FY 2025 Chair's Proposed Budget

April 25, 2024

Chair Jessica Vega Pederson

Multnomah County Executive Budget Message

This FY 2025 budget is the first one I’ve had the privilege to steward from start to finish – to work on with joy, a commitment to a community-oriented process, and a genuine desire to invest in policies and programs that meet the biggest needs for the most people. It is an offering to our community and a reflection of where we’re coming from, where we are and where we’re going. In delving into this year’s work, I knew we had opportunities to strengthen our connections with each other through this process and make thoughtful and sometimes tough decisions in a year with fewer resources.

The County budget is a blueprint that outlines and articulates priorities for our work, our investments, and our way forward on the issues that concern and challenge us. The County’s budget is a moral document and considered the clearest expression of our priorities. I am the leader of the largest county and manage the third largest budget in Oregon. It is important to me that I am clear about my values and how the decisions reflected here will impact our safety net, services, and community.

This year, I’ve invested in several areas to ensure we’re addressing the biggest challenges our community faces. Multnomah County is responsible for some of the most critical, complicated services to neighbors who are experiencing the worst days of their lives. We provide shelter for people who are homeless, work around the clock to support people during severe weather, and connect with folks in severe mental health or substance abuse crises. We lift our community up with libraries, in-home nursing, and in providing access to joyful, culturally-responsive early-childhood education.

Our region faces hardships and economic challenges, and our revenue projections forecast a budget deficit in Fiscal Year 2025. Like so many cities and counties, we cannot continue all of the County’s current programming and I have asked each department to constrain their General Fund spending by 3% as a result.

I have been clear: departments must keep Multnomah County’s values in mind as they navigate these hard decisions. We must make fiscally sound choices that will help us maintain and grow successful programs that create and advance equity and justice, strengthen the health, safety and stability in the lives of community members and engage the community actively in this work.

The complex challenges we face today demand strong and bold leadership. This $3.96 billion Executive Budget represents hard choices and tough trade-offs designed to continue support for our most critical priorities: Focus and clarity in programs that are foundational to a healthy safety net, a one-county approach across all programs and especially our homelessness response system, addressing the fentanyl crisis with increased and diversified interventions and treatment options, a healthy library system and network of animal services, adjustments to our elections to respond to a changing elections landscape and a strong Multnomah County ready to tackle the tough problems of today and tomorrow.

Our past four budgets featured multimillion-dollar investments in the County’s COVID 19 response and appropriated the federal dollars we received through the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and the 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act. This year, those federal pandemic support dollars are no longer available.

This Executive Budget includes:

A 24% increase in the dollars allocated for housing placements, rental assistance and support services for people experiencing homelessness
$9.5 million in strategies to provide safety on and off the streets • A new investment of $900,000 of Supportive Housing Services (SHS) funding for homelessness response specifically in East County
$29 million dollar deflection and addiction recovery package that includes a $2 million new County General fund dollars to coordinate implementation of HB 4002 in our community
A continued investment of $9.3 million for daily operations at the Behavioral Health Resource Center, including support for the Day Center and Shelter program
$1.4 million in one-time-only dollars for Elections Division to continue to conduct and protect our fair, safe, and free elections
$876,000 in partnership with the City of Portland in one-time-only funding for the District Attorney’s successful retail theft and auto theft task-forces
Full funding for our jails, adult parole and probation and specialty courts
$1.3 million for a Newcomer Support Services Pilot to augment short-term humanitarian transition services for asylum-seekers
A 3.3% General Fund cost of living increase (COLA) for all Health and Human Services contracts to continue increasing the baseline wages needed to do this meaningful work...