PORTLAND, Ore. — The county-helmed office that oversees administration of homeless services for much of the Portland metro area has been a source of frustration for internal staff and external homeless service providers alike, according to a report released Wednesday by Multnomah County Auditor Jennifer McGuirk.
While the Joint Office of Homeless Services represents a seven-year agreement between the city of Portland and Multnomah County to pool their resources toward addressing homelessness, it's functionally an arm of the county. Through it, the two local governments fund a web of nonprofits that do the actual work of outreach, shelter operations, providing transitional housing and other services.
But according to McGuirk's audit, homeless service providers described JOHS as a "confusing and chaotic" organization, one that struggled to pay providers in a timely manner and provided incomplete or untimely contracts. Less than half of the providers that the auditor's office surveyed felt that JOHS did a good job communicating policies or goals.
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Many providers had positive things to say about the JOHS staff, but felt that the organization as a whole suffered from disorganization and problems with communication.
The audit also noted a foundational problem of services being placed into different silos, with little communication between them. Those broke down by the population served: adult, youth, family, domestic/sexual violence survivors and veterans.
"One executive director said that because these systems are siloed, the Joint Office was moving further and further from countywide strategies for ending homelessness," the report said.
Of those surveyed, 48% said the office did a "very good or good" job of providing a countywide strategy for homelessness, while 41% said it was "very poor or poor."
Underscoring some of the problems at JOHS, the report detailed a winding and ultimately futile process that auditors went through in an attempt to find out how many people have been successfully placed into housing. In fact, the audit began as an attempt to investigate whether JOHS was reporting accurate numbers on how many housing placements were being made.
"During the course of these interviews, significant concerns about silos, communication, contract management, and strategic planning came up," the report states. "We decided to expand our audit to include these issues."
McGuirk's office said that they decided to publish Wednesday's audit even though they hadn't yet gotten to the bottom of the housing placement numbers. That piece will be dealt with in a forthcoming report.
"Knowing the challenges that homeless service providers have had interacting with the JOHS and getting paid by the JOHS is really important, because we need providers to be able to be successful and provide services that will help people get out of the cycle of homelessness," McGuirk told KGW.
Inside the joint office
Meanwhile, staff within JOHS shared their own frustrations with the system. One worker described the office as a scapegoat for societal ills, tasked with fixing all of them and blamed for failing to address the root causes of homelessness.
"It is not JOHS sole responsibility to end the racial and economic forces that create the conditions of poverty in Multnomah County, and JOHS is often blamed for it anyway," this staff member said. "Adequately responding to our housing crisis will require major shifts in all the systems listed above to actively address the impacts of racism and oppression. This is our collective responsibility.”
Another staff member told auditors that they would not tell people where they worked because of the public criticism that JOHS regularly receives.
The number of staff at JOHS has grown substantially in recent years, from 20 full-time employees in 2020 to 99 in 2023. But between the push to hire more help and a recent history of high turnover at the office, the audit noted that JOHS staff were preoccupied with hiring and onboarding while provider requests languished.
Some of the problems noted in the audit had to do with JOHS staff members' dual roles at the organization. Staffers were expected to be the primary advocates for homeless service providers while also being the ones to hold those providers accountable for meeting measures of performance.
Staffers also had a great deal of latitude to move the goalposts on performance measures when providers failed to meet them, the report said, something they might be motivated to do because of the ambiguity in their mission.
Recommendations
McGuirk's office did provide a list of recommendations to JOHS that the auditors believe could improve how it functions. First and foremost, they suggested that JOHS management schedule regular communication between staff and service providers.
The report also recommended that JOHS process invoices more quickly, allowing large payments to go through while small issues are being reviewed, noting an example of a $300,000 invoice being delayed over a $25 charge. JOHS should also hire contract management specialists to oversee the process, the report said, instead of relying on other county departments.
Other recommendations concerned changes at JOHS to better hold service provers accountable — more clearly defining staff roles for that purpose while also holding providers to clear measures of performance. JOHS management also needs to more clearly communicate its "strategic vision" to both providers and staff, the audit said.
The response
In an August 18 letter responding to the audit report, Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson and Chief Operating Officer Serena Cruz expressed confidence that JOHS was already making progress on some of the issues cited since the audit began in 2022, which they described as a "particularly challenging moment" for the office.
“We are focused on both correcting past mistakes and moving forward with plans to reduce homelessness in Multnomah County,” they said.
Vega Pederson and Cruz highlighted that JOHS is now under new leadership, with plans in place to increase transparency and communications. They said that the county has a new plan to spend unused funding from the Supportive Housing Services Tax through rent and employment assistance, new shelter sites and grants to community organizations.
A recent review at JOHS of invoicing practices found that 80% of invoices from providers were being paid within 10 days after being accepted, "with goals for further improvement." Vega Pederson and Cruz said that the agency now has its own contract management specialists.
McGuirk said she was pleased that county leadership said they agreed with most of her recommendations for improvement.
“Management says they’re going to take them on, so the public can use that information to help hold their government accountable and help us try to have a better system moving forward so hopefully we can gain some traction on reducing homelessness in our area," she said. "The things we’re pointing to are all just good management practices for having a functional system and it should not be that difficult to achieve, frankly.”
It's worth noting, however, that the letter from Vega Pederson and Cruz states that they "do not necessarily agree" with the auditors' recommendation that JOHS staff members be more clearly divided between advocating for service providers and holding them to account. They did say that JOHS was taking steps to ensure that providers meet a set criteria of performance metrics.