From the Vancouver Columbian, January 30 2009

Hundreds accept a chance at improving their lives

Toni doesn’t know why she’s alive today.

She figures she shouldn’t be. She tried to inject bleach into a vein and doesn’t know what went wrong.

What went right, she said with tears in her eyes, is that her mother found her where she was staying at a local motel and got her to the hospital. She was diagnosed with severe depression and began the rounds of addiction treatment programs until she found one that worked.

Now she’s living with her mother and spending her days at the Val Ogden Center, a vocational rehabilitation “clubhouse” for people with mental illness.

She’s been clean and sober for 90 days, she said. She’s 22 years old, eight months pregnant, single and a veteran of the streets.

“I had nowhere to go, nothing to do,” Toni said. The Val Ogden Center “has been a family for me.”

Free services and that sense of family drew 340 needy people Friday to Project Homeless Connect, a single-day clearinghouse of services and resources for the homeless held at the Red Lion Hotel at the Quay. That’s a big jump from last year’s first local Homeless Connect event, which drew 200 to Hudson’s Bay High School, according to Kelly Adams, spokeswoman for the organizing Council for the Homeless.

Dozens of service providers and hundreds of volunteers were on hand, from mental health clinics to the state veterans department, and from barber shops offering free cuts on site to laundromats passing out coupons for free washes. They said they were gratified that the event was so successful — with a line snaking out the door and a scarcity of elbow room inside at times.

They were also alarmed.

“It’s frightening that it looks like this,” said Janet Bentley-Jones, recovery programs director at New Life Church, which runs counseling programs, support groups and a gym for people fighting drug and alcohol addiction — nearly all of whom are homeless, she said.

Given the sour economy, Bentley-Jones said, she’s bracing herself for funding cuts for social services, and a resulting rise in misery.

“It’ll get worse before it gets better,” she said.

“The need is great, and there are not enough resources,” said optometrist Suzanne Zamberlan of Evergreen Eye Care, who was doing eye exams for those who signed up on what turned into a long waiting list. Zamberlan said homelessness brings a greater risk of long-term eye infections and greater risk of glasses’ getting broken, stolen or lost.

“Most folks I’ve talked to haven’t had an eye exam in 10, 15, 20 years,” she said. “Some have prescriptions but don’t have glasses.”

In the end, 30 eye exams were conducted and 12 vouchers for free glasses distributed. Eighty people got haircuts.

Something special

Council for the Homeless executive director Craig Lyons said Clark County has in place a great system for tracking and aiding the homeless, and a unique sense of volunteerism to boot.

“We recorded something like 14,000 hours of volunteer time last year,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s something special about this town.”

This second annual Homeless Connect event came the day after Lyons and many other outreach workers and volunteers scoured the county to conduct a rough single-day homeless census. Results won’t be available until late February, but last year the final number was 1,062 people counted as living locally with no fixed address.

This year, Lyons is hoping the excellent local system and its volunteers will balance out an economy in freefall.

Second chances

Folks in weather-beaten jeans lugging backpacks or shopping bags enjoyed a free lunch of turkey, sweet potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls and cake served on white tablecloth.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” said Al Shamshak, 52, who’s been in the Vancouver area for a couple of months. “I’m very grateful for everything these people are doing today. They treat you like a real human being, and that means everything.”

Shamshak, a New England native — he introduced himself as “The Shak from Boston” — said he’s been on his own since he was 16, and spent 17 years in prison for attempted murder. He’s looking for a job as a cook, he said, and he sent out 47 résumés last month without a response.

“It’s disheartening. I worked all my life,” he said. “Sometimes you get overwhelmed. I think about doing the wrong thing sometimes, but I know I won’t benefit.”

Across the room, James Ingram was digging through used books for his daughters, who live with their mother in Portland. He came up with a couple of American Girl paperbacks and a Nancy Drew mystery, and proudly discussed his girls’ growing reading skills.

