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Efforts to improve morale within the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office appear to be having little effect, according to internal poll results released today in response to a public records request.
The poll mirrored a similar set of questions asked in January 2023 and found little, if any, progress had been made since. “Confidence in reporting discriminatory behavior or feeling unsafe has decreased” and “workloads are having a greater, negative impact on mental health,” according to a report summarizing the survey’s results.
The report recommends the office “expand the number of staff dedicated to equity work.” The office did hire an equity manager in late 2022, Ari Alberg, but he lasted little more than a year. He left in November. The office plans to announce his replacement later this week.
“It is encouraging that staff are seeing our equity-related initiatives taking off, and we also clearly have more work to do so that everyone feels that this is an office where they can thrive. I look forward to continuing this important work,” District Attorney Mike Schmidt said in a statement.
The statement listed the various equity initiatives he’s launched in the past year, including management training and a new diversity, equity and inclusion workgroup. He’s planning new initiatives going forward, including “micro-aggression training for all staff.”
One hundred fifty-four employees, 61% of total staff, responded to the latest survey. Only a quarter said they agreed with the statement that “my work does not impact my mental health negatively,” a 6% drop from last year. The number of employees who “feel safe reporting discriminatory behavior” also decreased, but the number of employees who believe the office “is making progress towards achieving equity” increased.
Many of the comments compiled by surveyors were scathing.
“I had a lot of hope for our office with the initiated changes, but there has been a lot of talk, meetings, committees and no real measurable progress,” reads one. “We’ve spent hours and large amounts of money for the equity director to facilitate and now to attend trainings that overall, have had little to no impact on the inequities across workloads and between different levels of staff.”
“Ari is absolutely excellent and his work matters. But it’s also just one person pushing against a culture that goes back decades, and it’s not fair to him or realistic to expect that the ship will have turned around in such a short period of time,” another employee said.