things aren’t getting better.’ because there is.”

Common Cause’s McMorris believes there needs to be clearer guidelines about the “gray areas” in recipient selection. Both Mr. Levinson and Mr. Levinson acknowledged that their fault lay with Mr. Feldstein Soto and believed that the city attorney, who in other cases had denounced the use of negotiated contracts, could turn the experience to her advantage. rice field.

“It’s hard to learn the hard way,” McMorris said. “But if the result is her, she’ll move forward more radically and implement her rhetoric of introducing some policies and cracking down on potential corruption…then good for her.” That’s it.”

Mr. Feldstein Soto said he intended to do just that and would solicit suggestions from recipients on future issues.

At a committee hearing two weeks ago, Feldstein Soto assured councilors that the city had conducted a more extensive investigation into Kevin Singer, the recipient the city had chosen to replace Adams. Singer hasn’t donated in a city election since 2015, when he donated $500 to an unsuccessful city council candidate, according to campaign finance records.