Void for Vega-ness
It gets worse and worse in Portland every day. Now the governor has clawed back from the Multnomah County government $2.6 million in state funding that was supposed to go toward cleaning up the humanitarian disaster on our streets. Why? Because the county is so unspeakably mismanaged that it has no plan to address the situation and still can't manage to implement enough meaningful programs after several years of grappling with it.
In March, Kotek signed a $200 million funding package, called the Emergency Homelessness Response, that she said would help move 1,200 Oregonians without shelter into housing and create 600 new shelter beds by January 10, 2024. Nearly $80 million of those dollars were distributed across the states’ most populous counties in April, with the largest portion, $18.2 million, going directly to Multnomah County.
Kotek has decided to take back $2.6 million of those funds and redistribute them to six other counties....
Kotek first aired concerns with how Multnomah County and Portland officials were planning on spending state dollars on homelessness in April. She expressed frustration with the vagueness of the city and county’s plan, and pressed for details....
Think of what could have been done with that money. It could have gone toward shelter beds, mental health treatment, addiction treatment, law enforcement. Instead it's going to other counties, who know what they're doing.
Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said this funding cut will “not at all” impact the county’s response to homelessness.
“The Governor and I both recognize that Multnomah County has more resources than other parts of the state,” Vega Pederson told OPB. “Our investments and goals – and the impacts they will have on our Homelessness Response System and our ability to allocate targeted resources to this crisis – will not change.”
If you voted for Chevy Vega for county chair last time around, stand up and give yourself a good, swift, well-deserved kick in the tuchis. And next time, listen to common sense.
sounds like she is happy to return the money and get the State off her back.
ReplyDeleteYou mean our homeless income tax rate could have been lower because the state was willing to chip in? The moron Vega doesn’t even see that what she’s saying is that, thanks to the high tax rate, we can just turn away state money. She has no clue about what the enormous tax burden in her county is actually doing to the economic viability of Multnomah.
ReplyDeleteWe won't miss $2.6 million. But we need a scorched-earth audit of the Bybee Lakes Hope Center before we fund them for $1.5 million.
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