OREGON CITY, Ore. — For the first time since 2020, Clackamas County voters will soon determine who will helm the board of county commissioners. Over the last three-plus years, that's been Chair Tootie Smith — and she's running for a second term. But she faces a serious challenger in the May primary from a former Clackamas County Sheriff, Craig Roberts.
The Story's Pat Dooris sat down with both candidates for county chair to talk about what they have to offer. The interview with Roberts aired Tuesday, now it's Smith's turn.
Smith is a fourth generation Oregonian, growing up on a hazelnut farm in south Clackamas County. She and her husband of 46 years now own that farm, and they've started two other businesses together.
In 2000, Smith made her first foray into politics, winning election to the Oregon Legislature. She left state office in 2012 after being elected to the Clackamas County Board of Commissioners, where she served the next four years. Then, in 2020, she won election for board chair.
While it's not precisely pressing, you might be wondering how Tootie Smith got her name. Dooris asked her about it right out of the gate.
"My grandmother gave it to me," Smith said. "So, my mother was adopted. Her mother died (during childbirth) and she was adopted by a German woman who spoke broken English. And so my given name was Charlene, and she literally could not pronounce it. So she nicknamed me 'Töchterchen' or something like that in German. I don't remember the derivative of it. And it just became Tootie and stuck. So Grandma is to blame or to thank, either way."
The challenges since 2020
Smith said she's proud of the work she's done as board chair, putting pressure on lawmakers before the governor's halt on I-205 and I-5 tolling, and ahead of the recently passed law that partially rolled back Measure 110.
"We've had a lot of projects in Clackamas County. It's taken us a while because when I became chair, we walked right into three declared emergencies. We had COVID. We had the firestorms. Then, in February, after I was sworn in, we had the ice storms. So we had to manage our way through.
"The challenge was to bring our employees back to work and get everything functioning again. And then what happened after we got through COVID, the vaccines and the mandates, we saw this huge spike in homelessness that none of us wanted to really acknowledge. Oh gee, it's here. So we implemented some strategies in Clackamas County that I think are working."
According to Smith, the last report on homelessness in Clackamas County saw a 65% decline within the last five years. They went back that far to see whether funds from Metro' Supportive Housing Services tax were working. Smith thinks they are.
"My team likes to say we do things the Clackamas Way, and it's a little bit different than we see across the other parts of the region," she said. "And it's working, and I'm very happy we have such a dedicated staff working on this problem."
Quoting one of the county's managers for homelessness, Vahid Brown, Smith said that Clackamas County has the "secret sauce" — which seems to be a matter of matching outreach efforts to the scale of the problem in the county.
"We have about 20 to 25 dedicated social workers and they go out on the street almost daily and they meet a homeless person," Smith explained. "We start a conversation and you're not going to get them to come in the first time or maybe the second, tenth or twelfth time — but eventually, after establishing a relationship with them, getting them to come in, we start with basic needs like a hot meal, a shower, clean clothes. And then they go back to the memory of, 'Oh, this is how this is how it used to be in life.'"
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Smith said that there isn't going to be a solution to homelessness until the root cause is addressed, but she held back from diagnosing any one cause. She's indicated before that she doesn't think housing availability is the main driver.
"Housing people first without services is going to be very difficult," she said. "A lot of people think they know why people are homeless ... Is it mental health? Is it addiction? Both? Economics, we've certainly seen a spike in the cost of housing and durable goods like groceries and gasoline, and that's probably adding to it. We have a huge rent assistance program. That can be used for people who are renting places and either coming up short at the end of the month, we get them rent assistance so they don't become homeless. And that's been a big, big help to us in Clackamas County."
Courthouse steps
Looming large in this race is the effort to build a new Clackamas County Courthouse, expected to cost at least $313 million. Half of the cost is being covered by the state. The other half will be paid for by county taxpayers. Without a bond or levy to cover that cost — something voters were very clear they would not support — that money will need to come from the existing budget.
A budget battle between county commissioners and current Sheriff Angela Brandenberg has dragged on for nearly a year, something the sheriff has publicly said stems from this courthouse expense. As an elected official in her own right, Brandenberg released a statement last May crying foul about what commissioners were doing to cover the cost.
In reply, Smith issued a statement highly critical of Brandenberg, accusing her of lying to county employees and pitting the sheriff's office against the wider public safety program of Clackamas County. Smith did say that the county has "guaranteed (the sheriff) more money should there ever be a shortfall" — but it was the source of that money, according to Brandenberg, that caused this friction in the first place.
Now the courthouse is a key part of the platform that Smith's opponent, former Sheriff Craig Roberts, is running on. He's critical of the plan that Smith and her colleagues approved. But Smith doesn't see a problem — at least not a big one.
"What we've done in Clackamas County is we really right-sized our budget. Show me a government that doesn't waste money, and I'll show you a government that doesn't exist. So what we did ... we hired a budget manager and a new finance director along with our county administrator. And we started looking at each different department."
Smith said she spent four years on the Ways and Means Committee in the Oregon Legislature, which is the group that does the nitty gritty work of drawing up the state's budget. She didn't like the work at the time, but she appreciates the experience now.
"Now I know why I was in the legislature. It showed me where there was a lot of waste in government," she said. "So we implemented accounting procedures, basic accounting procedures, like develop the chartered accounts for every department, they need to post where the money is going. The year-end, monthly-end reconciliation of the checkbook, they don't get to carry over big wads of cash, and every month they either have to give it back or they have a use for it."
The county also cut positions that weren't occupied, and took hiring duties from department directors.
"We were outdated two decades at least on the allocated cost, that's a cost assigned to every department for the cost of doing business — like your mortgage payment, like your water bill, the cost of your desk, the electric payment and all that cost money, so we were smoothing those out and we found some departments paying and some not," Smith continued. "And it really evened out."
The biggest piece was having the state of Oregon cover half the cost of the new building, which she said is a necessity for Clackamas County.
"It is a constitutional duty that counties have courthouses, and Clackamas County is a statutory county. Our courthouse is very old — that's over 100 years old. It's outgrown its capacity," Smith said. "We should probably have 14 judges. We only have 11 because of limited space. We're able to do that. We have overwhelming support from the legislative fiscal office and the Oregon Justice Department, who took a deep dive into our budget."
Smith acknowledged that construction costs have skyrocketed, but she thinks the board has worked to keep costs down and cut waste in the courthouse project. And, as her opponent Roberts admitted to Dooris in his interview, that ship has sailed — for better or worse, Clackamas County has bought itself a new courthouse.
With another term, Smith said she wants the Oregon Legislature and Metro to go even further in relaxing land use laws in the county, which would allow developers access to more property they can build on for growth.