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How did Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services, run in coordination with the city of Portland, blow a $104 million hole in its budget for the 2026 fiscal year?
It’s a question lots of Oregonians are asking, including the governor, the regional government supplying the office with tax dollars, and members of the county’s board of commissioners.
The answer, at least in part? Multnomah County broke its own rules.
The county’s budget for the current fiscal year has a page describing fiscally responsible restrictions on the use of one-time funds—windfalls that come from federal emergency funding, the sale of capital assets, taxes that exceed budgeted revenue, and “carryover funds” unspent from the previous year.
“Unrestricted one-time-only resources present organizations with temptations that are hard to resist,” the budget reads. “In the short run it appears more beneficial to allocate such resources to the highest priority public service that would otherwise be unfunded than to restrict them to costs associated with one-time needs and those that will not recur in following years. However, the result of this practice is to expand operational levels and public expectations beyond the capacity of the organization to generate continuing funding.”
“This,” the resolution says, “inevitably produces shortfalls and crises.”
From that, it’s clear the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners knew that one-time funds were the budget equivalent of eating marshmallows for breakfast. They deliver a sugar rush, but the energy boost runs out, leading to a midafternoon crash.
But JOHS, which will change its name to the Homeless Services Department, or HSD, when the new fiscal year starts July 1, couldn’t resist a nibble in the current fiscal year. In a Feb. 18 letter to Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson describing his needs for the 2026 fiscal year—the one with the giant hole—department director Dan Field copped to hitting up one-time funds to sustain ongoing programs in 2025. Those funds, he said, had run out.
“In some cases, HSD used this one-time-only funding to fund ongoing services,” Field wrote. “For FY 2024 and FY 2025, this allowed HSD to respond with urgency and meet the expanded spending targets, as programs ramped up and more people were served with housing and services.”
In all, JOHS relied on $113 million in one-time funds this fiscal year.
And, sure enough, the county now has a shortfall, and a crisis. Vega Pederson sounded the alarm herself at a Friday press conference late last month, when she pleaded for more money from the state ($55 million) and Metro, the tri-county regional government ($30 million). She blamed the shortfall in large part on a December forecast from Metro that showed supportive housing services, or SHS, tax revenues were shrinking this fiscal year and next.
Instead of coming to the rescue, Gov. Tina Kotek and Metro Council President Lynn Peterson asked for an explanation, and they want Vega Pederson to show her work. In a letter sent on the last day of February, they requested details on four years of JOHS spending, including “actual line-item detail” in a “machine-readable format” by March 14.
That same day, Peterson sent a solo letter to the whole Multnomah County Board of Commissioners asking 11 questions about JOHS spending. The first one: “What is the JOHS’s plan to address the ongoing programmatic needs that are currently funded with one-time-only dollars?”
Peterson says she has a right to know because Metro is funding about a third of JOHS’s $395 million budget for the fiscal year that ends June 30 from its SHS tax on high incomes.
JOHS spokeswoman Julia Comnes says fluctuations in collections from the SHS tax make it difficult to budget the money. In fiscal 2024, Multnomah County took heat from Metro for not spending its SHS money fast enough. Also, Metro requires the three counties to spend the money on services (not on actual housing), which, by their nature, aren’t ideal one-time investments, Comnes says.
“It’s been challenging to respond to significant fluctuations in revenue from the supportive housing services measure,” Comnes said in an email. “Because the tax is volatile, the forecasts have understandably had to react to that volatility, and then the county has had to align the revenues we’ve received.”