The Great Multnomah County Tent Wars

When Portland attorney John DiLorenzo sued the city of Portland back in 2022 for ADA violations due to the city allowing tents distributed to the city’s homeless to accumulate on Portland’s sidewalks, the most controversial aspect of the lawsuit was that the lawsuit’s discovery found that Multnomah County was spending roughly $2 million per year on 6000+ tents, 27000+ tarps, and other supplies that were being delivered to the homeless population.

Many were rightfully outraged, especially when considering that the city was paying $4 million per year to a contractor to clean up these same tents and tarps when it came time to remove dangerous or toxic city campsites.

By 2022, the city and its populace were getting more and more weary of viewing the illegal city camps that lined nearly every corner of the city and all of the unsavory aspects that came along with them: drug dealing and use, theft, assaults and other violence, discarded needles, large accumulations of garbage, and the rats and other vermin that generally were attracted by large amounts of waste. Fewer and fewer people, other than the homeless advocacy groups, were finding it acceptable for large scale street camping to be allowed and enabled by our local governments, especially in the example of distributing tents and tarps. Tents were the most obvious and obtrusive example of the city’s failure to deal with the homeless crisis.

Portland’s Joint Office of Homeless Services (JOHS), the organization that receives over ¼ of a billion dollars per year from the city and the county in order to combat homelessness, was at the time, and is currently, keeping a large warehouse in NE Portland that receives, stores, and passes out these homeless supplies for the county. What’s even more interesting is that the funds for these supplies doesn’t come out of the $270 million that JOHS receives, but rather directly from Multnomah County, approved as a portion of their $4 billion county budget.

Even after the uproar that was caused by the ADA lawsuit discovery, the county continued to fund this practice. It has been a large sticking point between the city and the county since then, and one of the main reasons that the city has questioned its financial commitment to JOHS.

Last week, on June 20^th, the city commissioners met with their main discussion being whether they planned to continue to fund their portion of JOHS’s budget (roughly $31 million). The year previously, the city did decide to continue the funding, but it was approved by the tightest of margins by a 3-2 vote, with Commissioners Mapps and Gonzalez being the dissenters. Last week, the discussion again centered around whether the city would continue funding their part of the JOHS budget, and why they should do so.

The main character on the side of the Joint Office was Dan Field, the newly hired executive director of JOHS and Portland Homeless Czar. Field was appointed in April of last year, and there was understandably, some excitement around his hire. Field was hired after the county conducted an exhaustive search for the new director, and with his hire, the county appeared to public as if it had pulled off a coup. They even publicly gushed about it:

Field emerged from that wide-ranging list of applicants in large part due to his extensive experience finding concrete solutions to some of Oregon’s most complex and seemingly intractable problems, through negotiation and a commitment to building new partnerships.

In other words, Field was a dude who “knew what he was doing,” which is unusual in this day and age in Portland politics. I remember speaking to my friend, Richard Cheverton, the brilliant writer from Portland Dissent, who we have featured multiple times on our platforms, about Field. He told me: “Well, that might be the problem. He DOES know what he’s doing.”

Meaning political animals are going to political animal.

Field had spent nearly two decades with Kaiser Permanente, and served as a staffer for former Gov. John Kitzhaber, and as chief of staff for former Mayor Vera Katz when she was the speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives. His list of superlatives heaped on him were extensive in recognizing his accomplishments, and it felt that those “in the know” at the county had conducted an excellent hire after their above mentioned exhaustive search.

The interaction between the commissioners and Field began with questions, posited by Gonzalez, first to the city employees who were obviously tasked with studying the effectiveness of the Homeless Czar and his organization, and then to Field himself. These questions involved the perceived effectiveness of JOHS  in winning the fight against homelessness. The city employees said that it mattered what aspects of homelessness Gonzalez was referring to, and that some of the aspects were working, such as the Safe Rest Villages (SRV’s) and funding individuals who were at risk of becoming homelessness; however, overall, the city felt that there were indeed more homeless than there were last year. In other words, broadly, JOHS was overall failing in their efforts.

When it came time for Field to answer the question, he didn’t answer directly, but rather described a long list of programs that JOHS had planned to try out in the next 12 months, all with lovely new acronyms to boot, including rebranding JOHS as the Homelessness Response System (HRS). Gonzales then preceded to ask Fields whether there should be ramifications if the JOHS or the HRS didn’t meet the goals laid out by the organization and the city, including cancelling the city’s funding of the organization. Field again didn’t answer this directly, but said that for the first time, there would be actual metrics involved in their programs, and that they would be more closely monitoring the effectiveness of the homeless service organizations they had contracted with in order to determine whether they would continue to fund these organizations in the future. Field also noted that these organizations that failed to meet unspecified metrics wouldn’t be “embarrassed” by a public acknowledgement of their failures, which suspiciously sounds like regressing back into the lack of accountability that JOHS has been accused of in the past.

The most notable exchange between Gonzalez and Field occurred at the end of the four hour meeting in which Gonzalez finally brought up the question of the tents and tarps that JOHS was responsible for distributing into the homeless community.

This is where it got weird.

In the exchange, Field claimed that although JOHS was responsible for maintaining a large warehouse for the storage of the tents and tarps and also was responsible for handing out these supplies to organizations who distributed the supplies directly to homeless people, JOHS was not, in fact, responsible for them ending up on the street. When Gonzalez pushed further on this question, telling Field that Portland Fire and Rescue had to make the decision to take tents and tarps off the table as a service provided by Portland Street Response in order to meet the requirements of the ADA lawsuit, Field doubled down on his statement saying, “the Joint Office doesn’t distribute tents, so in one way, we are complying with the (ADA) lawsuit.” He further stated that it’s the organizations who distribute the tents, even though the organizations get them directly from the JOHS.

Yep…Field does, indeed, know what he is doing. The slight-of-hand and political maneuvering created a noticeable pall over the meeting and was reported on extensively in the media of the main stream.

Gonzalez asked Field what the policy was if any, that they had for distributing the supplies, and Field said that there was no policy, just limits on the amounts of tents and tarps an organization could receive. According to Field, there is a limit on the number of times an organization can access the supply center, and a five tent maximum for each time the organization requests the supplies.

In our investigation of supply distribution last year, this is obviously not the case. When we interviewed John DiLorenzo at the time, he provided us the actual rolls for the distribution of supplies which showed the exact number of supplies and who took them on a day to day and month to month basis. In fact, the frequency of times the number of tents distributed to organizations that exceeded five were very common, and at times, the numbers were upwards of 20 tents. Also of note is that oftentimes there was no organization listed under who received the tents and tarps, and just included a single first name with no last name. For example, “Jerry” taking 3 tents on a specified date. One has to wonder what amount of these supplies are going out the door not to protect people from the elements, but rather, to people who wish to sell them for financial gain. Since there is little to no oversight over who is actually getting these supplies, and the fact that there has been almost no auditing of the JOHS, this type of breakage is definitely a concern and a very real possibility.

In an interesting development yesterday, Vega-Pederson said that the county would, at least for the time being, stop the distribution of tents and tarps. It would; however, be naïve to think that this is not just a tactic to put the actual onus on JOHS to be the organization that is directly responsible for these supplies. The supplies still exist in the warehouse by the 1000s. If the county is stopping the practice, that doesn’t mean that JOHS won’t, in secret, take on the full responsibility and use a portion of their already large funding to fund the cost of these supplies themselves.

I’m almost completely sure that in a week, or a month, or in six months, we will hear that this is actually the case. JVP was tired of hearing about it. She has other concerns, such as her new home in the hills.  Now, it’s Field’s turn in the tent war hotseat

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