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The advisory committee that provides feedback to the Multnomah County chair on the county’s annual budget is, once again, deeply unhappy with the dysfunction surrounding its role.
As WW reported last year, a number of the county’s Community Budget Advisory Committees—volunteer committees that make budget recommendations to individual county departments and to the county as a whole every year—complained that the county had failed for several years to adequately support them, gave them little time to review budgets between when they were proposed and voted on, and were letting the committees wither by neglect.
Last summer, Chair Jessica Vega Pederson promised she’d fix the process and provide adequate county support to the committees. She reaffirmed that promise in a December letter.
But the chair of the Central CBAC said at a Tuesday morning board meeting that the county didn’t follow through on those promises.
“Regrettably, these inconsistencies and compressed timelines persisted into the current fiscal year,” Daniel DeMelo told the board of commissioners on Tuesday morning in a public work session on the budget. “The Central CBAC has encountered significant obstacles in effectively carrying out its mandate.”
County Chair Vega Pederson took responsibility for the failure.
“The letter that went out in December that set up the timeline, it was my expectation of what would be followed,” Vega Pederson said, “and I take responsibility that it wasn’t followed.”
The issue of the CBACs, whose rosters and meetings were dwindling as the county failed to schedule meetings and appoint members, first came to the surface last spring, when WW reported that the Central CBAC, which is supposed to provide feedback on the county’s proposed annual budget and is composed of the chairs of the 10 departmental CBACs, was on pause until the end of the 2022-23 fiscal year. At the time, Vega Pederson said she would re-seat the Central CBAC in time for the 2024 budget process. (In October, the CBAC for the sheriff’s office had dwindled to just one member and had written in its report that the CBAC seemed to be an “insignificant puppet within a barely functioning system.”)
By October, little seems to have improved. Three of the CBACs expressed extreme displeasure in their annual reports last year about the lack of information from the county, which they said made it impossible for them to do meaningful work.
In a Dec. 5 letter, Vega Pederson assured CBAC members that the process would be smoother this fiscal year. “I have directed members of my team and [the Office of Community Involvement] to make this a priority in the coming months,” Vega Pederson wrote, promising “robust and equitable community engagement and increased transparency and communication with the public.” Vega Pederson wrote that county staff would be responsible for sharing departmental budgets with their respective CBACs and be responsible for scheduling CBAC meetings and ensuring the county complies with public meeting law requirements.
This year’s process, DeMelo told the board Tuesday morning, was just as faulty as last year’s. For instance, Vega Pederson promised that the Office of Community Involvement would convene the first meeting of the Central CBAC this year in February. It wasn’t until April that the CBAC first met, DeMelo says.
Vega Pederson said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon that she’s committed to improving the CBAC system by September.
“I am committed to ensuring that we have accountability, transparency, and enough time to complete this important work next year,” she said.