Portland’s Old Town district, Nov. 15, 2023. The district has struggled with homelessness, drug addiction, poverty and behavioral health issues. Under the state's formulate, Multnomah County would receive more than $80 million per year in support.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
Two of Oregon’s largest counties are suing the Oregon Health Authority, saying they are being shortchanged tax revenues meant to address the state’s drug and addiction crisis.
With nearly $430 million set to flow in coming years to address addiction, Washington and Clackamas counties argue the courts must weigh in to ensure they and others get their fair share.
The two counties — the second and third-most populous in the state, respectively — filed suit Tuesday in the Oregon Court of Appeals. They are asking the court to invalidate a funding formula for how the state doles out money under 2020’s Ballot Measure 110.
For years that formula has helped dictate how hundreds of millions of tax dollars from sales of legal cannabis are distributed to grant applicants around the state in order to bolster treatment services, help drug users access housing, pay for harm reduction strategies and more.
The formula offers a starting amount to counties based on their size – for instance, counties with more than 375,000 residents get at least $5 million per grant cycle. Then it tacks on more depending on how many people in a county are houseless or receive Medicaid, and how many overdoses and possession-related arrests a county has seen.
The funding formula got a significant change this summer, when an OHA advisory body, the Oversight and Accountability Council, opted to give more money to the smallest counties – ensuring less for large counties like Clackamas and Washington. And the formula has new importance ever since lawmakers recriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs earlier this year.
Alongside that major change, the state asked counties to set up “deflection” programs that help direct drug users away from the criminal justice system and toward treatment. And the state used the same funding formula set up for Measure 110 to decide how much to award counties for deflection programs.
That, it appears, spurred Washington and Clackamas counties to action.
Some officials in the two counties had already complained about being offered meager amounts of state funding to establish complex new deflection systems.
“The breakdown of that money…defies some logic and common sense,” Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton told OPB earlier this year, adding: “We just don’t have enough.”
Now the counties are suing, arguing that the OHA did not follow a legal process to craft the Measure 110 funding formula in the first place.
According to the suit filed Tuesday, the funding formula was not created in accordance with the state’s Administrative Procedures Act. The counties say that the OHA and an advisory body, the Oversight and Accountability Council, failed to provide adequate public notice or an opportunity for them to weigh in on the formula.
That failure, the counties argue, “has denied the Petitioners and others the ability to participate … and have its concerns about inequities in the grant distribution formula heard and possibly addressed.” Washington and Clackamas counties say they have instead been “relegated” to simply urging officials to change the formula.
OHA declined to comment on the lawsuit.
According to OHA documents, the state expects to have about $427 million to distribute to so-called “behavioral health resource networks” within counties to pay for addiction services in the next four years.
Washington County stands to receive about $29 million of that money, while Clackamas County will get about $22 million. Those awards are far less than the counties would receive if the money was awarded solely on the basis of population size, The Lund Report noted in July.
By contrast, Multnomah County, the state’s most populous, is slated to receive more than $80 million.
The three counties in the Portland metro area have adopted different approaches to working with drug users now that possession is once again a misdemeanor offense.
Multnomah County, for instance, is opening a “deflection center” where police can bring people caught with drugs in order to connect them with available services. Meanwhile, Clackamas County has adopted a more restrictive program that drew scrutiny earlier this year because it routes drug users to the county court system.