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MAYOR WILSON PICKS CITY ADMINISTRATOR: Mayor Keith Wilson has chosen Raymond Lee as the next city administrator, Portland’s top bureaucratic post overseeing everyday operations from policing to trash pickup. Lee formerly served as city manager of Greeley, Colo., a city with a population of 116,000. (Portland has 2.2 million residents.) Lee resigned from his position in Greeley in November, a move he made to “explore new opportunities,” the city said at the time. In his Dec. 2 announcement, Wilson cited major projects spearheaded by Lee as the reason for his pick, including an intergovernmental partnership to remake Greeley’s urban core and the launch of a massive entertainment and housing district with “a proposed 10,000-seat arena, resort hotel, water park, and multimodal transit hub representing $1.1 billion in investment.” The City Council must approve Lee’s nomination, which is set for a vote next week. Lee said in a statement he was “humbled” by Wilson’s nomination. “Stepping into this moment for Portland is both a responsibility and a privilege,” Lee said, “and I welcome the opportunity to partner with the mayor and council as we continue building a strong foundation for this new form of government.”
FIRM ACCUSES PPS OF “BIAS” IN LUCRATIVE CONTRACT AWARD: After awarding a lucrative bond program management contract to Texas-based construction firm Procedeo, Portland Public Schools received a formal protest Nov. 24 of its choice from a longtime construction partner, Atlanta-based Turner & Townsend Heery. (TTH has had an office in Lake Oswego for more than 35 years.) The contract, scheduled for a vote by the School Board after press deadline Dec. 2, would pay Procedeo up to about $61 million to manage delivery of three high school modernizations and the Center for Black Student Excellence on time and on budget, and to oversee the district’s Office of School Modernization. In its formal protest, TTH executive VP Robert Chomiak alleged PPS’s evaluators were “biased” because they failed to objectively consider proposals and the interview round was influenced by a Procedeo employee already working for the district and present for interviews—allegations the district wholly denies. Chomiak alleged scoring irregularities and charged that one of the evaluators, an employee inside OSM, is being overseen by a manager, Sarah Norman, who is employed with Procedeo. (The firm was on a temporary contract to oversee OSM before this award.) “To a third party, the impression is that while this evaluator was evaluating Procedeo’s work, Ms. Norman was evaluating his work,” he wrote, calling for a redo of the request for proposals. In a Nov. 26 letter, Paul Williams, the district’s senior solicitations manager, dismissed Chomiak’s protest. Williams wrote: “TTH admits in this protest that ‘it does not have evidence of any wrongdoing’ and that it ‘is not suggesting there was any wrongdoing.’ The reason for that is simple: there was no such wrongdoing.”
LAWMAKERS HEAR OF PROFIT LEVERS IN HOSPICE: Hospice is a realm of medicine concerned not with curing patients, but helping them end their lives with comfort, meaning and dignity. But, with a major deal under consideration, Oregon lawmakers got a reminder last month that the hospice business model has imperatives of its own. Through Medicare, the federal government pays a per diem for each beneficiary, regardless of service provided that day. And given that most services must be rendered at the beginning and end of a patient’s stay, a grim financial logic emerges: “Patients that typically die within 7 to 14 days of being in hospice are not as profitable as those that have longer lengths of stay,” Robert Tyler Braun, a Cornell University researcher, said as part of a presentation to a Senate health care committee. The presentation, by him and other hospice experts, comes as the Oregon Health Authority weighs approval of a major transaction: As part of a multistate deal, Compassus, a for-profit company run in part by private equity interests, is seeking to take over the management of home health and hospice assets of the nonprofit Providence Oregon, the state’s largest provider of such services. Lawmakers moved earlier this year to restrict corporate control at health care facilities, but the private equity model has its boosters, who argue it can bring cash and efficiencies to struggling operations that might otherwise close down. Still, many have their suspicions. As the researchers noted in the presentation to lawmakers, private equity prizes short-term profits. And in hospice these come primarily through cuts to operating costs—such as wages—and by selectively targeting more profitable patients, such as those with dementia, who require less complex care and are likely to have longer lengths of stay.
CITY TRAFFIC DEATHS TREND DOWN: Portland traffic deaths in 2025 are on pace to hit their lowest number since the COVID-19 pandemic, when deadly crashes soared. New figures released to the City Council by City Administrator Michael Jordan show 32 people died in Portland traffic through Nov. 17, a lower figure than any year since 2021. At that pace, Portland would finish the full year with the fewest traffic deaths since at least 2019. (At least one person has died since Jordan published the report.) The statistics tally all people killed on Portland roads, whether in cars, on bicycles or motorcycles, or walking across the street. The 2019 figure of 50 deaths was the highest number of fatalities in a single year since 1996. They spiked further the following year, as drivers flouted traffic laws on roads emptied during COVID closures. The numbers kept rising, reaching a 30-year high in 2023, when 63 people died in the streets. Portland Bureau of Transportation director Millicent Williams pledged to keep working. “The 33 community members lost in traffic crashes to date in 2025 is 33 too many,” she said in a statement. “At PBOT, we are committed to transforming Portland streets to support safe travel and ensure loved ones get home at the end of the day.”
