Murmurs: Home Forward Hunkers Down Amid Controversy

HOME FORWARD HUNKERS DOWN AMID CONTROVERSY: Home Forward, the city of Portland’s housing authority, is battening the hatches after WW reported that its CEO, Ivory Mathews, spent more than $100,000 on agency-funded travel in recent years while the agency struggled. The union representing 205 of the agency’s employees has says it has “no confidence or trust” in Mathews’ leadership, and at a board meeting last week employees lambasted their boss’s travel and spending. Records show Mathews spent seven days in Hawaii in fall 2024, and the agency has been unable to provide any documentation of work-related activity during that trip. Additional records show she took 10 employees to an Orlando conference that same year, some of whom helped her campaign for an unopposed leadership position at an industry group. Despite criticism by Portland city councilors and the agency’s own workforce, the agency’s board of commissioners and Mathews herself have defended her travel to housing conferences across the country, saying it’s a critical part of her job. It’s unclear if Mathews, or the board, will publicly address the controversy—or the fury of the agency’s employees. UPDATE: After press deadlines, WW learned that Mathews will resign.

ALT-HEALTH PLAN OUSTED: Oregon regulators have moved to ban ClearShare Health from the state, alleging the “health share” is in fact health insurance—and that it has been offering such insurance here without a license. The move comes after Washington state took a similar enforcement action against the organization in June 2025. As WW reported earlier this month (“Share My Burdens,” April 8), Washington insurance regulators have been far more aggressive than their counterparts in Oregon in scrutinizing alternative business models to health insurance. Health care sharing arrangements often tout cheaper prices and a community rooted in common values, while asserting—debatably, some would say—that they are not in fact insurance and thus not subject to insurance law. They make this point for several reasons, including that even as they say they pay eligible health claims, they don’t want to have a legal obligation to do so. (They tend to be of particular appeal when health premiums spike.) Oregon’s announcement of enforcement action against a health sharing arrangement, the first such action by state regulators since 2021, suggests the insurance commissioner may now be looking more aggressively into the business model. “This action is part of [the Oregon Division of Financial Regulation’s] ongoing efforts to pursue entities offering health insurance or marketing products that function as health insurance but are not properly licensed,” the agency said in a news release. It added that it began looking into ClearShare after receiving “multiple consumer complaints.” ClearShare did not respond to a request for comment.

PORTLAND SCHOOL BOARD REVISITS SCHOOL FOUNDATIONS: In May 2024, the Portland School Board overhauled the fundraising model Portland Public Schools had used for decades. The board voted 5–2 to ban individual schools from fundraising for staff through Local School Foundations, or LSFs. The decision was deeply controversial. Parents against LSFs cited data that indicated wealthier and whiter schools were often the system’s biggest beneficiaries (though LSFs were required to contribute one-third of any money raised past $10,000 to a districtwide fund). School foundation defenders said the district stood to lose a valuable source of funding and didn’t have the infrastructure to replace it. In the years since, the district has put more effort into The Fund for Portland Public Schools, a districtwide foundation. But it has so far failed to match the bounty LSFs once brought in. (In the last three years they operated, LSFs generated an average of $3.3 million for the district. This school year, The Fund for PPS had raised about $200,000 by February.) As PPS eyes another $50 million budget shortfall, that delta has raised big concerns for a few members of the School Board, which was set to discuss the issue more in depth after press deadline. Patte Sullivan, one of two members to vote against sunsetting LSFs in 2024, asked to pause the fundraising policy overhaul at an April 14 meeting. In part, Sullivan noted, The Fund for PPS had not been given an adequate runway to succeed. “The intent of the rule change was to make things more equitable,” she said then. “Instead, it has negatively impacted all students.”

APPEALS COURT ADOPTS FEDS’ STORY IN PORTLAND ICE SUITS: Tear gas and other crowd control weaponry will continue to be fair game for federal agents to use at Portland’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, following a 2–1 decision by a federal appeals court striking down emergency prohibitions on the tactics established earlier this year by lower court judges. The appeals court had already suspended the lower court injunctions, but elaborated on its rationale in a more durable ruling. At times citing Trump administration press releases as the basis for their account, the appellate judges in the majority, Trump appointees both, emphasized the aggressiveness and unrest of protesters at ICE—and said the lower court judges’ red lines were overly broad, prohibiting federal agents from using common crowd control tactics even when crowds genuinely needed controlling. Their ruling had technical aspects. But it also drew on explicitly subjetive judgments: A lower court judge had urged, for example, that the appeals court review what he described as “unambiguous and disturbing” video of alleged violent excesses by federal agents. The appeals judges said they “reviewed dozens of video clips—and we come to a different conclusion.” Meanwhile, the third judge on the appeals panel, Ana de Alba, saw the videos in a different light: footage of a federal officer shooting a projectile at a protester who is walking away or at people dancing the Cha Cha Slide—was indeed, de Alba wrote, “unambiguous and disturbing.” She cast the loan dissenting vote. The ruling arrives less than a week before May Day protest events.