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Late last month, Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson held a press conference to plead with the state and Metro—the regional government—for millions of dollars to fill a budget hole at the Joint Office of Homeless Services.
Instead of riding to the rescue, Gov. Tina Kotek and Metro President Lynn Peterson are pressing Vega Pederson to explain the gap, and they want receipts.
Kotek and Peterson wrote a letter to the chair Friday, requesting three years of spending—with “actual line-item detail”—at the JOHS, a partnership it runs with the city. They also want granular detail on the JOHS forecast for fiscal year 2026, which ends June 30 of next year.
“We recognize the significant financial stress the county is facing, and that Multnomah County has to have a successful suite of services for combating homelessness for the region and the state to succeed as well,” Kotek and Peterson wrote. “This is the very reason we share an urgency to understand the rationale that yielded the request to the state for an additional $55 million on top of the $60 million the county is already receiving from the state this biennium.”
The joint missive is a love letter compared to the seething one that Peterson penned to the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners on her own and sent the same day. In it, Peterson raised questions about Vega Pederson’s integrity and questioned the management skills at the JOHS, which is led by director Dan Field.
“As your elected peer, I assume this misinformation was not intentional on the chair’s behalf but borne from mismanagement or confusion within the JOHS,” Peterson wrote.
The letters amp up a fight among the three leaders just as all of their budgets are suffering from lower tax receipts and deep cuts in federal funding by billionaire Elon Musk, anointed by President Donald Trump to slash spending across all agencies.
Worse yet, for Vega Pederson, a member of her own board, Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards, responded to Kotek and Peterson on March 1, disclaiming any responsibility for the surprise deficit, and reminding them of the county chair’s powers.
“As you are likely aware, in our governance structure, the chair has the operational responsibility to manage the county’s budget,” Brim-Edwards wrote. “The specific funding request to Metro and state had not been discussed by the commission and was a unilateral action by the chair without consultation with commissioners.”
Hammering home her point, Brim-Edwards told Kotek and Peterson that commissioners got word of the deficit just one hour before Vega Pederson’s press conference.
“This was also before any of the 2026 department budget documents were shared with the public or the commission,” Brim-Edwards wrote. “Those budget documents were shared later in the afternoon.”
Peterson, meantime, has wasted no time in hammering the county for the shortfall. One business day after Vega Pederson announced it, she took time out of a Metro meeting to flame her counterpart, saying she was “shocked” by the gap, which is larger than the deficit that Portland faces in its citywide general fund.
Peterson has skin in the game. Metro pays about a third of the Homeless Services Department’s $421 million budget for the fiscal year that ends June 30. The cash comes from the tax on high marginal incomes in the tri-county area approved by voters in 2020.
Metro has been pressing Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties for more details on how they spend the Metro money. Negotiations to produce program-level financial data have been going on for three years, straining relations among the four governments. Peterson invoked those fruitless talks in her letter.
“Metro’s lack of access to Multnomah County’s current-state programmatic details and as-of-today lack of access to disaggregated data means that we are unable to gather these details on our own,” Peterson wrote as a preamble to 11 questions about how the $104 million gap opened and which programs the county plans to cut to close it.
“What is the estimated number of people who will lose their homes currently funded by SHS?” Peterson asked. “What emergency provisions have been made for their potential evictions?”
Members of Multnomah County’s press office didn’t immediately return an email and text messages seeking comment on the flurry of letters.