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It’s a new era for the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners—which, because of the enormous funding it has to spend on homeless services, has become the most-watched five-member group in Portland since the last time the Blazers were any good.
One obvious difference: The days when Chair Deborah Kafoury dictated every detail of how the county operated are over.
“It’s a real change,” Commissioner Susheela Jayapal tells WW. “Deborah had many strengths. Sharing power was not one of them.”
On Aug. 10, hours before the five-member board sat down to discuss how to spend $50 million of unanticipated revenue from Metro’s supportive house services measure, Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards publicly released a wish list not only for that money, but for another $71.8 million the county and Metro are currently dickering over that remains unspent from 2023.
Among other ideas, Brim-Edwards wants an infusion of $6 million or $7 million for the Bybee Lakes Hope Center, a homeless shelter in the former Wapato Jail. (That in itself is remarkable: Kafoury pushed the county to sell the never-used jail for a fraction of its cost and would not consider supporting any county services at the North Portland building. Today, at least three commissioners support funding Bybee Lakes.)
Commissioner Jayapal suggested helping Albina Vision Trust purchase the Paramount, a 66-unit naturally affordable apartment building at 253 N Broadway. (Jayapal didn’t propose a specific dollar amount, but the nonprofit previously requested $2.8 million in gap funding.)
Commissioner Lori Stegmann asked for $11.5 million to buy the Sheraton Four Points Hotel at 1919 NE 181st Ave. for the Rockwood Community Development Corporation.
And Commissioner Sharon Meieran repeated her call for a $25 million down payment on the sprawling 241-unit Crowne Plaza Hotel at 1441 NE 2nd Ave., located in the Lloyd District between the Hooper Detoxification Stabilization Center and Legacy’s Unity Center for Behavioral Health.
“This should be a no-brainer: acting at a scale that will make a difference,” Meieran said. “Do we or do we not have a desperate need for recovery housing?”
The truth is that the county could make all of those expenditures today and still have $70 million or so left over.
Vega Pederson, who served six years on the board before moving up to the chair’s job in January, acknowledged that giving her colleagues an opportunity to publicly recite their wish lists put her in a tricky position.
“Having a conversation of this type is unique in my experience,” she said last week.
And it is no accident that the biggest items on the commissioners’ wish lists are existing rooms that can immediately house people—in some cases, at a fraction of what the city’s Housing Bureau has historically spent on constructing subsidized housing.
“People are talking about tangible improvement,” Jayapal says. “They want to see an impact on unsheltered homelessness.”
All the talk of buying bricks and mortar made Vega Pederson uneasy, perhaps a legacy of the county’s ill-fated decision to construct the Wapato Jail in 2003 without having the money to operate it.
“Capital investment implies ongoing costs,” she said.
That’s prudent, but it ignores the stream of cash—more than $100 million a year—flowing from the homeless services measure voters passed in 2020 (the Joint Office of Homeless Services’ budget is $282 million this year). It also ignores the possibility of Medicaid funding for some of the services the county would provide in new buildings.
Vega Pederson is under pressure. Her colleagues’ collective clamor to spend surplus county dollars on properties with urgency came in the same week Gov. Tina Kotek announced a “task force” to tackle homelessness and public safety—an obvious slap at Vega Pederson and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler. Metro is also ratcheting up its oversight of county spending. All of that means Vega Pederson faces unprecedented scrutiny and demands for Multnomah County to move with dispatch.
Last month, Vega Pederson botched the rollout of tinfoil and straws for fentanyl users, as WW first reported. Last week, The Oregonian chronicled the county’s failure to provide basic services at a new safe rest village in inner Southeast Portland.
But those stories mask the larger issue: The county has simply failed to spend the money voters have sent its way. Behind the scenes, Vega Pederson’s chief operating officer, Serena Cruz, has been negotiating with Metro on how to spend the $71.8 million that Metro says remains unspent from 2023 (“Scrooged,” WW, July 26).
There’s clear consensus on the board that the county needs to open a sobering center, pay contractors better, build capacity at nonprofits, and continue to provide rental assistance and take other measures to prevent even more people from becoming homeless. Tangible spending on the unsheltered who are already on the streets is less clear.
The biggest single line item Metro and the county have agreed on for last year’s money? Not spending it. Metro will allow the county to put $16 million into reserves—i.e., savings.
That is not an isolated suggestion. At last week’s board briefing for the $50 million of recently discovered Metro supportive housing services revenue from 2021, Joint Office of Homeless Service staff made a similar suggestion: “increase stabilization reserves to 15%” from the current 10%. In other words, spend even less money.
“How much do we really need to have [in reserve]?” Stegmann asked, noting that the 2020 ballot measure gave the county a finite time to reduce homelessness: “It’s a short time window of 10 years.”
Vega Pederson was mostly in listening mode last week. Unlike her colleagues, she did not bring a wish list, and while she asked questions, she kept her cards close to her vest.
The opportunity for her is to share the authority, the workload, and even the blame by incorporating the suggestions others made. She can lead the parade, or risk getting run over.
“I think there’s a fair amount of trepidation on the chair’s part,” Jayapal says. “There’s risk involved in being open and transparent in public.”
County spokeswoman Julie Sullivan-Springhetti says Vega Pederson is gathering data and considering her colleagues’ wish lists.
“She and her staff are evaluating the information around the bricks-and-mortar options and Bybee Lakes,” Sullivan-Springhetti says. “She’ll comment when the analysis is complete.”
The board expects to vote on allocating the surplus money in late August.