City of Portland ERA -1 Combined Obligations and Spending to September 30th: Spending Was Only 23% of Total, With Rent Assistance 76% of That Spending.

The City of Portland has responded on a very timely basis to my public record request for recent documents required by Treasury for the Emergency Rental Assistance 1 program. 

The City of Portland Sept 30th transmittal to me HERE includes a overall summary and a breakout by recipient, sponsored program, and obligations and spending, (The detailed report is dated October 21st). 

The Treasury Excel data for all grantees as of September 30th is HERE. (No breakout of households served was provided by the City of Portland in the Treasury required forms provided to me, but the Treasury report does have assisted household counts). 

The total ERA 1 allocation to the City of Portland was $19,647,973. The submission from the City indicates that amount has been fully obligated,  but includes 10% of the grant for admin which does not yet appear to be to be fully spent. In any case, the data for the City of Portland shows that there are NO ERA 1 funds subject to Treasury recapture. 

Multnomah County has their own direct allocation of $4,825,321 in ERA 1 funds which is NOT accounted for here. 

OHCS has a total statewide ERA 1 allocation of $204,366,635, which it has further sub allocated to local jurisdictions. I do NOT have data showing how much OHCS has sub allocated to the City of Portland or Multnomah County. The OHCS dashboard is HERE. 

Suffice it to say that there are substantially more ERA 1 funds in use or available in the city of Portland than the direct ERA 1 Treasury allocation made to the City of Portland. Nonetheless the data provided by the City of Portland is the first detailed set of data on the use of direct allocations to local governments in Oregon and I am appreciative of the timely response from the City. 

I prepared a two page PDF HERE and embedded below that further subdivides City of Portland use of the ERA 1 allocation. 

MY observations of City of Portland funds obligated or spent:

• The combination of obligations and spending was $18,898,192. Of that 77% ($14,515,540),was obligated and 23% ($4,382,652) was spent.. 
• Home Forward has spent or obligated 68% of the funding to date, and Multnomah County 31%. 
• Rent Assistance accounted of 76% of spending to date, and 92% of obligations, for a total of 88%
• Admin expenditures were 10% of spending to date, 5% of obligations, for a total of 6%
• Housing Stability Services were 13% of spending to date, 3% of obligations, for a total of 6%

I look forward to the receipt of similar data from other ERA 1 direct local grantees, including Multnomah County. 

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Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog