Oregonians Deserve More Accountability
The executive branch has experienced numerous failures, yet few folks have been held accountable. Oregonians deserve better monitoring to improve services.
Oregon voters deserve a legislature that exercises prudent oversight over the executive branch to ensure that the services paid for with tax dollars are delivered effectively and efficiently. When one party holds both legislative and executive power, however, it is particularly difficult ensure accountability. Friends rarely like calling out friends. That’s why it can be hard for legislators to point out failures of leadership in the Governor’s office.
During the late-Secretary of State Dennis Richardson’s tenure, the Audit Division provided an objective and professional outside opinion on operations; but he could not fully restore the culture of accountability Oregonians deserve alone. In just the last two years, scandals at the Oregon Employment Department (OED), Department of Corrections (DOC), and Office of Housing and Community Services (OHCS) have had serious consequences for Oregonians, but these failures have gone largely unaddressed.
At the Employment Department, poor leadership and a toxic workplace culture delayed critical unemployment and paid family leave benefits. After a decade of failing to update the unemployment benefits computer system, OED was not prepared to respond to the urgent needs created by the pandemic. OED’s leadership did not ask for help, causing extreme delays in unemployment benefits.
The Governor eventually fired the Director, but OED then failed to implement even the most basic customer service software to tell people where their claims were in the process. Day after day, claimants waited for hours on the telephone, mostly just trying to figure out if their claims were complete.
Meanwhile, in a different office in OED, implementation of the paid family leave program fell even farther behind. While OED blamed the pandemic, the Oregonian discovered that OED never made a serious effort to meet the deadlines set by the legislature. When it became clear just how far behind the program was, the Governor and legislative leaders tried to sneak through a bill to give them more time, while still failing to address an internal culture of racism that was crippling operations.
To this day, the only manager held accountable for these failures was the Director in 2020, despite the continued problems after her departure. OED services to the public continue to be hobbled by significant workplace deficiencies.
A lack of accountability has hindered effective service provision at the DOC as well. Prisoners are the only group in the US constitutionally entitled to healthcare. Nevertheless, DOC failed to prioritize vaccination of prisoners, increasing the risks to both staff and prisoners and leading to significant outbreaks and deaths in our prisons. DOC remedied this problem only after being forced by a court order. Even after they started vaccinating prisoners, they lagged in vaccinating corrections officers, worsening the risk to prisoners.
In two other scandals, DOC botched the evacuation of facilities impacted by the wildfires and tear-gassed its own staff. Again, no one was held accountable for these failures, and we failed to make policy changes to prevent it from happening again.
Most recently, the Office of Housing and Community Services fumbled the rollout of the rental assistance program. Like the problems at OED, this started as an IT contracting problem and snowballed into huge delays in providing critical rental assistance to Oregonians facing eviction. Indeed, the legislature will meet in special session to deal with the consequences of this failure.
Those failures have not led to any accountability at OHCS or changes to their IT contracting processes. Instead, OHCS has simply blamed the contractor, neglecting their role in failing to select a contractor with a solid and relevant performance history, a necessary element of any public contracting process.
In all of these cases, Oregonians suffered from executive branch failures. In all of these cases, the legislature failed to impose accountability measures for the departments involved or make structural changes to prevent these problems from happening again.
In healthcare, aviation, and the military, when there’s a serious accident, the institution involved must conduct a thorough, impartial investigation, to include a root-cause analysis and recommendations for changes to prevent a reoccurrence. Oregonians have a right to the same culture of accountability and process improvement in their state government.
Marty Wilde represents House District 11 in the Oregon State Legislature.
More from Rep. Wilde
photo credit: "Cherry Blossoms Salem Oregon" by Edmund Garman is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The governor put teachers ahead of front line workers for vaccines, and then the teachers didn’t go back to in-person learning. People are watching. The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555, endorsed Kristoff. “Frankly our board felt, as I do, that it’s foolish to support the politicians who praised essential workers during the pandemic while neglecting necessary worker protections,” union president Dan Clay said. “We need leadership that is willing to actually deliver solutions when they get to Salem, instead of trying to get in their sound bites.”