Can you say "fiasco"?

Here's a scathing new audit showing that the "joint homeless office" in Multnomah County is mismanaged, and so chaotic that nobody can tell for sure what, if anything, it's accomplishing. You can only imagine how much is being stolen and wasted.

Among the most damning findings by County Auditor Jennifer McGuirk: The office sometimes pays providers months late; it asks them to work before contracts are in place; it adjusts performance measures if providers cannot meet original goals; and it could not produce simple data on how many people it’s housed—even to the county auditor herself.

McGuirk also reported a remarkably high turnover rate among staff (250 have left in recent years) and wrote that because the office could not furnish her with basic placement stats even after “months of trying”, she “decided we would best serve the public interest by not waiting any longer on data requests” and instead issue two reports. The next report, McGuirk says, will be on “data reliability.”

To me, the most damning fact recited in the audit is that the office does not seem to have a strategic plan. Things are so crazy, they can't even agree on whether they have such a plan or not.

Many staff said that they did have a strategic plan and pointed to documents such as the Local Implementation Plan for the Metro Supportive Housing Services Program, created in 2020, and the A Home for Everyone strategic plan, created in 2013. But not all staff shared this view. For example, one staff person told us in December 2022, that due to changes in the director position, they were unclear about the current strategic vision for the Joint Office. Another employee told us that they did not feel that leadership has communicated a strategic vision to staff and that they were so busy reacting that there was not time to plan. Similarly, a different employee said that they were not sure if there is a strategic plan and that they were just trying to keep their team afloat.

And the bobblehead in charge, county chair Jessica Chevrolet-Vega, doesn't get it. She says the audit confirms that they it's all moving in the right direction.

You get what you vote for, peeps. In this case, someone I wouldn't trust to go to the store and pick me up a quart of milk and a loaf of bread. You were warned.