2 Democrats call for Oregon to step up its enforcement of housing discrimination laws

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Aerial photography taken Saturday, March 10, 2018, of a neighborhood in SE Portland. Mark Graves/Staff LC- Mark GravesLC- Mark Graves

Oregon Labor Commissioner Val Hoyle and Sen. Shemia Fagan, D-Portland, announced Wednesday they will push to require increased enforcement of fair housing laws throughout the state.

The Senate Bill proposal calls for allocating $299,000 in one-time funds to hire a prosecutor and four staff members for the state Bureau of Labor and Industries to investigate complaints about housing discrimination and educate landlords on fair housing laws, Hoyle said.

The deal would reestablish a partnership between Oregon and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Hoyle said the state labor bureau and federal agency used to work together to investigate cases of reported housing discrimination in Oregon, but haven’t done so since 2015. She said the federal agency no longer sends cases it receives directly to the state labor bureau to do on-the-ground investigations, leaving Oregon residents to go through a “backlogged federal process.”

California, Idaho and Washington are among states where the federal housing agency refers cases it receives to the states, Hoyle said.

They stopped referring the cases in Oregon because of a change in state law advocated by her predecessor Brad Avakian in 2015, Hoyle said. Lawmakers agreed to make it discretionary for the labor bureau to bring formal charges in cases that can’t be settled and to represent tenants if the case goes to court. It previously was mandatory.

If the new proposal becomes law, Hoyle said federal dollars for cases of housing violations will cover 90% of the costs after the state allocates the one-time funds. Hoyle estimated the state’s cost would then drop to around $64,000 for the two-year state budgets beginning in July 2021.

Hoyle and Fagan were prompted to propose the change after a recent survey of Portland’s rental housing market found more than one in four prospective renters were illegally discriminated against because of their race, national origin or source of income.

Nonprofit Fair Housing Council of Oregon tested the conditions renters faced in Portland’s housing market between January 2018 and June 2019 using actors posing as prospective renters. The group conducted 94 tests and found that potential renters received disparate treatment in 26 of the cases.

In public testimony to Oregon Senate and House members in 2015 in support of Senate Bill 380, Oregon BOLI’s then-legislative director Paloma Sparks said giving the bureau more leeway in enforcing housing cases would “better manage taxpayer costs in housing cases while still ensuring strong and fair enforcement.”

Sparks said the mandatory requirement was “quickly becoming unsustainable.”

Costs related to legal representation were an estimated to be $20,000 a month, one case could rack up more than $100,000 in legal costs and sometimes BOLI received no funds from the settlements, Sparks said. Other associated costs related to taking a case to trial could push the price tag to more than $1 million, she said.

“The Bureau has brought forward this bill because there are instances when it is not appropriate for the agency and DOJ to continue to represent individuals who have elected to go to court,” Sparks told the House Business and Labor Committee in June 2015. “The agency needs flexibility in negotiating settlements in these cases.”

The bill passed 41-16 in the House that June and then passed a week later in the Senate 27-1. It was signed by Gov. Kate Brown at the end of the month and went into effect the same day.

The bill also called for the labor bureau to submit a report no later than Feb. 1, 2017 on how complaints were resolved in the two years after the law change compared with the prior two years. And it said the bureau’s issuing of formal charges and representing tenants in court would resume being mandatory on October 1, 2017.

In 2017, both those provisions were delayed: the report would be due no later than Feb. 1, 2021 and the labor bureau’s more stringent enforcement would become mandatory again on October 1, 2021. The 2017 bill said the delay was necessary “for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety.”

Sparks again testified to legislators that the change was necessary to give the labor bureau “flexibility in negotiating settlements in these cases.”

If legislators approve Hoyle and Fagan’s proposal during their short five-week session that begins Feb. 3, more stringent enforcement by the bureau would become mandatory on Jan. 1, 2021, according to a draft copy of the bill.

-- Everton Bailey Jr; ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 | @EvertonBailey

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