Skip to main content
Ever notice that most years, right as daylight saving time begins, you hear about how broke local government agencies are?
Staff here at WW got an email from the Multnomah County Department of Homeless Services last week topped with a cheerful cartoon city scene (buildings, people, airplane, dog, unrecognizably blue sky). Below that lurked a dark message.
“We are currently navigating an incredibly challenging budget season,” the email said. “After years of historic expansion, the department is confronting a $68 million structural gap driven by the expiration of one-time ‘bridge’ funding, rising service costs, and lower-than-expected revenues.”
What’s the ask? That we “learn more and weigh in during this critical time.”
Possible translation: Get your ass to a meeting with county commissioners and tell them you’re going to be super pissed off if shelters close and tent cities crop up all over town.
So, yeah, it’s budget season again, when everyone tries to figure out how to pay for stuff in the 2027 fiscal year starting July 1. For Multnomah County, it’s an ugly one. Chair Jessica Vega Pederson kicked it off in November, when she wrote to department directors and told them there would be a $10.5 million deficit in the county’s $800 million general fund, the only pot of money in the overall $4 billion budget that the chair and county commissioners can parse out on a yearly basis to provide services.
Multnomah County handles some of the hardest jobs in the state. Often through nonprofit contractors, it runs homeless shelters, distributes naloxone, collects guns from criminals, sends nurses out to help low-income patients, rescues animals, and runs our new, confusing ranked choice voting system.
This dismal year, here’s a prediction you can take to the bank: You’re about to see a lot of headlines with the words “budget crisis.” (The city of Portland and Portland Public Schools are digging out of even deeper holes.) We decided it would be helpful to take a different tack and look back over the past decade to see how Multnomah County gets and spends its money.
We pulled four authoritative documents from 2015 and 2025 and parsed more than 1,000 pages to see exactly what’s changed.
What you won’t find is an appraisal of whether the county’s priorities are the right ones, or if it spends its money efficiently compared with other counties. This spreadsheet-driven exercise shows only where the county gets its money and where it goes.
We started with the county’s adopted budget for 2015. Leaf through those pages and you’ll think it was the ledger of a Swiss canton (semiautonomous state) flush with cash from banking and making fine chocolate. There are passages like this: “Due to improved economic conditions, the county has been able to focus on longer-term initiatives, such as infrastructure replacement and health care transformation.”
Budgets these days, by contrast, read more like the finances of a broke Belarussian oblast (Russian for region). A sample from the 2025 financial report: “Job growth in Multnomah County is currently lagging behind state and national trends and has been one of the worst performing metro areas for job growth in the nation.”
Strangely, though, the county collects more than twice as much revenue from taxes and other sources than it did a decade ago: about $2.7 billion in 2025, compared with $1.1 billion in 2015. Adjusting for inflation, the increase was still twofold. And it’s not like there are a ton more residents to serve. Population rose just 3.1% in a decade to 801,557, according to county data.
What did change: Multnomah County was flush with new revenue streams. In the past decade, property taxes that had been locked up in urban renewal areas came back to the county, boosting revenue. The county increased the Business Income Tax rate from 1.45% to 2% in 2020, and it passed three ballot measures that boosted revenue by tens of millions each year. (We’ll get to those in a minute.)
The county had more money per capita, so it set about tackling more problems, including some that were sprouting like death cap mushrooms in the autumn rain, chiefly fentanyl addiction and homelessness. The number of people experiencing some form of homelessness almost tripled from 3,801 in 2015 to 10,526 in 2025. Multnomah County’s expenditures totaled $2.5 billion 2025, almost triple the $945 million spent in 2015.
As it wrestled with these social ills, however, the county didn’t foresee another problem: Multnomah County’s finances are built on people moving here and building homes and offices. The county’s budgeting bedrock is property taxes: They provide about half the cash in the general fund. For three decades, in-migration kept the county afloat on a river of revenue constrained by two huge upstream dams: Measure 5, which caps the amount of tax that counties can collect per $1,000 of real-market property value at $15, and Measure 50, which allows assessed values to rise just 3% a year. That’s why your house might have a market value of $550,000, but an assessed value of just $250,000.
With those dams in place, county tax revenue can only rise 3% a year, plus any new collections from people moving in and building new homes and commercial spaces. Without that bump from newbies, and with downtown office values crashing, property taxes suffer even more.
“Our fiscal system only works with immense growth,” says Mike Wilkerson, director of economic research at Portland-based ECOnorthwest. “That’s our economic strategy.”
The county has a name for the vice created by Measures 5 and 50: the “structural deficit.” Unless the two measures are repealed, revenue for Oregon counties will almost always trail expenditures, especially in periods of high inflation, like the one we’re in now.
“The county can only do what the county can do,” Wilkerson says.
