Faced with Multnomah County’s largest funding gap in more than a decade, Chair Jessica Vega Pederson today proposed a $4 billion balanced budget that makes difficult tradeoffs to prioritize direct services to those who rely on the County most. This includes a focus on services for children, families and people who need shelter, rent assistance, substance abuse and mental health services.
In a 23-page letter released with the Chair’s Executive Budget, Chair Vega Pederson laid out her decisions to prioritize County programs with the greatest impact. That includes programs serving community members most impacted by racial, ethnic and economic disparities. It also includes programs to prevent and address homelessness, improve health and public safety outcomes, and strengthen community resilience.
“Under my leadership, our community can trust that the County will focus on helping people who face the most challenges, as well as preserving the most direct and impactful ways we can serve them,” Chair Vega Pederson said. “My budget ensures no shelter bed is lost and no health clinic closed. Still, it is not possible to make cuts to this degree and not have it affect the services we provide.”
The Chair’s budget protects community safety through investments of $142.5 million, with no reductions for the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office. It funds initiatives to tackle the fentanyl and substance use crisis and maintains programs to reduce violence.
It includes the strategic rebuilding of animal services and invests in the security and success of future elections through support of the Elections Division, which conducted the most complex election in County history last year with the introduction of ranked-choice voting.
Working with departments, the Chair prioritized administrative reductions to preserve direct services to the community, streamline their delivery, and make programs more efficient. Overall, her budget would eliminate 102 full-time positions, largely starting with those already vacant.
The Chair’s budget, for the fiscal year that begins July 1, 2025, reflects the County’s commitment to upholding its values during troubled times.
Three years after the state reopened after COVID-19, job recovery and population growth in Multnomah County remains stalled. A rise in downtown Portland office vacancies means the County is receiving lower-than-expected property tax revenues — among the main sources of revenue for the County’s general fund. At the same time, personnel costs — the County’s biggest expense — are higher due to inflation, rising cost of living needs, and public employee retirements.
That combination of factors led to a $15.5 million shortfall in the County’s General Fund as the Chair began her final proposal. The $897 million General Fund is the largest pool of resources that the Chair and Board have decision-making power over. Additionally, because of falling revenues from Metro’s Supportive Housing Services tax, the County’s Homeless Services Department faced its own significant spending gap.
Overall, the County’s total operating budget (including the general fund, federal funds, and other state and local revenues) is down $77.3 million this year.
Homeless Services
The Homeless Services Department, formerly the Joint Office of Homeless Services, is facing unprecedented reductions in the face of lower than anticipated revenue from Supportive Housing Services funds, of nearly $60 million in program reductions.
The Chair’s budget calls for significant general fund investments to make up some of those gaps, including funding for the County’s system of 24-hour shelters; programs to help people move out of shelter beds or off sidewalks and back into housing; rental assistance to help people avoid falling into homelessness in the first place; and $10 million to continue providing dollars to support the City of Portland’s shelter programs, including Safe Rest Villages and Temporary Alternative Shelter Sites (TASS).
But even as it preserves or expands some of these safety-net investments, the Chair’s budget includes a 22% reduction overall for the Homeless Services Department. Those reductions include $1.2 million to employment programs, and reallocated funding from proposed construction plans, administrative costs, and some shelter expansion plans.
In addition, to help fill the gap in Supportive Housing Services funds, the Department would reduce its normally required allocations to reserves and contingencies by $29.4 million.
Community Safety
Through a $142.5 million investment, the Chair’s budget maintains current staffing levels to operate 1,130 beds in the County’s two jails and allows the Sheriff’s Office to meet new requirements following the revision of Measure 110 and an order from the County’s Presiding Judge to keep beds open. It also sustains human resources staff to address deputy shortages. Due to the uncertainty from the changes in Measure 110 and the Presiding Judge’s order, Chair Vega Pederson added $1.2 million in contingency funds should additional jail capacity be required.
Other public safety investments support specialty courts, homicide investigations, youth violence prevention programs, and services for crime victims and survivors as well as people who complete their sentences and are leaving custody to possible homelessness.
