News from the Continuum

Revised: January 2019

By Sarah Owens and Michael Livingston

Weiner Tapped to Replace Boes as MWVCAA Vice Chair

A lawyer has been tapped to replace all around nice guy Herm Boes as Vice Chair on the Mid Willamette Valley Community Action Agency (MWVCAA) Board of Directors. 

Weiner, a person with lived experience who's also chair of the Marion County Association of Defenders and has served part-time as a municipal court judge, was on the MWVCAA Board all of last year and, in that capacity, approved, without recorded comment or concern, every aspect of The Golden ARCHES Project that was put before him.  So, it's doubtful he will be providing MWVCAA Executive Director Jon Reeves the meaningful advice and oversight he so desperately needs, which is unfortunate, because Weiner has been chosen to lead the board in evaluating Reeves' performance this past year.  Last year, Chair Jeff Wood used an employee survey for that.

Reeves has been MWVCAA's executive director for almost 3 years, having succeeded Teresa Cox, who'd headed the agency for about 15 years when she finally stepped down.  She came out of retirement for a while to direct Women at the Well's Grace House. 

In the past 10 years, MWVCAA has had almost as many CFOs, and its annual audit continues to reveal material weaknesses such as lack of internal controls and processes to ensure accurate data is being reported and staff inexperienced in grant accounting.  And, it's a well-known secret that Reeves knows he is out of his depth as an executive director and is unhappy in the job.  What's not known is, given that awareness, why he doesn't just resign and go back to working with young children, which is what he knows.  (MWVCAA's CFO resigned in January 2018, followed in June by Reeves, who took a job in the state's in the Early Learning Division.  Reeves's deputy Cyndi Leinassar resigned shortly after Reeves.) 

In addition to his duties on the MWVCAA Board of Directors and the MCAD, Weiner is seeking election to replace the formerly honorable Vance Day on the Marion County Circuit Court Bench this May.  (Weiner came in third, with about 21% of the vote.)

MWVCAA opened another overnight warming shelter last week, Sunday through Wednesday nights.  First they announced it would be at ARCHES, but the venue was quickly switched to First Congregational Church (two nights), then to the First Christian Church's Morgan Building.  MWVCAA asked for experienced/trained volunteers, about 10 per shift, and got about 7 per shift, according to the sign up sheet.  (There were ten total warming shelter nights during the 2017-2018 season in three locations (First Christian, First Congregational and First Presbyterian), with an average of 76 guests per night.  See here at page 40.)  

The Oregon Community Foundation recently gave MWVCAA $7,000 to support the overnight warming shelters, which MWVCAA says they will use to purchase replacement blankets and mats.

Councilor Kaser updates CANDO at the February 20 meeting

In a divided vote, CANDO failed to pass a motion to oppose allowing UGM's CUP to relocate and expand the Men's Mission.  Even though the hearing officer had issued a decision allowing the permit with additional conditions, the consensus was that the decision was likely to be appealed to the City Council, and perhaps from there to LUBA, so the Chair felt the motion should go to the board for consideration.  You might think it strange that the board waited so far into the process (which has, after all, taken years), but really, it's not unusual for land use issues to heat up as they move into the conditional-use permitting process.  It seems almost not to matter how many conversations an owner/developer has with the neighborhood beforehand, or over what period of time.  Is that because neighbors aren't paying attention to those conversations?  Or is it that the owner/developers tend to avoid talking about potentially thorny issues that they've thought about, but maybe the neighbors haven't, so why bring it up?  Or is it because the project doesn't seem "real" until the owner/developer applies for that permit, and the official notices start going out?

The February 15 meeting of the Downtown Advisory Board that Salem Breakfast on Bikes reported on was cancelled.  Among the other budget items slated for consideration at that meeting was $500,000 for "ARCHES/Sobering Center."  Interestingly, that item was dropped from the revised February 22 agenda, perhaps because someone realized that a sobering center isn't really what most people would consider urban renewal?  Well, except maybe the Mayor.  (The "not urban renewal" problem was fixed a few months later.  See "Urban Renewal to the Rescue", 28 November 2018.)

OHCS recently published the EnviroIssues Report on Phase 1 of the outreach to service providers and low-income "recipients" needed to inform OHCS's statewide housing plan.  None of the focus groups was in the mid-Willamette Valley, but the themes the groups developed are pretty much what one would expect in any area, in or outside Oregon. To find out more about the development of the Statewide Housing Plan, start here.

OHCS reports that James LaBar has been selected as Governor Brown's new Housing Policy Advisor, which might be good for our area, as he has been and will continue to be the Mid-Valley Region Coordinator for the Governor's Regional Solutions Office.  Salem City Manager Steve Powers sits on the RSO's Mid-Valley Advisory Committee.  The bad news is that Jackie Winters is the committee's convenor, and perhaps due to her reportedly poor health, they don't appear to be doing very much.  Maybe that's why James has time to advise the Governor on housing?