To the county’s credit, it didn’t get hooked on the federal money that flowed like free beer at a frat party during the pandemic. Plenty of cities and counties used that one-time cash to backfill ongoing needs. Milwaukee, Wisc., for one, used American Rescue Plan Act money to operate buses. Now, riders face higher fares and fewer routes, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.
“In my 23 years with Multnomah County, how we navigated the American Rescue Plan funding to address the COVID-19 emergency and its aftermath is truly one of my proudest moments,” budget director Christian Elkin says. “We knew that backfilling would only lead us off a massive fiscal cliff once the federal funding dried up, and we knew that would result in painful, long-term program closures that our general fund simply couldn’t sustain.”
So, if inflation was relatively tame during the first half of the past decade (with spikes later), the county was cautious with ARPA dollars, and property tax increases were constrained, how did the county’s revenue increase so much? The answer lies, again, with ballot measures.
In need of money to pay for critical services, the county went looking for other sources of cash. In 2020, voters passed three ballot measures that boosted revenue by tens of millions each year: the Preschool for All tax, Metro’s Supportive Housing Services levy, and a $387 library bond. That cash drove “increases in capacity,” according to county budget staff.
Crucially, none of this windfall went into the county’s general fund, the one-quarter of the county’s budget that isn’t earmarked for specific, ongoing uses. The chunks of new money were off-limits.
For fiscal year 2027, the budget that’s being hammered out now, Vega Pederson has asked all departments to submit budgets that are 5% lighter than last year in order to close the gap in the general fund. That’s tough on departments that rely most heavily on the general fund for operations, like the county sheriff, which gets almost 90% of its funding from it.
To meet that demand, the department would have to cut the equivalent of 39 deputies who oversee 300 jail beds, or 27% of the total. Without those beds, the jail might have to release adults who are in custody, only because there is no room for them, Sheriff Nicole Morrisey O’Donnell said in a letter describing the consequences to Vega Pederson.
The county’s Preschool for All program, meanwhile, plans to almost double the number of seats available in FY27 to 7,460 from 3,844. It can afford to do so because it has more than $600 million (and growing) in a fund created by voters in 2020 that can only be used for preschool and preschool-adjacent stuff, like building playgrounds.
“Special funds create an uneven system,” says County Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards. “The sheriff provides a core service that can’t be cut without compromising public safety.”
Given the 135% increase in county revenue during the past decade, it seems odd that the sheriff would have to scrounge for money, except that so much of the money is off-limits.
“There is so much more revenue,” Wilkerson at ECOnorthwest says, “but the flexibility to use it is lower than ever.”
You might say county officials are trapped in a hell of their own making. Well, consider us your Virgil on a journey through this underworld. On the pages that follow, you’ll find four charts: two showing how much the county collects and two showing how much it spends. We’ve annotated the data with helpful tidbits of information that help unpack where the money comes from and where it’s going.
Total County Revenue
This chart shows all the revenue the county booked from taxes, fees and grants from other governments in fiscal years 2015 and 2025. The real numbers nerds among you—you know who you are, and you know why you’re drinking alone—will ask why this doesn’t add up to $4 billion for 2025, given that the county touts a $4 billion budget.
It’s because they come from the Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports for the county. Figures in its adopted budgets are much higher because they are required by Oregon law to report “all of the resources that we know about,” according to the 2025 ACFR, including contingencies and funds that won’t be spent during the fiscal year. (Expenditures are similarly inflated by internal transactions, like when county computer people troubleshoot software for another department.) Include all of that, and you get revenue and expenditures of about $4 billion for 2025.
1. Operating Grants
This revenue category has exploded in recent years, thanks in part to the Supportive Housing Services tax, collected by Metro starting in 2021 and distributed to the three counties within its jurisdiction. Multnomah County got $150.8 million in FY25 to pay rent for people who are homeless or on the verge. SHS dollars also pay for shelters and for employment programs.
2. Property Taxes
A 76% jump in property taxes in a decade might seem like a lot, but relative to expenditures, it’s not. Regardless of what commissioners decide to spend, the county’s costs rise almost every year because of inflation, which got cooking during the pandemic and hasn’t relented. Oregon counties can’t catch up because Measure 50, passed in 1997, made it law that the assessed value of a property—the amount that can be taxed—may only rise by 3% a year, maximum, regardless of what happens to real market values. In 2025 dollars, 2015’s $330 million in property taxes would be worth $448 million. Adjusting for inflation, property tax revenue rose just 30% in a decade. For comparison, the cost of tuition and fees at the University of Oregon jumped 63% during the same period.
