On Wednesday, three Portland Commissioners — Mingus Mapps, Rene Gonzalez and Dan Ryan — decided to pull an ordinance they had filed to end the city’s eight-year partnership with Multnomah County to fight homelessness. The decision was made as Portland is poised to elect Keith Wilson, the owner of a trucking company as its next mayor who opposes the city leaving the Joint Office of Homeless Services. The newly elected 12-person city council, along with the new mayor, will get to decide the fate of the intergovernmental agreement with the county in just two months.
In a letter she sent on election day, Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said she was ready to work with Portland’s next mayor and new Multnomah County and Portland city commissioners on “solving the most pressing and challenging issues this community will face in the coming months and years.”
Chair Vega Pederson joins us to talk about how new Portland city leaders might affect the future of the Joint Office of Homeless Services.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson was not on the ballot this year, but there were plenty of races that could be seen as kinds of proxies for her leadership. Two county commission races could have swung the balance of power away from her and the election for mayor could have led the city to pull out of the county-run Joint Office of Homeless Services. None of that happened.
Chair Vega Pederson joins us now to talk about those results and the path forward. Chair Vega Pederson, welcome back to the show.
Jessica Vega Pederson: Hey, good afternoon, Dave. Great to be here.
Miller: It’s great to have you on. And I’m thrilled that we could talk to you right after our first conversation with Keith Wilson, after we learned he was going to be the new mayor. I actually want to start with his central idea for tackling homelessness – this big increase in city-funded congregate emergency night shelters. What do you think of this idea?
Vega Pederson: Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, I have to say publicly, congratulations to Mayor-elect Wilson. I’m really excited to start working for him. He and I have already had different conversations and we’ve been in contact, both since the election but even before that. So I’m really looking forward to the collaboration.
I’ve looked at his plan. I have a high level of understanding. What I think is great is that he is really focused on addressing the fact that we have so many people who are living unsheltered outside. That is not something that any of us wants, for our city, for our county, for the people who are doing that, and really making sure that we are working very directly on addressing that is incredibly important.
I have to say, I’m always very wary when there are politicians who say, like, “I’m going to completely solve this in one year.” I think Mayor Wheeler had said something like that years ago: “I’m going to solve homelessness.” Those things, at first, make me a little skeptical on the surface and I really want to dig in to understand what the plan is. I think Keith has been really good about talking about how he sees that happening. I’m very interested in working with him and making sure he has a good understanding of the work that we have been doing in partnership with the city with the Homelessness Response Action Plan, which was the fundamental part of the Intergovernmental Agreement that we have with the city. There are similar components. One of the core goals of our homeless response action plan is to shelter or house almost 2,700 people by the end of 2025. And I heard your conversation with him. He was saying, in his plan, that about 3,000 is the number that he’s looking for.
So I think there are similar goals. I think there are similar plans. We know that that is a number equivalent to about half of those that are living unsheltered throughout the county. So really making sure that we’re building that capacity. Since 2020, we have been able to open a significant number of new shelters – 17 shelter sites have opened since 2020, including nine of those that are supporting the state of Portland’s TASS sites and Safe Village sites. So we definitely need to expand on that. That is something that is part of the plan. And I think that’s something that we’re going to be able to work closely with Mayor-elect Wilson on as well.
Miller: But I just want to make sure I have clarity on what you think about the basic idea here. The central philosophy, thesis of his run for mayor and his plans as mayor, which is get 25 of these new congregate shelters set up and then give people two options: Go to these shelters or you might face some kind of law enforcement action. Do you think that will be an effective policy to address unsheltered homelessness in Portland?
Vega Pederson: I think that having places for people to go to get them safely off the street is a shared priority that we both have. I want to have a better understanding of the details of his plan of what this looks like and what it costs. I think we do have the same long-term goal. I think that’s a great place that we’re starting from. I think that I want to make sure that we’re getting the most out of every dollar. Part of the component of having the shelters that are night time only is making sure that we’re also having the daytime services that are also a part of the support services. So looking at what the cost is, what those investments are – those are the things that I’m really curious about. But I will say part of our work is to add 1,000 units of shelter, both new and planned units, to increase our capacity.
