State Seeks Accountability from Hless Svces Providers

By Sarah Owens and Michael Livingston

Before 2016, the state allocation toward statewide homeless housing and services was a mere $5M per biennium.  Most of it was spent on motel vouchers.

Then, in 2016, the Oregon State Legislature allocated an additional $15M, for a total of $20M over the 2015-2017 biennium.

In 2017, they allocated another $20M, for a total of $40M over the 2017-2019 biennium.  They also established a program to provide homeless Oregonians replacement birth certificates without charge.

In 2018, after public outcry over the sheltering system during the winter of 2017-2018 left lawmakers wondering what the heck all those millions had been spent on, they directed the Housing Stability Council (HSC) to figure out how to prioritize the funding to ensure funds are spent "as efficiently and effectively as possible."  (Ensuring funds are spent "as efficiently and effectively as possible is the HSC's job per ORS 458.525.)  They also allocated another $5M, to go to specific areas.  See here at 31-32.

The lawmakers' directiive to OHCS to get the state's homeless assistance act together came in the form of what's known as a "Budget Note."

The Housing Stability Council, in alignment with preliminary findings from the Statewide Housing Plan, shall make recommendations to the Director of Oregon Housing and Community Services [OHCS] about how to prioritize funding for the Emergency Housing Account and the State Homeless Assistance Program to ensure that funds are being spent as efficiently and effectively as possible.

At a minimum, the Council shall consider how the use of funding incentivizes regionally and nationally recognized best practices, and outcome oriented strategies, to create a more effective system to prevent and reduce homelessness.

The Director shall present recommendations to the Legislature by February 28, 2019.

(Emphasis added.)  Clearly, the legislature doesn't think OHCS has been doing its job, and we agree.  However, as discussed in "Is Your State Hless Assist Plan Working?  How Can You Tell?", the problem lies not just with OHCS, but with Oregon's private community action agencies and their lobby/trade association, Community Action Partnership of Oregon (CAPO).  As the Governor's Housing Policy Advisor told us a year ago:

We know the system [in Oregon that disburses state and federal funds through community action agencies] is broken, but given a choice between fixing the system, and pushing the money out, now, through a broken system, Speaker Kotek and the [OHCS] Director [Margaret Salazar] felt very strongly that they needed to get the money out there now.  

See "State to Sink More Hless Assist $$ in MWVCAA Bldg."  In that context, the Budget Note can be seen to represent a legislative compromise that, in return for all those millions, OHCS would work to repair the broken system.  The problem is, the system's not "broken" so much as it's never been built.

And now, finally, after years of neglect, the legislature expects OHCS to do something about it? 
 
OHCS completed an 'historic' Statewide Housing Plan in January.  See "State Issues 'Historic' Housing Plan." In February, staff presented a memo on the Budget Note work, and an outline of the report to the Legislature, to the HSC at its February meeting.  See Memo re HB 5201 Budget Note (HCS Meeting Materials at page 27).   

The "best practices" recommendation is to take a Housing First approach, to maximize "coordinated entry" participation, to support access to low-barrier shelters, to incorporate lived experience in service delivery and to act intentionally to reduce racial disparities.  The "outcome oriented strategies" recommendation is to adopt the "EPIC Card approach" for prioritizing outcomes and tracking performance.

The recommendations are standard best practice across the U.S., Canada and U.K, but not in most of Oregon, including Salem, which continues to cling to Reaganesque, 1980s-era paradigms of homelessness and generally prefers to let religious institutions take care of "the indigent" while they focus on prevention.  But as far as OHCS being a change agent, heralding a new era of accountability in homeless services delivery?  One need go no farther than this sentence from the EPIC Card: "No action will be taken on the successes or challenges of these Outcomes and Performance Measures during this time [the 2019-2021 biennium]." 

One hardly need point out that OHCS is part of the problem.  Locally, OHCS colluded with the Mid Willamette Valley Community Action Agency (MWVCAA) to cover up OHCS's initial mismanagement of the Golden ARCHES Project, and, since then, OHSC has allowed MWVCAA to spend hundreds of thousands more homeless assistance funds on renovations and what amounts to debt service through a dubious accounting scheme.  See, "The Golden ARCHES Project", Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, "State to Sink More Hless Assist $$ in MWVCAA Bldg", "MWVCAA Bldg Sucks Up More Gov't $$", and "MWVCAA Pays Mortgage Debt with Hless Assist $$." 

Clearly, if the legislature is relying on OHCS to "ensure that funds are being spent as efficiently and effectively as possible", they are leaning on a weak reed.  OHCS can't even manage to follow its own rules and regulations.  (See the above links.)

If the legislature wanted to do one simple thing to promote Oregon's policy on homelessness, it would require OHCS to make public what funds are going to which community action agencies for which programs, how the money was spent and leveraged, what the return on investment was and what kind of outcomes resulted.  The relevant data is being collected and shared -- just not with the public.

Public officials are very fond of saying that homelessness is a community problem.  If that's true, then  they should treat the community as an equal partner by sharing all relevant and available information.

3/3/19 Update:  View the final HB 5201 Budget Note report here.
1/3/20 Update:  View a status report on the HB 5201 Budget Note here.