3. Personal Income Taxes
This might be the most controversial entry in the ledger. It’s the amount raised by the Preschool for All personal income tax, which went into effect in 2021. For single filers, the tax takes 1.5% of income over $125,000 and 3% of income over $250,000. Married couples start paying at $200,000 and $400,000. It was pitched as a tax on high earners, which is why critics say the payment triggers should be adjusted for inflation, year to year. Otherwise, inflation will push more people’s incomes over the thresholds, even if their real income is stagnant. The preschool program’s technical advisory group recommended last month not indexing because the program’s future costs are too difficult to estimate.
4. Interest and Investment
This is a big-ass increase, but it’s off a small base, so let’s not get too excited. It’s the interest the county earns on cash and investments, which totaled $1.6 billion at the end of 2025. Almost 40% of that is in the Preschool for All fund, waiting to be spent on new preschoolers. While that money is off-limits to other uses, at least it’s earning interest.
TOTAL COUNTY REVENUE:
2015: $1,148,648,000
2025: $2,693,875,000
134.53% change from 2015–2025
General Fund Revenue
The general fund is the one that people haggle over because so much other revenue (like the Preschool for All trove) goes to specific departments and can’t be diverted. Here’s where that discretionary income comes from.
5. Property Tax
As you can see from this chart, property tax and the Business Income Tax account for almost all general fund revenue (83%). The rest is almost a rounding error. Property tax alone brings in two-thirds of the fund’s cash every year. Because of the caps imposed by Measures 5 and 50, that revenue is throttled, but it’s steady. Even in FY25, a crappy year, property tax revenue rose 3.5% because real market values remain above assessed values (see main story). These days, commercial property values are cratering, and there are plenty of Chicken Littles who see a tax-pocalypse. But the sky might not be falling. Commercial buildings account for just 21.4% of total property tax going into the general fund, and downtown towers accounted for only 3.5% of the assessed tax base before the pandemic. The bulk comes from residential property, which has held its value because people still want to live in Portland and there isn’t much inventory. If house prices go the way of Big Pink (sold for $45 million in July after trading at $373 million in 2015), then Multnomah County will start to look tax-pocalyptic.
6. PILOTs
Let’s get into some budget minutiae here! PILOTs, or payments in lieu of taxes, are payments made by companies leasing space from tax-exempt organizations. Most of the money comes from commercial tenants on Port of Portland land. At Portland International Airport, these tenants include airlines, cargo handlers, and the Blue Star Donuts in Concourse D/E.
7. General Fund Percentage of Total Revenue
When it comes to budgets, the general fund tends to dominate any discussion because it has all the dollars that can be apportioned by county commissioners. The rest of the cash is spoken for, and now more than ever because of taxes restricted for single uses, like the Preschool for All levy and the Supportive Housing Services tax. So, while there was way more money in the general fund in 2025 than in 2015, less of that loot was available for priorities identified by commissioners. The upshot is a budget that’s less responsive to current needs because more funds are locked up by older priorities. The Preschool for All Fund ended FY25 with $610 million in the bank, while weak tax collections forced Chair Jessica Vega Pederson to beg the state and Metro for money to fill a $104 million gap in homeless services funding.
TOTAL GENERAL FUND REVENUE:
2015: $442,280,000 | 38.5% of total revenue
2025: $726,786,000 | 26.98% of total revenue
-29.93% change from 2015–2025
Total County Expenses
Here we have everything the county spent in FY25 ended June 30, 2025. (Fun fact: Governments use fiscal years, not calendar years, so they can account for all the tax revenue that starts arriving in April. It also spares accountants tons of work over the holidays. As for Multnomah County, Oregon law requires it to produce a balanced budget by June 30.)
1. Social Services
This spending category blew up after the county and the city formed the Joint Office of Homeless Services in 2016, which turned out to be anything but joint. Bickering between county and city officials stymied progress on getting people off the street. The JOHS budget swelled in 2021, when revenue from Metro’s Supportive Housing Services levy began flowing into Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties. The tax on high earners raised far more than expected in the early years, and the counties spent it. Though revenues still exceed initial expectations, the haul has started to shrink. Multnomah County got $136 million from Metro in FY25, down from $140 million a year earlier. The unexpected decline, with more reductions forecast to come, left Multnomah County with a $104 million shortfall for FY26.
2. Community Services
The county’s Community Services division is something of a grab bag. It includes animal control, pet licensing, voter registration, ballot printing, road and bridge maintenance, and the permitting of buildings. In FY25, the division boosted spending on elections by $1.1 million to manage the new ranked choice voting system. The county allocated another $2.6 million in new spending for sidewalk ramps to meet requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Spending by the Community Services division will grow as the county undertakes a $1.8 billion reconstruction of the Burnside Bridge, necessary because none of Portland’s bridges is expected to be usable after a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake, which could arrive any day and render this whole budget conversation moot. Most of the bridge-rebuilding money is expected to come from the federal government, but groundbreaking on the project has been pushed beyond 2028 because the Trump administration is fucking around with the funding (sorry, but there’s no other way to put it).
