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Members of the Portland City Council and the Multnomah County Commission met publicly Wednesday morning to discuss the county’s $104 million budget shortfall for homeless services.
There may have been more action behind the scenes, though. Out of the public eye, staffers for Mayor Keith Wilson and Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson are sparring over funding for the city’s 850 tiny pod beds in the upcoming fiscal year.
The city says it was under the impression that the county would take over the funding of those beds. But the city says that county officials recently said they had no intention of funding the bulk of those beds—and said they’re under no obligation to do so, per the agreement they share to govern the Joint Office of Homeless Services.
The inter-agency agreement that regulates the Joint Office between the city and county was re-negotiated last year and approved by both governments.
City leaders say that the agreement obligates the county to fund the city’s network of tiny pod shelters and camps in fiscal year 2025-26.
(The county, in negotiating the most recent IGA, actively sought to assume management of all of the city’s tiny pod shelters in the coming fiscal year. The city last fall asked if they could delay that transfer, and the county agreed.)
But in a standing meeting between Gov. Tina Kotek, Mayor Keith Wilson and Chair Vega Pederson on Tuesday, Vega Pederson made it clear that the county would not be funding the city’s shelter beds in the coming fiscal year in their entirety, but instead only helping out with $10 million of the necessary $41 million to fund all the pod shelters.
That, according to two people familiar with the meeting, took Mayor Wilson by surprise. He thought the county—per the IGA—was obligated to pay for the pod shelters.
That means the city needs to find an additional $30 million in funds to fund all of those 850 pods next year. (The city is hopeful it will receive $13.3 million in pass-through funds from the state, which would decrease the funding gap to $17 million.)
It’s one more way in which Vega Pederson’s sudden revelation last week of a $104 million budget shortfall at JOHS has thrown a wrench into a budget season that was already looking ugly.
Though that issue didn’t come up directly in the Wednesday work session at which both members of the City Council and the County Commission were present, Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney asked if the county’s projection that it would add a net-positive of 329 beds in the next fiscal year, despite the county’s budget gap, was assuming that the city would find the $30 million in remaining funding for its 850 pod beds.
Dan Field, the director of the Joint Office, said yes, that assumption of net added beds to the system was assuming that the city would find the money between now and July to keep all of its pod shelters open.
“I generally look at this at one system,” Pirtle-Guiney said, “but want to make sure I understand where beds are expanding and capacity is shrinking, what that looks like.”
County officials at today’s briefing said that they are also seeking $10 million from Metro to help close the city’s tiny pod funding gap further.
Though it’s unclear if Metro President Lynn Peterson is considering funneling additional funding to the county for its homeless services, Peterson at a Metro meeting on Monday expressed her deep displeasure with the county’s funding gap.
“I want you all to know that I was shocked by her request and by the depth of the budget hole that the Joint Office finds itself in,” Peterson said. “County staff and county commissioners have worked so hard to get to this point, only to be undermined by this admission of negligence.”
The county has argued that its budget deficit was not foreseeable, and that it’s due to a mixture of a smaller county general fund, expiring one-time funds, and its quick usage of carryover funds from prior years’ budgets.
“We are disappointed that doubt has been cast on Multnomah County’s obligation to maintain $41 million in funding for existing Safe Rest Villages and Temporary Alternative Shelter Sites,” Aisling Coghlan, Wilson’s chief of staff, tells WW. “Our budget offices will continue to meet to discuss funding where we expect our County partners will follow through with their IGA commitment.”
County spokeswoman Julia Comnes said that the county and city are “working through a difference of opinion on a few specific aspects of our IGA covering the sheltering goals and whether there is a requirement for the County to assume full funding over the City’s TASS and Safe Rest Village sites; those discussions are ongoing.”