Commissioner Susheela Jayapal
Summertime provides more opportunities for community connection. After several years of social distancing, Commissioner Susheela Jayapal is back to visiting constituents and community leaders in District 2.
She started off July attending the 2022 Mississippi Street Fair with a vendor tour by the Multnomah County Democrats. This year organizers focused on increased outreach to local and BIPOC businesses, and Commissioner Jayapal had the opportunity to meet an array of the local businesses and BIPOC vendors who sustain our economy.
On July 13, Commissioner Jayapal toured Oregon Community Warehouse at their Northeast Portland location — the only furniture bank in the region, providing home essentials for people experiencing housing instability. Visit their estate store and see their new installation spotlighting Black musicians in Portland’s once thriving jazz hub.
In mid-July, STARS Mentoring Program invited Commissioner Jayapal to share a few words in recognition of Dean’s Beauty Salon and Barbershop’s recognition in the National Register of Historic Places. Dean’s was established by Benjamin and Mary Rose Dean, in 1956, and is Oregon’s longest-running, continuously Black-owned business. It continues to be a community anchor in Northeast Portland, and Commissioner Jayapal was delighted to join Dean family members from Portland and across the country in celebrating this honor.
Commissioner Jayapal also attended the grand opening of Rockwood Village, a beautiful new housing development providing 224 affordable homes in Gresham, along with public greenspace, community rooms, and more. Congratulations to Hacienda CDC and its partners on getting this to the finish line! And finally, she joined the API Community Coalition of Oregon’s summer internship program for a lively discussion on women in leadership.
Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson
Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson spent the last month focused on housing, homelessness, and behavioral health issues. She toured a downtown commercial building with Commissioner Susheela Jayapal that could be turned into affordable housing. Creating housing is an absolute necessity for our region, and as the status of in-person work changes, there are opportunities to repurpose buildings for residential living. Doing so downtown would allow people to live close to jobs, transit, and other amenities, while also adding residents to an area of the city that lacks them. She also met with the new owners of a hotel in northeast Portland that could similarly be turned into a shelter and/or affordable housing.
The Commissioner also joined the Multnomah County Sheriff Office’s Homeless Outreach and Programs Engagement (HOPE) team in east county, handing out supplies to the homeless and learning more about the struggles and barriers to housing for those living outdoors. The HOPE team forges connections and helps identify and meet the needs of those living outside.
She also visited the Unity Center for Behavioral Health to discuss the many challenges facing the Center, as well as challenges throughout the behavioral health system.. She met separately with Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Nan Waller, Latinx behavioral health leaders, state Representative Rob Nosse and state Senator Kate Lieber to discuss a myriad of behavioral health issues and potential solutions.
Commissioner Vega Pederson attended the opening of the Rockwood Village,which includes 224 units of affordable housing located in Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood. She celebrated the groundbreaking of the Multnomah County Library Operations Center. Located blocks from her house, this operations center will positively impact the commercial corridor along SE 122nd Avenue. She spoke with the Earthquake Ready Burnside Bridge Community Task Force members at their 30th and final meeting. She toured City of Roses Disposal and Recycling, and discussed innovation, job creation, and how to make Multnomah County the next hub of sustainable industries. Lastly, she visited Columbia Park in North Portland to hand out free lunches with Portland City Commissioner Carmen Rubio. The summer lunch program provides free, healthy meals to kids throughout our region, reducing hunger, and helping kids grow.
Commissioner Lori Stegmann
With the beginning of a new fiscal year, Commissioner Stegmann spent July connecting with our community partners, who provide critical services to our community, including housing and behavioral health support. She toured Salvation Army’s Bridgeway to Hope location, which provides transitional housing and support to sober men. Having been involved in the planning and removal of permitting barriers for Hacienda CDC’s Rockwood Village in Gresham, a 224 unit affordable housing development with a community center and beautiful public park, Commissioner Stegmann was honored to speak at their grand opening celebration.
Together with Commissioners Jayapal and Vega Pederson, Commissioner Stegmann joined Japanese internment camp survivors and leaders from the AANHPI community at a Rise Against Hate event to share their deep concerns of both recent and historic bias. Most recently, the July 2 attack on Dr. Ryuichiro Abe, who was repeatedly punched along with his 5-year-old daughter while they were bicycling on the Eastbank Esplanade. Speaking to the assembly, she asked everyone to “join us to speak out against hate and learn about different cultures and people, and to stand up for one another.”
