A little-known government agency tasked with managing homeless services in the greater Salem area is expanding rapidly, fueling disagreement over how much overhead is needed to effectively coordinate shelter and housing programs.
Executives for the Mid-Willamette Valley Homeless Alliance proposed tripling their employees as they crafted a budget this year.
The agency initially wanted to spend over $1 million in total on workers who would manage data, apply for grants and to develop relationships with landlords and health care providers.
The draft budget prompted Jimmy Jones, head of the area’s largest homeless service provider, the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency, to raise objections in a May letter. Jones is a non-voting member of the alliance’s board.
“We have grave concerns about the wild expansion in budget, scope, authority, and mission of the alliance moving forward,” Jones said.
He said the proposed expansion would add “legions more bureaucracy” to local services “without housing, sheltering, feeding or having administered CPR and Narcan to so much as one person.”
Providers like Community Action are already dedicating too much staff time to processing reports, data and other items for the alliance, he wrote, rather than helping homeless people in Salem.
“I didn’t feel like we needed another level of bureaucracy in the system,” Jones said in a July interview.
Elaine Lozier, the alliance’s executive director, said the organization’s mission, and the guiding goal of this year’s budget, is to develop and sustain a system of services for people who are homeless or at risk of becoming so.
“We had an influx of state funding that we have never had before, and it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a very good thing, it’s what we need. And also, how do we manage those funds well?” she said. “What’s within our scope of influence, which a lot isn’t, but within our scope of influence, how can we set our programs and ourselves up for sustainability?”
Jones’ concerns, and additional discussions within the agency and among its stakeholders, brought a compromised budget which the alliance’s board approved on June 13. That budget scaled back new overhead, but still called for hiring up to five new positions and maintaining three added in recent months.
In total, the alliance budgeted $759,000 for employees, up from $179,000 in last year’s budget for one full-time staff member. Some of the positions will replace costly contracted work.
The board approved the final $25.6 million budget on June 13, after whittling down proposed employees from 13 to nine in an effort to compromise on competing visions for the agency.
READ IT: Mid-Willamette Valley Homeless Alliance 2024-25 Budget
Different philosophies
The disagreement shows differing philosophies over how to best address rising homelessness as a flood of resources enters a relatively new network of services.
In less than five years, the alliance has grown from its first adopted budget of $365,574 in 2021 to over $25 million. That’s because the state and federal agencies that largely fund homeless services have shifted to giving money to regional coordinators like the alliance to distribute, rather than to organizations serving homeless people directly.
The alliance is a continuum of care program, an organization recognized by the federal government to coordinate local housing and homeless service programs.
By having regional groups distribute the money, the government hopes to improve data and prevent duplicate services and competition for grants in the same area.
Local government agencies and service providers formed the organization in 2019, seeking to help the Salem area secure more money for homeless services.
Its board includes representatives from the city of Salem, Marion and Polk counties, the Salem-Keizer School District and organizations including Salem Health, Union Gospel Mission and United Way of the Willamette Valley.
Polk County Commissioner Jeremy Gordon chairs the board, and Salem Mayor Chris Hoy is vice chair.
With Gov. Tina Kotek making housing and homelessness a central focus of her administration, more money is flowing to groups like the alliance and the providers they work with.
Some of the results are visible around Salem. The city has added hundreds of shelter beds over the past five years and played a role in the building or preserving multiple affordable apartment buildings.
Local homeless service providers housed 250 households in 2023 using money from Kotek’s emergency order on homelessness, surpassing a goal of 182.
Lozier believes the organization’s growth is an opportunity to expand regional work in homelessness prevention.
She wants to improve coordination between health care, youth services and child care, which often work with people at risk of homelessness. That could mean making sure health clinics have tools in place to get people signed up for subsidized housing.
“It’s not just about saving money in the long term, about being reactionary, that’s a piece of it,” Lozier said. “But these are people’s lives. If we can prevent them from falling into (homelessness), their lives are going to look so different.”
Competing focuses
Nearly 90% of this year’s alliance budget — $22.8 million of it — will be distributed to agencies like Church at the Park and Community Action, who will use it to provide shelter, food and case management services for unhoused people in the community. Those agencies have their own overhead costs.
The rest, about $2.8 million, is spent on the alliance’s employees, materials and other administration costs.
The new employee positions focus on improving data management and overseeing contracts, Lozier said. New employees could also expand the alliance’s work into coordinating health care and housing.
