Murmurs: County Commissioners Seek to Curb Chair’s Power

OHSU TRAINERS ALLEGE SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT: Trainers at Oregon Health & Science University’s fitness center sent a letter to the human resources department recently, saying they had long been in the “practice of receiving gifts of monetary value” from clients “with no negative action taken by management.” They sent the letter because OHSU is taking disciplinary action against one of their own, the letter says: a trainer named Hananiah Mays, who happens to be Black and a union organizer. “This policy has never been enforced until they hired a Black person,” says Benny Hendricks, Mays’ representative at American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 328. Worse yet, OHSU is violating its own “progressive discipline” policies by sending Mays straight to a pre-dismissal meeting this week, Hendricks says. The matter began in February when Jason Yoder, a manager at OHSU’s March Wellness & Fitness Center, opened an envelope left for Mays by an elderly client, Dawne Wilkins. Yoder then confronted Mays, Hendricks says, and sent an admonishing email to Wilkins. “We know you have been giving cash gifts to Hananiah Mays,” Yoder wrote to Wilkins. “Please reference the attached letter regarding OHSU’s policy related to gifts.” Wilkins, 83, says the email shocked her. She had been leaving envelopes at the front desk for Mays for a year. “At no time was I asked if there was any remuneration in them,” she says. More importantly, she’s concerned that an exceptional employee is being unfairly targeted. “He’s a very special person,” she says. “If a new member walks into the class, he makes them feel like it was incomplete without the new person’s presence.” OHSU declined to comment on the matter.

COUNTY COMMISSIONERS SEEK TO CURB CHAIR’S POWER: Two recently elected members of the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners proposed new rules this week to diminish the vast authority of the county chair. Commissioners Meghan Moyer and Vince Jones-Dixon are seeking public comment on the changes to how the five-member board operates, which include giving commissioners more power to place items on the board’s agenda. The new rules would require majority consent to end a meeting or cancel one, and board members would be required to state conflicts of interest before meetings and could be precluded from voting. “Multnomah County’s current board rules are confusing and do not align with the county’s stated values of inclusivity and transparency,” Moyer and Jones-Dixon said in a press release. “The revised rules will make it easier for residents to participate in county decisions.” Their push coincides with recommendations for reform from ManageWise, a firm run by former City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero, engaged by the county to help update its governance. County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson welcomed discussion of both sets of proposed rules. “It’s very timely and very good that commissioners are bringing forward their proposals because we’ve been having this conversation around rules,” she said. “I think we’re going to have a robust and comprehensive discussion.”

RECOVERY LEADER DIES: The Alano Club, which calls itself the “largest nonclinical recovery support center in the United States,” lost its executive director last month. The club, which says it serves 10,000 people a month from its Northwest Portland headquarters, announced on social media that its longtime executive director, Brent Canode, had died from an unspecified cause March 21. “We are heartbroken,” the club said in a statement. “The loss of our executive director has left us devastated beyond words.” Canode, who was 52, began his career as a campaign staffer for U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and later worked for former Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard, both at City Hall and in the Legislature. After confronting his own addiction, Canode began working at the Alano Club in 2006. “Brent was a tireless, fearless advocate for the recovery community; an innovative and brilliant person whose work touched thousands of lives—saved thousands of lives—not just here in Portland but everywhere he went,” the club said.

CONSERVATIVE LEGAL GROUP CHALLENGES UNIVERSITY OF OREGON SCHOLARSHIPS: Four scholarships at the University of Oregon are under fire from the Equal Protection Project, a conservative legal group that is challenging universities nationwide for considering race or gender when issuing such awards. The EPP filed a complaint March 4 with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, alleging two UO scholarships violated Title VI by prioritizing students for scholarships based on their race, and two others violated Title IX by being open only to women. “The Office for Civil Rights has the power…to impose whatever remedial relief is necessary to hold [UO] accountable for that unlawful conduct,” wrote EPP attorney and founder William Jacobson. In the month since, three of the scholarships remain intact, but UO appears to have changed eligibility requirements for the Andrea Gellatly Memorial Scholarship. The $1,000 scholarship, originally awarded to “a woman beginning her final year” at the Clark Honors College, is now for “a student beginning the final year.” It’s not immediately clear if the changing of requirements was in response to the EPP complaint. The complaint comes at a time when UO, among dozens of other universities, is under federal investigation for alleged race-based discrimination. In a Feb. 14 letter, the DOE threatened to withhold federal funding from universities that didn’t comply with eliminating race-based scholarships and programs. UO spokesman Eric Howald says the university has not received official notification of a filed complaint but will respond if a review is opened. “We have recently reviewed all of our practices,” Howald says, “and believe that the University of Oregon is in compliance with the law.”