3. Library
Read the local press (including WW) and you might think Multnomah County libraries were surrounded by drug addicts and gun-wielding vigilantes. That’s because the downtown Central Library has problems that draw so much attention. But zoom out and you’ll see that a voter-approved measure to issue $387 million in bonds has created new branches and helped buff up old ones. The new Albina Library opened in July. The Rockwood Library got a makeover and reopened in October, followed by the refurbished Sellwood-Moreland Library in November. The brand-new Northwest Library had a grand opening in January, and the remodeled Hollywood location reopened last month, with a mural featuring Beverly Cleary’s beloved characters like Ralph S. Mouse.
4. Total Expenses
Multnomah County’s budget has almost tripled in 10 years, far outpacing inflation and far, far, far outpacing population growth. A dollar in 2015 is worth about $1.36 today, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s online inflation calculator. At that rate, Multnomah County’s budget expenditures could be expected to rise to $1.3 billion from $949 million. Instead, they ballooned to $2.5 billion. And it’s not like the county is serving more people. The county’s population rose just 3.1% to 801,557 in 2025 from 777,490 in 2015, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
TOTAL COUNTY EXPENSES
2015: $948,834,000
2025: $2,536,227,000
167.30% change from 2015–2025
General Fund Expenses
Does a county commissioner want to build a petting zoo in Tom McCall Waterfront Park to improve community mood? That money would have to come out of the general fund, unless voters approved a ballot measure to build a petting zoo in Tom McCall Waterfront Park.
5. Homeless Services
Population may be steady, but what has risen is the number of people in need. There were 3,801 people enduring some form of homelessness in January 2015, according to that year’s Point-in-Time Count. That figure reached 10,526 in January 2025, an increase of 177%, which isn’t far off the 167% increase in Multnomah County’s total spending during the same period. Once more, for emphasis: The county budget is growing at the same rate as the number of homeless people, rather than the rate of overall population growth. One measure of how much of a burden homelessness had become in 2025 compared with 2015: The word “homeless” appears just five times in the budget director’s message for 2015, compared with 21 times a decade later. An apples-to-apples comparison for 2015 and 2025 is tough because the city handled services for homeless adults until 2017, when the city and county systems merged. That said, spending on homelessness rose ninefold from $47.3 million in FY17 to $431.6 million in FY25.
6. District Attorney
Unlike many other county departments, the District Attorney’s Office is funded in large part from the general fund, the most flexible part of the county budget, because there just isn’t much state or federal money available for general public safety. In FY25, the DA’s office got about 84% of its $55 million budget from the general fund. How that amount was determined shows something about the budget process. After the chair proposes a budget, commissioners may propose amendments to be put to a vote. Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards successfully added $782,000 to the DA’s budget for legal staff and data experts in FY25, for example. Mike Schmidt was DA that year, and he rarely fought with County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson over money. The DA’s budget would become a war zone the following year, when Nathan Vasquez took over. They fought over proposed cuts with dueling press conferences on the same day, with Vasquez calling Vega Pederson’s budget a “shell game.” Vasquez beat Schmidt for the elected position by painting him as soft on crime. One statistic that might back him up: Schmidt’s office prosecuted 10,428 cases of adult crime in FY25, down 36% from 10,428 in 2015. His office prosecuted just 234 cases of juvenile crime, down from 666 in 2015.
7. Health Services
This category includes county-run medical and dental clinics, a vaccine depot, and inspectors who make sure stores aren’t selling cigarettes to kids. The county got $25 million from the state starting in 2024 to build a deflection center, where people arrested with user amounts of illegal drugs could go to avoid jail by seeking services. Also new since 2015 was the Behavioral Health Resource Center, a former nightclub in downtown Portland that the county bought and turned into a walk-in mental health center. It opened in 2022 and began serving clients. Sadly, dealers gathered outside to serve them drugs. Downtown business owners howled. Then-Mayor Ted Wheeler texted his staff to ask “how on earth could people be receiving meaningful treatment in a facility that has drug dealers outside 24 seven.” In FY25, County Chair Vega Pederson appropriated $9.3 million to keep it operating.
8. Pass-throughs
Multnomah County is charged with lots of hard jobs: running clinics for disadvantaged residents, housing the homeless, rounding up stray animals, and providing addiction services, just to name a few. But it doesn’t do all of that work in-house. Instead, it contracts with a network of nonprofits. About $1.65 billion, or 40%, of the total $4 billion budget went to contractors, according to county financial documents, making the county what’s known as a “pass-through” agency. When a contractor runs into trouble, as WW documented this winter in the case of shelter provider Sunstone Way, it raises questions about the county’s oversight of a major artery of its spending.
TOTAL GENERAL FUND EXPENSES
2015: $415,955,000
2025: $719,834,000
73.06% change from 2015–2025
