Gov. Gavin Newsom played the role of Santa Claus last week, promising bigger public subsidies for Hollywood’s film and video industry and giving cities and counties a new round of public aid to combat the -shelter.

The amounts are in the same range, but the beneficiaries couldn’t be more different: $750 million to improve the balance sheets of a few already wealthy entertainment producers and $827 million to help about 186,000 homeless people find housing . The governor’s attitudes toward the beneficiaries of political largess, as expressed in closely spaced press conferences in Los Angeles, are also very different.

Newsom called the increase in entertainment subsidies from $330 million a year to $750 million an “investment in the future of this industry and in the future of this state,” but devoted much of his announcement on homelessness served as a warning to local officials that they must and will do better. meet new performance standards.

“We have given our local partners the tools and resources they need,” Newsom said in a statement. “It’s time to end this crisis now. These new funds represent the hard work, accountability and strategic planning needed to combat homelessness with real, lasting results.

The governor’s office said that “to receive the funding, awardees must agree to increased accountability, transparency and compliance measures.” These new measures will help strengthen the capacity of these public investments to generate real and measurable results and will help improve the monitoring of data and results. This ensures grant recipients remain accountable and protects state funding.

Over the past four years, the state has allocated $2.4 billion in aid to local governments for homelessness programs, and Newsom has periodically threatened to withhold additional appropriations, saying recipients were not spending this money effectively.

However, local officials have countered that receiving money one year at a time, without a long-term funding commitment, makes it difficult to establish permanent programs to help homeless people find shelter and to resolve the issues that made them homeless in the first place.

It’s also worth noting that Grant Parks, the state auditor, criticized Newsom’s Interagency Council on Homelessness for failing to monitor homelessness programs as it was created to do it. Until the council does its job, “the state will lack up-to-date information that it can use to make data-driven policy decisions on how to effectively reduce homelessness,” Parks said in a report last April, just before Newsom and the government. The Legislature has staged its annual fight over homeless spending in the state budget.

As the number of homeless people continues to rise, the squabbles between Newsom and local officials appear less about how to attack the crisis and more about who will be blamed for failure.