Amidst the hustle and bustle of this year’s long legislative session and ongoing leadership transitions in the Oregon Health Authority, the state-county partnership on our shared health and human services has continued to grow. The directors of the Oregon Health Authority, Department of Human Services, Oregon Housing & Community Services and the Office of Emergency of Management are at the table with county commissioners and other local government leaders for monthly Local Government Advisory Committee (LGAC) meetings chaired by Lane County Commissioner Pat Farr. They have been focusing on the statewide emergency homelessness response, preparations for the upcoming wildfire season, and the development of the new state-county contract for community behavioral health services. 

In the coming months, the LGAC will also dig into closer partnership on court-mandated services provided by the Oregon State Hospital and counties’ Community Mental Health Programs, as well as the implementation of several new Medicaid 1115 waiver benefits and the coordination of public health modernization efforts.

An outgrowth of that relationship-building work is a state-county-city collaboration with the Oregon Housing & Community Services department begun this spring to maximize the impact of $26 million homelessness emergency response funding. The funding was earmarked in HB 5019 this session for communities within the Balance of State Continuum of Care which includes 26 of Oregon’s 36 counties. The collaboration has yielded a two-pronged approach for disbursing the funds which is built on a shared commitment to geographic equity; a portion of the $26M will be targeted to meeting the bill requirements to create 100 new shelter beds and rehouse 450 people, with the remainder dedicated to building the capacity of every interested county to respond to its homelessness and housing needs and to draw down available state funding in coming biennia that most rural and frontier counties have not historically had the capacity to do.

The Local Government Advisory Committee for Health & Health Human Services meets monthly on the fourth Friday at 10:00 a.m. in the Human Services Building, Room 160, 500 Summer Street NE in Salem.

Contributed by: Jessica Pratt, AOC legislative affairs manager