The budget stabilizes the District Attorney’s Office staff, providing $2.3 million in ongoing funding for 11 prosecutor positions that previously received temporary, one-time funding. The budget also adds $2.5 million to preserve neighborhood-based prosecutors.
The budget reduces staff at the Department of Community Justice by 12 positions, in part because the department’s contract for youth beds with Washington County ended. The budget also reallocated funding in business services to add client assistance for victims and survivor services.
Mental Health and Substance Use
The Chair’s budget continues funding for downtown Portland’s Behavioral Health Resource Center, which provides a day center, shelter beds and transitional housing serving people with mental health issues who are homeless or in transition.
The budget also supports planning work for the community’s long-awaited 24/7 drop-off sobering and crisis stabilization center. In addition, it funds overdose prevention, behavioral health services for youth and adults in custody, and the County’s comprehensive crisis services that include funding mobile crisis intervention and funding for an urgent walk-in clinic. The budget invests a reduced amount of funds in school-based mental health services, with an emphasis on redesigning services to improve access for students with the most needs and identifying a sustainable funding model.
Youth, Families and Seniors
The SUN Community Schools program — which provides services for more than 18,000 children and youth across six school districts — has undergone a two-year process to improve wages and program quality.
The Chair’s budget funds one-time-only investments for family resource navigators to conduct case management at schools. Best practices from the Successful Families program were also integrated into SUN. These enhancements ensure this program is more robust and responsive to the needs of the diverse communities who are served by this important work. The budget also allocates $32.7 million for programs serving children and families at risk of homelessness and a one-time-only investment in additional emergency rent assistance.
Drawing from the County’s dedicated Preschool for All tax revenues, the Chair’s budget funds preschool seats for 3,800 children starting in fall 2025. This includes support for new facilities and childcare providers, keeping the County on track to achieve universal free preschool for families in Multnomah County by 2030.
The Department of County Human Services’ general fund budget, however, was reduced by $3.75 million and 14 positions overall. Reductions affected the department’s administration, Youth and Family Services Division, and Aging, Disability and Veterans Services Division, and also involved reallocating funds from the Successful Families program into the SUN system.
Clinics, Public Health and Environmental Health
The County will continue to operate Oregon’s largest Federally Qualified Health Center, providing more than 50,000 patients a year with primary care, dental care and pharmacy services at 18 health clinics.
The Chair preserved the County’s Sexually Transmitted Infections Clinic for community testing, prevention and sexual health services for people with STIs and HIV. She maintained spending for work to prevent communicable diseases; and programs that support infants, children and parents, including home-visiting programs like Healthy Birth Initiatives, which provides intensive, culturally specific home-visiting, employment and education services to pregnant Black and African American women and their families before and after birth.
Reductions are in the Health Department’s Director’s office and budget for administration, human resources and business services. Nurse Family Partnership, eliminated in this proposed budget, was funded in FY 2025 with the understanding that home-visiting would be redesigned within the department to better serve clients.
Learn more, get involved
Chair Vega Pederson has been meeting with community members throughout the budget development. She hosted a budget town hall in February and conducted a survey that drew more than 4,000 responses, with results available at an online dashboard.
The budget is also the most accessible budget the County has ever released, with dashboards online allowing the public to follow the stages of the budget, potential reductions and new program requests, as well as real-time budget monitoring of the current year FY 2025 budget.
Today’s Executive Budget release also kicks off seven weeks of public work sessions with the Board of County Commissioners and County staff. The Board will also host three public hearings for members of the community to comment on the County’s operating and capital budgets.
- Wednesday, May 14, 6 to 8 p.m., Multnomah Building Boardroom, 501 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd., in Portland
- Wednesday, May 21, 6 to 8 p.m., East Multnomah Building, 600 N.E. 8th St., #300, in Gresham.
- Wednesday, May 28 6 to 8 p.m. Virtual-only. Find more information about the public hearings Multnomah County Budget Office.
You can sign up to testify or leave a comment on the Chair’s Budget page.
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