So like I said, there’s common ground. I think one of the things that is important to me though is, as we’re talking about the things that we need to invest in as a city, a county and a region and a state to address homelessness, it is also about moving people from shelters into permanent housing effectively so that we can create a pathway from the street to shelter, to housing. We need to make sure that we are preventing people from experiencing homelessness in the first place. We are seeing eviction court cases near to 1,000 right now. So prevention and preventing people from experiencing homelessness in the first place has to be part of the solution. And we need to make sure that we’re addressing the disparities around vulnerable populations that we know are experiencing homelessness at higher levels, including People of Color and the LGBTQIA2+ community.
So those are the pieces that are in the Homelessness Response Action Plan that are part of the work that we’re doing, that I want to make sure are continuing to be priorities because that’s truly how we’re gonna have a comprehensive approach and solution to homelessness.
Miller: Do you see the plan that the future mayor is talking about as tied-in to the Joint Office’s work or is that an open question? Would it be separate? I mean, because a couple of times you said that the county [is] already working on things that have some seeming overlap in terms of goals and numbers for this, but now I think I’m even more confused about how the city’s plan would fit into the county’s current plans.
Vega Pederson: I mean, I absolutely think that that is part of the discussions that we’re going to need to have both with the mayor-elect and the incoming city council, right? Because they’re going to have a lot to say about the direction of the city and the things that they want to invest into. So we’re going to have 12 new people. I mean, this is really an incredibly important time, for both the city and the county, and the work that we’re trying to do. So I think that those conversations are really important in figuring out what that looks like and how we can incorporate that plan into action. Those are the conversations and the work that it’s going to be happening in the next weeks and months.
Miller: To turn more squarely to the county – two candidates who are running for seats on the county board, Vadim Mozyrsky and Sam Adams, they are both very outspoken in their criticism of the direction of the county and also of your tenure as the head of the county, as the chair. They both lost and their races weren’t particularly close. Did you see Shannon Singleton and Meghan Moyer’s wins at all as a reflection of voters’ thoughts on your leadership?
Vega Pederson: First of all, I am very excited to be working with both Shannon and Meghan, and I want to congratulate them on their wins. We also have an incoming commissioner from East County who was elected in May, Vince who’s coming on board. And so we have this really incredible opportunity of having new people on this board who are, I think, all very dedicated to the work of the county, to the work of being a safety net provider for addressing some of our most pressing issues.
What I see this election being, is really an reinforcement that our community wants people who are willing to work together, work together smartly, work together collaboratively to be able to create the solutions and to drive forward those solutions that we need, whether we’re talking about homelessness; whether we’re talking about behavioral health issues; whether we’re talking about community safety; whether we’re talking about how we’re investing in serving our seniors, our children and our families. What has happened and what I’ve seen on our board, is that we’re bringing people who have real experience in all of those issues. So we really have people bringing some life experience and expertise on those issues, and people who are committed to working together on this.
Miller: I’m glad you brought up that the fact that there’s a third new member of the county commission. It means that a majority of the Multnomah County Commission are going to be first-time members, which is something that we haven’t talked that much about. There’s been so much focus on the newness of city government that people, I think, have looked less at the fact that three of the five members of the county commission are also going to be new.
I just am imagining a lot of learning curves here for a lot of leaders in Multnomah County, at the city and county levels. What is that going to mean for residents?
Vega Pederson: Yeah. It’s funny, Dave, because there are a lot of parallels between what January 2025 is going to look like and what January 2017 looked like when I came in as a new commissioner to the county. I was the new commissioner who had been elected in May. And there were two other commissioners who were new, Commissioner Stegmann and Commissioner Meieran, who were elected in November. And we were three people on the board and we were starting our terms right when President Trump was elected.
So to me, there are a lot of parallels here, but because I’ve been through that experience, we are already planning on having briefings available to our new members from all of the county departments. We’ve got a board retreat that we’ve got scheduled for December. So I feel like my job as chair is to really support these new commissioners in making sure they’ve got the information and the understanding of the county’s work, its functions, like where the bathrooms are – from A to Z, all the things they need to be successful in their job. And especially, and most importantly, how we’re going to work together as a board and how we’re going to work together as a county board in working with other partners, like the city and the state. I think that’s really important.
I think it’s especially important, too, how we are going to be working together to take whatever might come from our federal government with the second Trump administration. We know there were impacts. We know that Portland was in the crosshairs in a lot of ways on that. And I think that that’s going to be important work as well.
Miller: Jessica Vega Pederson, thanks very much for joining us.
Vega Pederson: Thank you so much, Dave.
Miller: Jessica Vega Pederson is the chair of Multnomah County.
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