Multnomah County won’t renew its contract with Rockwood Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit based in Gresham, according to reporting by Willamette Week. The county stated it had stopped funding the homeless service provider after the organization double-counted costs and charged for rooms that were closed for repairs, according to Willamette Week. Rockwood CDC disputed the allegations and stated Multnomah County owed it $1.1 million in overdue payments. Anthony Effinger is a Willamette Week reporter. He’s been covering the issue and joins us with details.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with a tangled story about one of the largest family shelter providers in Oregon’s largest county. As reported by Willamette Week, Multnomah County is not going to renew its contract with Rockwood Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit based in Gresham. The county says it stopped funding the homeless service provider after the organization double-counted costs and charged for rooms that were closed for repairs. Rockwood CDC disputes these allegations and says that the county owes it over a million dollars in overdue payments.
Anthony Effinger is a Willamette Week reporter. He’s been covering this story and he joins us now with the details. Great to have you back and good to have you in the studio.
Anthony Effinger: Thank you.
Miller: So this story first came on your radar when Multnomah County sent out a press release saying they were going to break ties with one of the biggest emergency shelter contractors they had, especially for families. What were the allegations in that release?
Effinger: Right. So it wasn’t quite a press release. It was more a, hey, here’s a letter. Here are our findings about this organization. And I think they sent it to a few reporters, which was unusual because Multnomah County tends to play it kind of close to the vest with their contractors. So this was surprising to me, but what this letter said was we have a shelter provider that has been housing families for Multnomah County, and that shelter has been billing us for empty rooms, billing us for excessive costs and some of their accounting just doesn’t add up. And they said we’re breaking ties and that was the point of it.
Miller: You ended up hearing a very different story from Brad Ketch, who runs this group, this nonprofit. What did he tell you?
Effinger: So I went out there. I did this one, the first story about Multnomah County breaking off ties. Then I went out to Rockwood CDC, and I met with Brad and a couple of his staff. I found him to be very open, accommodating and seemed to answer every question we had, which made the thing even more confusing, the story more confusing. He says the county owed them money, they had changed the terms of their agreement and made it almost impossible to fulfill, and had stopped paying. And he says it was them, it was Rockwood that cut ties.
Miller: After that, you started digging deeper into this story and into Brad Ketch’s work and life. Can you first tell us a little bit about his background?
Effinger: Yeah, he’s an interesting guy, especially for somebody who’s working in social services. He has a business degree from Northwestern and he was a tech executive for a long time in the early days of the internet. He did a lot on connectivity when the internet was not the internet, and it was just becoming that. And he started a small company that was going to speed the transmission of data over copper wire, which was a big deal back then, because you could get more life out of the system that we had and buy yourself more time to build a more robust internet.
This company sold a lot of shares. There were hundreds of millions of shares out. It was a penny stock. It wasn’t listed on any markets. It was a pink sheet traded company and those can be ripe for fraud. He was never accused of any, but the stock, the company never made money, never sold a product. Nonetheless, the founders of the company and a lot of the shareholders were selling shares, which if you’re trying to raise money for a company, why would you sell your own shares? So that’s kind of a red flag.
So he did that. And then by his own admission, that blew up in 2008, when lots of things did, and he had to switch gears. He went abroad and worked for a relief organization abroad for about 11 months and then he came back to Rockwood, where he’s from, and decided to be the be-all-end-all in social services for this community – which desperately needs them.
Miller: What did you hear from people who worked for or with Brad Ketch at that time?
Effinger: After doing that second story about he said/she said, the county versus Rockwood, I got a lot of email, phone calls and even a manila packet full of documents – old school – in the mail, that indicated that other people had had issues with Brad Ketch in the past, including the Rockwood Redevelopment Corporation. His board chair complained in email that he was slow to provide financial statements to your board chair, so that was odd. She actually quit very abruptly, after trying to get these statements, which, that’s a red flag. So it wasn’t his kind of first rodeo in this dispute with a government institution.
