Last week, Multnomah County commissioners approved a $3.5 billion budget for the next fiscal year. The County gets less public attention than the city of Portland, but it’s actually more responsible for dealing with some of the biggest issues that the region is facing right now. It has more direct control of the Joint Office of Homeless Services. It’s also more focused on behavioral health issues like substance use disorder and mental illness. Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson joined Think Out Loud to talk about the county’s priorities.
Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson
Courtesy of Jessica Vega Pederson
The following are excerpts from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity:
On underspending Metro’s supportive housing services fund
“This is unacceptable. It’s not the expectations that I have. It’s not the expectations that the taxpayers have for how we need to be using these dollars to get them out to the community. You know, the performance is not meeting the needs of our community and the expectations that I have. So I wanted to make sure that we were really clear on the things that we needed to do in order to change this around.
And the first one was really to come together with the short-term funding opportunities that we had to get this money directly out into the community as soon as possible. And this is something that the Joint Office is putting together in consultation with my staff. We’ve engaged the City in these conversations. We’ve engaged my Board and, of course, Metro in these conversations as well. Like, what are our biggest opportunities to get the money out the door right away. We’re still, you know, working on that plan. But a part of that was also my commitment to being collaborative as we’re making these decisions, as we’re making these investments to really look beyond just what’s needed and overall ...
And I will say for the wage issue, this year across all of our departments, we’ve invested an 8% COLA (cost of living adjustment) just in this fiscal year budget. And that is for funding that we’re doing through our general fund dollars. That’s also for providers who are paid through our Support of Housing Service Measure dollars. That builds on a 7% cost of living adjustment that we had in last fiscal year, fiscal year 2023. So we’re really looking to make these investments. And as we’re looking at what we can do with some of this additional underspending that we have, looking at how we can set up opportunities like a grant opportunity, for instance, for providers, that will allow them to use that for wages, for benefits, for technical assistance. And this is something that we’re looking to partner with our philanthropic community to help get this money out the doors because I think they can be a really good part of the solution as well ...
I think that there are some long-standing issues with the Joint Office of Homeless Services, how it was set up, how it was started off as a very small offshoot that was run under the Chair’s department. It’s only in the last couple of years been made its own department. That’s really a part of the larger structure of the County. There are things that are missing. I think in its structure, I think there are improvements that can be made throughout it. And what we wanna do is we want to bring in people who are the smartest in the country in doing these things. We’ve actually already engaged James Schroeder and Healthcare Management Associates to come in and to create the 90-day plan that really is looking at an evaluation of our current operations, the processes and the outcomes that are gonna be used. And they’ve actually started working already in engaging with partners to have this conversation. So it’s the things that we can improve with the Joint Office internally and things that we need to do as well as how we can be working better and more effectively with our partners.”
On the Joint Office of Homeless Services
“I think we can do a much better job of being transparent about how we are engaging with the City and also with my Board in the ideas and the types of investments that we want to see to make sure that we’re reaching the goals that we have for our support of Housing Services Measure plans as well as the needs that we see in the City and the County. And so that’s what I mean by that. I do think that we can have more public forums where we’re talking about those types of investments ...
In order to be able to invest in and solve those problems, we do have to have the collaboration between the City and the County. There are roles that they have in terms of establishing where people can camp and where they can’t. They have the public safety response function. They are able to be responsible and see things in a different way than we do. But we need everybody at the table as we’re talking about the investments we make, the solutions that we need to see and be making everyone successful.
You know, even before the Joint Office of Homeless Services was created, the City and the County both independently were putting millions of dollars into our homelessness system. The City was doing the adult single population and the County was doing families and couples. And I don’t think we want to go back to that divided system. I think it should be able to work better with us at the table together making these investments.”
On the city’s new daytime camping ban
“We already have had conversations and I’ve directed my staff to start working on what this means in terms of places where we know people will show up if they aren’t able to be in their tents or with their belongings during the day. So we’re having that conversation around libraries ...
Are they gonna have an influx of people coming in that are just looking for a place to go but who aren’t necessarily there for library purposes? Are we gonna see this at the Behavioral Health Resource Center that we’ve recently been able to actually get at a level of service and response, that works for the system and works for the people that are there really well? So this is a huge concern as we’re talking to folks at the County...
Until we have more shelter sites, until we have expanded capacity for these kinds of day services, getting all of these resources in place before a ban takes into place, seems to be the right thing to do.”
On fentanyl
“The severity of the drug crisis that we’re seeing on our streets is really intense. It’s something that we haven’t seen. I mean, I was in Portland when we had the heroin epidemic. So we went through the opioid epidemic but we’re in something different right now with fentanyl and even with the types of meth that we’re seeing right now. One of the things that we’ve done is in partnership with the City. We allocated money towards Unity to have nine additional sobering beds that are coming online in early 2024 ...So when we have people who are in crisis who need a place to go, we want to make sure that there is an option for them. I think our hospital emergency departments have done a great job of stepping up and filling that gap now. But we know that it’s needed there. So that is one of those things.
We’re also moving forward with the Behavioral Health Crisis Network or Beacon, as it’s often called, and looking at how we can actually make investments for the County and the City as well as our healthcare partners, in putting the pieces in place to set up this response network. So we’re gonna be putting out a request for information for folks to say, like, these are the things that we can do right now to build on those pieces.”
On Preschool For All
“We are working closely with our community colleges and funding scholarships and having them do programs to grow the workforce because we know that’s a huge need. And we are investing in facilities. So the bricks and mortar of just building more places to have preschools and being able to expand and provide technical assistance for people so that they’re able to do that. All of these are like really core things. We knew there were challenges when we started Preschool For All, workforce, wages, facilities. And that is why we are looking at how we can continue this work to build on that capacity. We’re actually 20% down in the County in terms of child care providers [from where] we were when we started Preschool For All before the pandemic. So we know we have our work cut out for us as we do this.”