She said the staff expansion is needed as the alliance’s workload grows.
Three employees, hired in the last month, will oversee the region’s coordinated entry and homeless management information system.
It’s a database that’s supposed to track every homeless person who’s received help from any participating service provider. That makes it easier to share information across agencies and identify which people are most in need of help.
Jones’ agency, Community Action, managed those systems recently at a cost of about $431,000 a year under a contract with the alliance. The alliance paid Community Action $36,000 for running the system. Jones said his agency assessed more than 3,500 homeless adults in 2023.
Jones said that, after several years without sufficient support from the regional agency to perform those functions despite repeated requests, his group pulled out of managing them.
The alliance is now taking the system over, planning to spend about $481,000 in the next year on direct costs and staff. It’s their responsibility to handle it as a continuum of care program, Gordon said of the shift.
The alliance’s staff expansion also includes adding a grants and contracts manager and someone to handle administrative and communications work. Lozier said those jobs are currently being done by contractors.
Another budgeted position is a program performance and support manager to ensure they’re complying with legal requirements for the money they get.
She’s also excited about the new health liaison position. That person will try to fill communication gaps between the housing, sheltering and healthcare systems on overlapping projects by working with groups like PacificSource and the Willamette Health Council.
“This is an integration that’s happening now. So we can either be in the early stages and help develop the system well, or we’re going to be dealing with, I think, the repercussions of maybe not being a part of that conversation,” Lozier said.
Lozier said that, because the board wants to be good stewards of the funds, not all positions may be filled, but they haven’t determined specifics yet.
In a July interview, Jones called his May letter “terse” and said he felt the alliance’s board was responsive to his concerns by scaling back plans.
But he maintained the alliance is still spending too much on administration over directly helping people in need.
“They’re going to spend twice as much to likely produce half as much, which … pretty much sums up government inefficiency over the private market in this work,” Jones said in an email.
Jones said the alliance’s focus should be on core issues of sheltering and housing homeless people through funding providers, rather than spreading itself thin across sectors.
“I think, going back to the beginning of the alliance, our focus has been too broad,” he said. “There are really only a handful of providers who are doing the work in the community, and I think the efforts should have been targeted on sheltered homelessness. The effort should be targeted on people living in the street.”
Balancing needs
Gordon, the Polk County commissioner who chairs the alliance’s board, said that the budget committee and board wrestled with the concerns Jones shared in his letter and part of the compromise was the reduced staff.
Gordon said the dramatic increase in state and federal money for homeless services has required more people to do the work to manage it. He said Jones’ concerns related to increased bureaucracy for providers are real as local programs and contracts expand.
“There are growing pains. And the acceleration of the growth is quite intense,” Gordon said.
Gordon said along with “spirited discussions” on the direction of the group, the board also had to balance the needs of smaller providers in rural areas who asked for more administrative help from the alliance than more established providers like Community Action.
He said the providers are the boots on the ground who build trust and opportunity throughout the network.
“As a community, they are the primary reason our community has been able to end homelessness for hundreds of people over the past year and a half. Their dedication inspires all of us to continue our collaborative work across sectors to prevent and end homelessness in our communities,” he said in an email.
In some cases, the alliance has reversed course and quelled its ambitions given provider feedback. In earlier discussions, Lozier proposed adding a landlord liaison role, which smaller providers told her would help them use rental assistance programs.
When she did that, she said Jones and other larger organizations told her it would be an overreach.
“That really left an impact on me, because even though I heard some partners saying ‘We want this, we want you to step into this role,’ there are others that didn’t. Trying to balance that can be hard, like, what’s best for the community?,” she said. “I felt confident by the next meeting we had: that was not the direction to go.”
Lozier said the alliance will stick to coordination and improving collaboration as intended, and looking at what drives people into homelessness. It won’t become a service provider.
“Literally every single day, I check myself before the beginning of the day on: what is our mission?” she said. “Am I helping perpetuate that mission? Am I staying within that scope? Of course, I don’t do that perfectly, I know the alliance doesn’t do that perfectly, but we do want to be intentional.”
Contact reporter Abbey McDonald: [email protected] or 503-575-1251.
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Abbey McDonald joined the Salem Reporter in 2022. She previously worked as the business reporter at The Astorian, where she covered labor issues, health care and social services. A University of Oregon grad, she has also reported for the Malheur Enterprise, The News-Review and Willamette Week.
