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Budget woes at the Joint Office of Homeless Services prompted newly minted Multnomah County Commissioner Shannon Singleton to spend the weekend poring over spending documents to find money from Metro’s homeless services tax that’s going to other county departments.
It was time well spent. Singleton says she found $22 million in the proposed budget for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026, that could be clawed back to JOHS. The figure is larger for the current fiscal year: $36 million.
Combined with $34 million in reserve dollars, the recovered money could cut the deficit at JOHS from $104 million, the figure announced by County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson at a hastily called press conference last month, to $48 million.
“If we’re short dollars for homeless services, we should pull them back to JOHS,” Singleton said in an interview.
Multnomah County broke no rules by sending SHS money to departments beyond the JOHS. Yet the discovery by Singleton is significant because it suggests county leaders haven’t considered a consolidation of SHS funds to bolster the JOHS. It also demonstrates the county’s board of commissioners is no longer showing complete deference to Vega Pederson’s budget.
Elected in November, Singleton has swiftly demonstrated independence on the board, working with fellow Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards on the county’s first-ever set of rules for lobbyists, and now combing the county’s budget for Metro money.
The county’s press office didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment
Metro collects its supportive housing services, or SHS, tax on high marginal incomes and distributes it to the three Metro counties—Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington—as the money comes in. Multnomah County gets the lion’s share at 45.3%.
The funds cover about one-third of the JOHS budget, which totals $421 million in the current fiscal year. Vega Pederson blamed lower SHS tax revenues, and reduced one-time funding from the federal government, for the shortfall.
Among the JOHS-eligible funds in the fiscal 2026 forecast that Singleton found: $12.7 million earmarked for the county Health Department to use for its own shelter and housing projects; $1.9 million for adult addiction services; and $1.9 million for the Behavioral Health Resource Center, the downtown day center and shelter for adults who have mental health or addiction challenges and also live outside.
The Department of Community Justice is slated to get $2.4 million.
“I’m not saying these aren’t good programs, Singleton said, “but they don’t need to be funded by SHS.”
Singleton says she tapped her experience running the JOHS on an interim basis for nine months in 2022 for clues about where to look for SHS money in other departments. The BHRC stood out, Singleton said, because when she ran the JOHS, the facility was fully funded without SHS money.
Singleton aims to use the accounting as a starting point for three reviews of the JOHS, led by Multnomah County commissioners. She wants to examine shelter operations, outreach efforts to people living outside, and administrative costs at JOHS, which is changing its name to the Homeless Services Department on July 1.
“With a renewed focus on our core services, we have a smaller, more manageable gap in our budget,“ Singleton said in a press release about the project. ”We can meet this challenge, but we will have to reform the work of the Homeless Services Department in order to rebuild public trust. SHS dollars are the most precious we have because voters granted us these dollars in order to do a job: address chronic homelessness. Anything we spend on outside of that job is at best a distraction, at worst it’s us not doing what voters sent us here to do.”