Miller: A lot of those stories that you were just talking about there – the dispute with the board chair, not providing proof of being a nonprofit, which resulted in one of their partners losing out on a big chunk of federal reimbursement – those took place in 2016 and 2017, so four or five years before Rockwood CDC took over a repurposed Best Western and turned it into a shelter. This is part of the Project Turnkey state program that we’ve talked about a fair amount about over the years. How much oversight was there in that process, in the state money going to Brad Ketch’s nonprofit to do this?
Effinger: That’s the question I’m trying to figure out right now. Project Turnkey, as you may know – I was not very familiar with it when I started this – was a pandemic wildfire emergency program to house people who were displaced by the pandemic by wildfires around the state. [There was] $125 million in state funds to buy hotels, which at the time were selling at bargain basement prices, because there was nobody staying in them. The state saw an opportunity to house people at a good price.
So they hired the Oregon Community Foundation, or engaged the Oregon Community Foundation, to do the due diligence on the people who would buy these hotels and then operate them as shelters. So the Oregon Community Foundation is a nonprofit, it’s not the state. They did the original due diligence. They had a committee, they had a couple of real estate experts. I think they said they had people who had experienced homelessness. They tried to cover all their bases. They did the original awards of money, then turned over oversight of these hotels to the Department of Administrative Services.
Miller: Sort of like the general administrator for state stuff at the state level.
Effinger: Right. I don’t know what that means yet. I’ve asked DAS for those records. I’d like to see what oversight looks like. The problem I’m having right now is neither OCF nor DAS say they can release the application that Rockwood put in, which I’d really like to see.
Miller: To cut through a lot of this stuff, as you said this is a kind of “he said/they said” story, with Brad Ketch and Rockwood CDC saying one thing [and] the county saying no, you’re the ones who are not doing what you said. How do you think about this, just as a reporter, these two sides?
Effinger: It’s been a challenge. I think the first story that was talked about, the county’s allegations … We of course called Brad and Rockwood for comment, and they gave us comments. Then we revisited it because we found that his side of the story was so compelling. I went out there, I met with him, as I said. And we wrote sort of a he said/she said, here’s what’s going on. The upshot being that 40 families who had recently been housed in shelter are now out of shelter, which is really the story here. And I’ve heard from a number of those families who are just distraught. I mean, it’s messed up their commutes, their children aren’t sleeping. It’s just another disruption for families who have known way too many.
So we did that story, he said/she said, and then I started getting all of these people coming forward saying, “Hey, I’ve dealt with Brad Ketch, I’ve dealt with Rockwood CDC and here’s my experience.” I thought that was interesting. And if past is really prologue, then maybe there’s something here. So I felt it was on us to report that, especially since Brad Ketch used his track record to get $6.8 million in state money to buy a hotel and build a shelter.
Miller: In the bigger picture here, is Multnomah County taking a harder look at oversight of its contractors in general, or does this seem to you to be a kind of one-off?
Effinger: That’s the question right now. For years, Multnomah County has been criticized for not taking a hard enough line, as you probably know, with a lot of their contractors. They are basically a pass-through agency that they contract out for everything and there’s a lot of contractors.
Miller: Well, they’ve been faulted in two different ways, in ways that are almost in opposition – one, being too slow to get the money out the door as well and then, in some cases, wait, but where’s the oversight? So people have complaints that arguably go in exactly opposite directions.
Effinger: Precisely. And I actually feel for the county on that because they did get criticized for not pushing the money out fast enough, then they pushed it out and people are like, “well, did you do the oversight?” I mean, look, they have a very hard job – I always say that to them. I couldn’t do it. But yeah, it’s going to be interesting going forward because I think they are responding a little bit to that criticism. I think that’s the reason they went public with this, is I think they wanted to say, “Hey, look, we found this and we’re doing something about it.”
Miller: Anthony, thanks very much.
Effinger: Thank you.
Miller: Anthony Effinger is a reporter for Willamette Week.
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