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GREEN SHOOTS EMERGE IN PORTLAND OFFICE MARKET: Talk to most commercial real estate experts and you’ll hear that downtown Portland is a smoking crater, occupancywise, and that things are only going to get worse as office workers cling to working from home to avoid a downtown reeking of fentanyl. Patricia Raicht, head of research for the Western U.S. at Jones Lang LaSalle, has a contrarian take. Her research shows that another 460,000 square feet of office space in the metro area emptied out in the first quarter, but “the pace of losses is slowing, and demand indicators are improving,” she writes in the Q1 report. Among the green shoots, she says: Daimler Truck asked office employees to come in four days a week, up from two. As a result, Daimler plans to reoccupy 107,000 square feet of space in Montgomery Park rather than sublease it, Raicht says. Other companies, including Deloitte, Umpqua Bank and Smarsh, have agreed to take space after giving it up during the pandemic, she says. “If everyone comes in just on Wednesday, you still need a place for everyone to sit,” Raicht tells WW. “I think people want to be in the office more.” Another upbeat statistic for the greater Stumptown area: While urban vacancy is tied with Phoenix for fourth-highest in the nation, at 28.7%, according to JLL, suburban vacancy is the second-lowest, at 13%. Only the San Diego ‘burbs are performing better.
NURSE ACCUSED OF NEGLIGENCE IN JAIL DEATH DREW SIMILAR ALLEGATION BEFORE: On April 5, lawyers representing the estate of Jason Forrest, who died in a Multnomah County jail in 2020, filed a legal brief outlining an extraordinary claim: The nurse responsible for Forrest’s death had been hired over the objections of a previous boss. The nurse, Camille Valberg, had been accused of making similar errors that resulted in the death of another inmate three years earlier, that time in Clackamas County. The lawsuit on Forrest’s behalf was filed in 2020, but Valberg wasn’t named in it at the time. She was added as a defendant the following year. Since then, the county has released hundreds of pages of documents in discovery to attorneys representing Forrest’s estate, and those attorneys published a large portion of the trove April 5 in an effort to convince a federal judge to turn down the county’s request to throw the suit out. Valberg and the county say she did nothing wrong. Valberg says she thought Forrest was suffering an asthma attack and had no way of knowing he was actually dying of an overdose, despite extensive notes in his medical record that he was a heavy drug user. She did not respond to a request for comment. The county declined to comment. So did Mike Reese, who is also named in the lawsuit and was sheriff at the time. (He now runs the state’s prisons.) When asked about the county’s hiring of Valberg in a disposition, he said, “I have no idea why they would make that decision,” according to the April 5 brief.
SCHMIDT FACES BAR COMPLAINT AS ELECTION NEARS: Chuck French, a retired longtime Multnomah County prosecutor, filed a bar complaint April 3 against District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who is running for reelection in May. In his complaint, French alleges Schmidt violated Oregon State Bar rules that prohibit “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation” in his handling of clemency applications for two people convicted of aggravated murder in cases French prosecuted. In both clemency proceedings, French alleges, Schmidt “made egregious misrepresentations to the governor regarding the facts of the criminal cases and the subsequent behavior of the offenders while serving their sentences in prison.” Based on the information Schmidt’s office provided, Gov. Kate Brown commuted the sentences of both inmates, Danielle Cox and Theron Hall. Cox became eligible for parole on an earlier date; Hall became eligible for the first time. Both remain in prison. The Oregonian has reported aspects of both commutations, but French’s bar complaint has not been previously reported. Schmidt campaign manager Andrew Rogers blames Schmidt’s opponent for the complaint. “Nathan Vasquez, who can’t articulate a single meaningful platform point beyond ‘I don’t like my boss,’ continues to rely on his small group of friends to manufacture controversies in a desperate attempt to discredit Mike,” Rogers says. “Vasquez’s team is desperate because they know crime is coming down after a spike during the pandemic—and because nobody knows who Vasquez is, and once they do, they don’t like him. I’m sure we’ll see more theater like this in the next six weeks.”
GRAFFITI REMOVAL AWAITS GOVERNOR’S TAG: The Oregon Department of Transportation has picked a contractor to paint over graffiti along state and federal highways, using $4 million allocated by the Legislature in the session that ended March 7. But the winner, Portland Graffiti Removal LLC, can’t get started because Gov. Tina Kotek, who pushed for the funding as part of her plan to revive Portland, hasn’t signed the bill. At a meeting for interested bidders March 13, ODOT distributed an agenda saying the work “shall begin no later than April 1, 2024, and the required contract completion date will be June 30, 2025.” Kotek spokeswoman Elisabeth Shepard says the date on the agenda was incorrect and the governor has until April 17 to sign the bill. Robert Barrie, owner of Portland Graffiti Removal, says he’s ready to start covering tags in “ODOT gray” paint, the agency’s preferred fix. Barrie says he got a smaller contract from the department in February 2022 and rolled trucks until April of last year, when ODOT ran out of money for graffiti. “That’s why the freeways look the way they do,” Barrie says. This job is much bigger, but Barrie says he’s got four trucks sitting idle since the cash crunch that he will put back in service. He plans to hire new employees as well. “I’ve got family members who want to get weekend work,” he says. “We’ll have all this backlog stuff done in two and a half months, maybe three.”
(Correction: JLL corrected their quarterly report to show that Smarsh, not Navex, has committed to taking more office space.)