With the extremely hot temperatures that we’ve seen the past month, Commissioner Stegmann supported the County’s cooling shelters and communications to inform residents of how to stay cool during and where to go when it’s hot in Multnomah County. She also met with the County’s Sustainability Director to discuss the County’s climate action plan and continued discussions on a Resilience HUB for East County residents. She joined the Multnomah County Board of Directors in celebrating the groundbreaking on the Library’s Operations Center in East Portland.
Bringing residents together to help one another, celebrate and build a strong community is what National Night Out is all about. Commissioner Stegmann thoroughly enjoyed participating in both Wood Village and Gresham’s community events. Commissioner Stegmann also spoke at the commemoration of Korean Armistice Day and honored the bravery of the American soldiers who risked their lives to protect the people of South Korea.
Commissioner Sharon Meieran
Much of Commissioner Meieran’s work continues to focus on addressing homelessness and behavioral health, and there was a lot that happened over the past couple of weeks.
Even as Commissioner Meieran and fellow commissioners celebrated the opening of the beautiful new affordable housing community at Rockwood Village, she continues to see, firsthand, the public health crisis of people living unsheltered through her volunteer work with Portland Street Medicine. Commissioner Meieran provided medical care to individuals who are currently living outside. From draining abscesses on the sidewalk, evaluating injuries sustained from the manual labor and dangerous work engaged in by people living in the margins of society, and seeing the devastating impact of living outside without any support or basic amenities.
Speaking with and serving the people most impacted by homelessness is a powerful reminder of our shared humanity, the precariousness of our life situations, and the need to act with urgency in addressing what is truly a humanitarian crisis.
Commissioner Meieran represents the Association of Oregon Counties on the Universal Healthcare Task Force, formed under SB 770 in 2019, and charged with creating recommendations for a comprehensive, affordable, equitable, accessible healthcare plan for all Oregonians. The Task Force is now compiling the information they have gleaned through actuarial studies, research into universal healthcare plans, and community listening sessions, and preparing their final proposal to be delivered to the State Legislature in September. Perfectly aligned with the timing of this work, Commissioner Meieran was proud to speak last weekend at a rally sponsored by Health Care for All Oregon and Jobs With Justice, among others, in support of Medicare for All.
Commissioner Meieran attended a number of community forums and meetings focused on homelessness and public safety, including speaking at a SE Uplift Neighborhood Coalitions event bringing together housed and unhoused neighbors, along with representatives of organizations doing front line work with houseless communities, to learn about opportunities for connection and engagement. Commissioner Meieran also engaged with community and focused on elevating youth voice and promoting leadership for youth, particularly for young Black men and for a diverse at events sponsored by Word Is Bond, Next Up.
Commissioner Meieran was interviewed by KATU regarding the mental wellness of youth in our community, and spoke about the youth Mental Health Forum she hosted, along with work of the County around youth mental health. She described additional opportunities for investment and engagement at both the individual family level and at the systems level, with a focus on listening to our kids, and providing what they tell us they need. She was also interviewed for an investigative Lund Report article looking into the implementation and impact of Measure 110, and broader state behavioral health issues. Her perspective, informed by both working on the front line in the ER and on the streets with people who are houseless, helped paint the picture of the challenges of Measure 110 implementation at the state level, and the implications for real people who are suffering and dying as a result of the state’s failure to create and coordinate an effective behavioral health system. The impact of methamphetamine on our community is devastating, and Commissioner Meieran was quoted as saying: “We need to have been addressing this yesterday. And watching it unfold has been like watching the slow-moving train coming towards you and not being able to stop it. We need to be the ones on the cutting edge looking for answers, implementing innovative approaches…rather than just waiting for the train to hit.”
Finally, Commissioner Meieran spent a weekend night seeing patients in the emergency department, which is a profound reminder of how so many people fall through the cracks in the systems supposed to support them, and end up in crisis, and how the work of the County can intervene upstream to put people on a better trajectory.
Upcoming
Join your Multnomah County Board of Directors, and advocate for the laws and protections we all deserve by joining elected women on August 18th at the premier of SHATTERED: How Women Broke the Glass Ceiling in Oregon Politics.