Murmurs: Who Pays for Sunstone Billboards?

WHO PAYS FOR SUNSTONE BILLBOARDS? Last week, a month after a whistleblower lawsuit accused homeless shelter provider Sunstone Way of profligate spending (Murmurs, WW, Feb. 18), the nonprofit announced plans to close July 1. It blamed a crunch in its balance sheet. Its government contracts are shrinking and costs are rising, Sunstone Way told staff in a memo. One cost the nonprofit appears to deem mission critical: billboard advertising. After WW broke the news of the closure, several readers wrote in about billboards around town that tout Sunstone Way’s services. We’ve laid eyes on two, one on East Burnside Street and another on Northwest Nicolai Street. “Everyone deserves to be inside,” the billboards say. “Help us bring people inside at sunstoneway.org.” Multnomah County, which pays Sunstone Way to run three shelters, has no line items on invoices that would allow contractors to seek reimbursement for advertising, spokeswoman Julia Comnes tells WW in an email. “That said, there is no county policy preventing our providers from using non-county funding sources to pay for marketing/promotion,” Comnes adds. Similarly, organizational marketing is not a line-item expense “that would be/has been reimbursed by the city,” spokesman Robert Layne says in an email. Sunstone Way didn’t return emails seeking comment on the matter. Commissioner Meghan Moyer says she is confident the county isn’t paying for billboards, but she’s concerned about how diligent it’s been about reimbursements for administration and other line items. “What is the expectation for ‘case management’ or ‘outreach’ and ‘service navigation’?” Moyer asked in a text message. “I am not convinced we are getting what we are paying for.”

PORTLAND TENANT ALLEGES LANDLORD LET BODY ROT: A Northeast Portland man alleges in a lawsuit that his landlord left the dead body of a neighbor to rot for an extended period before removing it, causing a maggot infestation in the plaintiff’s apartment. In the lawsuit, filed March 3 in Multnomah County Circuit Court, Emerson Lyon says he lived in the apartment at 2417 NE Glisan St. for just two months in late 2025 and early 2026 before moving out. The lawsuit alleges the “rotting dead body of an elderly tenant—whose unit shared a chimney with plaintiff’s unit—remained undiscovered for an extended period of time, resulting in advanced decomposition, pervasive and noxious odors, and the infestation and migration of hundreds of flies and maggots into plaintiff’s unit, which created conditions that posed a health and safety hazard to plaintiff.” Lyon is requesting $145,000 in damages from the building’s owner, Turk Investments LLC. A spokeswoman for Turk wrote that a property management company manages the building, and that Turk “was never notified of any issue in regard to the status of the unit until the property manager made Turk aware after the deceased individual was discovered by the Medical Examiner and removed from the unit.”

TALKS DRAG ON AS PCC WORKERS STRIKE: Two of Portland Community College’s largest unions went on strike March 11, marking the first community college strikes in Oregon’s history. Even though both unions have contracts that run from 2023 to 2027, the strikes come after unions and the college couldn’t come to agreements in midterm conversations around salary and benefits. The college’s Federation of Faculty and Academic Professionals and Federation of Classified Employees have held out on the picket line largely over cost-of-living adjustments. After long negotiations March 15 and 16, it appears the unions are in different places. PCCFFAP executive vice president Michelle DuBarry says the faculty union has made little progress at the negotiating table. Meanwhile, Justin Eslinger, contract action team chair for PCCFCE, says his union might be close to a deal. “Management started treating both unions very differently” on Monday, he says. His union was waiting to hear back on its offer made March 17, though had not heard by press deadline. Eslinger said he was at best “cautiously optimistic” this could mark the beginning of the end for the PCCFCE strike.” PCCFFAP’s DuBarry says: “We’re under a huge amount of pressure from our members to keep bargaining. We want our wages to keep up with the cost of living, and anything less than that is just going to be really hard for our members to accept.” In a statement, college spokeswoman Khylie Gardner tells WW: “PCC administration is working to balance fair, dignified compensation for employees with the reality that PCC cannot commit to ongoing costs it cannot sustain.”

CITY COUNCIL RETREAT COSTS $27,000: A seven-hour “priorities setting” retreat for the Portland City Council, reported in last week’s Murmurs, will cost at least $27,000, according to city staff. The March 7 retreat, led by a Texas consulting firm, focused little on the city’s upcoming budget deficit of more than $100 million and instead became a session in which councilors expressed their policy hopes and dreams. The final bill, as it now stands, is $27,422; $12,900 for the consultants, and $14,522 for security, tech and streaming provided by city employees. However, the bill doesn’t yet include travel expenses for the consultants, who flew to Portland for the retreat, so the total figure is expected to climb.

NEW INQUIRY SET FOR STATE HOSPITAL: Marion County District Attorney Paige Clarkson says her office has convened a grand jury to investigate Oregon State Hospital and will likely issue a report by the end of the year. Clarkson says she has grown increasingly concerned in recent years that the state’s flagship psychiatric hospital, which has its main facility in Salem, “cannot meet the challenge of the moment.” But here she is signaling a new tack. She was among the prosecutors who sought to manage the effects of a long-standing, controversial court order that, in practice, pressures the hospital to process many patients at a heightened speed, such that it can clear space for the many new ones who would otherwise be warehoused in jails. But Clarkson and other DAs withdrew from that case last September, stating they no longer felt they could achieve progress in their public safety goals through the federal court process. State law requires grand juries to make an annual inquiry into the condition and management of corrections facilities, but in the recent past this requirement has been fulfilled by having a grand jury tour the facility, says Oregon Health Authority spokeswoman Amber Shoebridge. This year is different. The review will be a “more thorough and robust review than the yearly process,” says Marion County chief deputy district attorney Brendan Murphy.