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In the past fiscal year, records show, the nonprofit shelter operator Do Good Multnomah received at least $5.7 million in contracts from the Joint Office of Homeless Services, Multnomah County government’s effort to aid and house people living outside.
What nobody knows is who, how and when Do Good Multnomah, a $17 million-a-year organization, lobbied county officials to get the money.
That’s because—unlike the state of Oregon, the city of Portland, and many large counties on the West Coast—Multnomah County doesn’t require contractors or their lobbyists to register or report hours spent pitching their services to public officials.
A half dozen people familiar with the county’s operations tell WW that the lack of lobbying requirements opens the door for abuse.
“The absence of graft is not an argument for no disclosure,” says Erik Sten, who served on the Portland City Council from 1997 to 2008. “There is no doubt that if you’re going to err, as you always do in human affairs, you should err on the side of reporting. The only person you inconvenience is the lobbyist.”
Do Good Multnomah is an ambitious organization. It operates six shelters in Multnomah County, according to its website, and manages four low-income permanent housing complexes, providing support services to residents. It also runs the Behavioral Health Resource Center in partnership with the county.
It may be that Do Good got those jobs, and the cash that comes with them, by doing good work. But it may also be that Do Good’s chief executive, Daniel Hovanas, is an effective advocate. On at least two occasions, Hovanas told staff that a major part of his job was having drinks with county officials and asking them for money, a Do Good employee told WW on condition of anonymity. Hovanas denied the part about drinks.
“Having drinks with county officials is in no way a significant aspect of my job,” Hovanas wrote in an email. “I have met with individuals from the Joint Office of Homeless Services leadership team over lunch a few times a year to discuss our ongoing partnership. These meetings are focused on the sustainability of our current contracts and solving Portland’s continued homeless crisis. We’re business and missional partners with the JOHS; we create space to ask questions and gain feedback on the realities of the work.”
Hovanas is hardly alone in seeking the ear of county leaders. Multnomah County paid out $1.2 billion to contractors in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2023. That constituted more than a third of its total $3.3 billion budget.
The Joint Office, which is operated in conjunction with the city but is controlled and largely funded by the county, is set to spend $282.2 million—or 82% of its total $342.5 million operating budget—on contractors in the fiscal year ending June 30.
The allotments are large because the county, unlike the city, performs most of its work (housing the homeless, running health clinics, treating addiction) by paying nonprofit contractors.
“They are an incredibly large pass-through agency,” says former Portland Mayor Sam Adams, who ran for the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners last year on a platform of transparency, but lost in November to Shannon Singleton.
Despite the scale of public dollars at stake, people who work for those contractors aren’t bound by the same reporting system that exists in the city, for example, where lobbyists must register and report whom they meet and what they spend.
For Multnomah County, the result is a system in which people seeking hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce homelessness—the work with the highest stakes in the region, to which taxpayers are sending $135 million a year—can cozy up to the people allocating the money, with virtually no disclosure.
“It’s the Wild West,” Adams says.
A former senior county staffer goes further: “There are no rules at the county. It’s like Fight Club.”
Reducing homelessness—the county’s most costly, most visible endeavor—is a massive expense, and taxpayers expect to see results.
The county produces reams of data about spending and the status of unhoused residents. But if taxpayers were to look for documents showing how contractors seek that money, they’d see nothing at all.
Multnomah County spokeswoman Julie Sullivan-Springhetti says county officials follow state ethics laws. She points to the county’s own 11-page code of ethics, which describes policies on gifts and conflicts of interest, but it doesn’t mention lobbying strictures—or use the word “lobby”—at all.
The closest it comes is saying that officials who have influence over contracting “may not serve on decision-making boards of, be employed by, or serve on evaluation or selection committees related to contract award for contractors who could benefit from such involvement.”
Asked what exactly that verbiage meant, a county spokeswoman said the county’s code of ethics “prohibits employees from using their position to influence contracts when the employee serves on a decision-making board of that contractor.”
But all of the former government officials and civic experts WW contacted said the code of ethics wasn’t enough.
“Lobbying on important issues shouldn’t be a bad thing,” says Eric Zimmerman, who worked at the city and the county before winning a seat on the new Portland City Council, “but being able to understand the flow of money and the picking of winners and losers should be transparent.”
The stakes are only growing. Last week, Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson asked Metro (which collects the supportive homeless services tax) and the state of Oregon to send the Joint Office $85 million to fill a budget hole, which she blamed on shrinking tax revenues.
Given that 82% of that money is likely to go to contractors who won’t have to report their cocktail get-togethers, WW asked Vega Pederson whether the public should demand transparency in lobbying before handing over more money.
In reply, Vega Pederson defended the integrity of the current contracting system, saying it prevents elected officials from awarding contracts.
“Our board makes funding decisions, but not decisions about who receives funding,” Vega Pederson said in a statement. “Those functions are decoupled for a reason. Unlike other jurisdictions, Multnomah County has a thorough, thoughtful and developed [request for proposal] process each contractor must go through in order to receive funding.”
The lack of lobbying rules at the county stands in stark contrast to Metro and the city of Portland, which do less business with outside contractors. Both Metro and the city require lobbyists to register, giving their own names, phone numbers and addresses as well as information about the people or agencies that employ them.
Metro also requires lobbyists to report expenses for food and entertainment purchased for the purpose of lobbying, and the names of any Metro officials who partook in it, once a year. The city requires lobbyists to file those reports quarterly. Elected city officials must report gifts, meals or entertainment received from a lobbyist in excess of $25 quarterly, even if they have nothing to report. High-ranking city officials must report the same perks only if they actually get them. Elected officials and city directors must post calendar entries for official city business—including visits by lobbyists—to their office’s website each quarter. Those calendars are public.
That means if a frequent lobbyist for a shelter operator had a standing monthly dinner at Canard with City Councilor Steve Novick, and they played a round of pickleball afterward, the lobbyist would be required to report the outing and how much it cost. But if the same contractor spent the same evening with Multnomah County Commissioner Vince Jones-Dixon, the occasion would not be recorded—so long as each of them paid their own way.
Ted Wheeler, who served as both county chair and Portland mayor, thinks the county should have similar rules.
“I’m surprised Multnomah County doesn’t have lobbying rules,” Wheeler said in a text message. “The city has them for transparency reasons, so the public knows who is influencing their elected officials and top officers. In all fairness, the county didn’t have these rules when I was there, either. I’m just surprised they haven’t been established over time.”
The lack of lobbying rules is just one more flaw in the county’s contracting system. In 2023, Multnomah County’s elected auditor, Jennifer McGuirk, chastised the county for failing to make sure nonprofits were providing the services they promised. Leaders of some departments didn’t know about the county’s contract monitoring policies, McGuirk wrote. In some cases, program staffers winged it and “determined how to best monitor programs.”
The upshot of those failings, combined with a dearth of lobbying disclosure, is that taxpayers didn’t know how nonprofits got money and whether and how they spent it. All of that makes it difficult to assess how effectively the county is allocating taxpayer dollars.
Ironically, the candidate who defeated Adams after he tried to tar her as part of the nonprofit industrial complex last year, has taken up his fight. Contacted for this story, Singleton told WW she was working with fellow Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards to develop lobbying rules for the county.
Singleton has worked at the Salvation Army, the housing nonprofit JOIN, and Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, all of which get county funding. She served as interim director of the JOHS, which funds a slew of nonprofits, for nine months in 2022 and was at the Portland Housing Bureau before that. As a contractor who had lobbied both the city and the county, Singleton says she was stunned by the lack of transparency when she sought Multnomah County money.
“You could reach out to commissioners and lobby for your own program,” Singleton says. “It’s always been shocking to me that there were no rules for providers.”
And, the freestyle lobbying worked, Singleton says. The results often showed up in amendments to the budget for specific agencies or programs. She says she didn’t tackle the matter when she led JOHS because running the agency was a full-time job.
Brim-Edwards knows a bit about lobbying because as a senior director at Nike Inc., she oversaw compliance with lobbying and ethics rules in lots of different places in the U.S. She promised to create a registry of lobbyists when she first ran in 2023. (Brim Edwards said she didn’t get to it because she was focused on public safety and homelessness.)
“The county is way behind the times,” Brim-Edwards says. “We are a large, complex enterprise that has relationships in the community. All of those should be transparent and reported.”
Brim-Edwards and Singleton plan to base their lobbying rules on those put in place by Metro in 2014. Both Brim-Edwards and Singleton say that Metro’s system is less arduous but just as effective as the city’s.
Whether they’ll have the support of the chair remains unclear.
“This new board is having conversations about creating a lobbying disclosure system,” Vega Pederson said, “and I would expect us to take up that issue this year.”