His first daughter was murdered at age 17, he said, and his whole world “turned upside down.” He wound up living on the streets, living on alcohol, he said. Eventually he suffered a series of small strokes, he said. By then he’d already pulled himself together, checked his pride and asked for help.

“It came down to, am I going stay on the streets and die, or see my girls graduate?” said Ingram, 57. “I’m getting a second chance to be a dad.”

Always hope

Adams of the Council for the Homeless said she spent the day listening to hard-luck stories in amazement.

“Some of these things you hear — it’s like, if they haven’t killed you, nothing will,” she said. “It just shows, no matter how far you fall, there’s always hope.”

Folks who came to get help were glad to talk about their hopes.

Ingram, who’s got a small temporary apartment — what’s called “transitional” housing — hopes to go back to school, maybe brush up on his Spanish and become a translator. The Shak from Boston, who sleeps in the emergency shelter of a local church, said he’ll keep looking for work. And 22-year-old Toni, sleeping on her mom’s couch and battling depression, wants to open her own cafe one day.

“I’ll be your first customer,” said her friend, Janice Hafer, another Val Ogden club member. “You can put my dollar on your wall.”

From the Portland Mercury, January 29 2008

Bad Apple Reputation – New Lawsuit Threatened Against Chasse Cop

The Portland Police Bureau officer involved in the death of James Chasse Jr. is facing the threat of another lawsuit—this time relating to his use of force against a woman claiming to suffer from mental health issues.

Chasse, a 42-year-old man with schizophrenia, died in police custody in 2006. It is now hotly rumored that Officer Christopher Humphreys’ alleged assault of Lisa Ann Coppock occurred just a few days after he completed Crisis Intervention Training (CIT), the police bureau’s education in how to diffuse confrontations with people in mental health crisis (the exact date of Humphreys’ training is not known). The training was expanded to include all the bureau’s officers in November 2006, in direct response to controversy created by the Chasse incident.

Attorney J. Ashlee Albies filed a tort claim with the city on October 21, 2008, giving notice of Coppock’s intention to sue.

“The circumstances that gave rise to Ms. Coppock’s claims arose on or about April 22, 2008, when Portland Police Officers Christopher Humphreys and Rod Nusum assaulted, falsely arrested, and discriminated against Ms. Coppock at the Gresham City Hall transit stop,” alleged Albies in the claim letter, a copy of which was obtained from the city’s Office of Risk Management through a public records request.

Albies works for Steenson, Schuman, Tewksbury, Creighton, and Rose, the same law firm handling the Chasse case ["The Chasse Files," Feature, November 15, 2007], but has declined further comment on the tort claim for the time being.

Further details of the incident are unclear, since it is against police bureau policy to release use-of-force documentation to the media while a case is pending criminal trial, or to comment on cases where litigation is pending. But Coppock was charged with theft of services in the amount of $50, resisting arrest, and interfering with a police officer, and is scheduled to stand trial for her alleged offenses at Multnomah County Circuit Court on February 23.

Coppock’s criminal defense attorney, Maite Uranga with Metropolitan Public Defender Services, has also declined comment on the case, but issued a subpoena to Officer Humphreys on January 6 requiring him to appear at the trial next month, according to records on the Oregon Judicial Information Network. She also filed Coppock’s notice of intent to rely on a defense of mental disease or defect, diminished responsibility, or extreme emotional disturbance on January 7.

Police Chief Rosie Sizer has yet to make a recommendation on discipline for Humphreys related to an internal affairs investigation into Chasse’s death, the outcome of which is still unclear.

Humphreys, who has been protected by the city attorney’s office from having to comment publicly on the Chasse lawsuit, will now be required to testify in court at Coppock’s trial about his use of force against a person claiming to suffer from mental health issues. Coppock declined comment through her attorneys.

Meanwhile, Portland Police Association President Scott Westerman has been an outspoken defender of Humphreys since he took office last November, when he told the Mercury, “There’s nothing in the Chasse incident that CIT training would have helped.”

Regarding the Coppock case, Westerman says, “I don’t want anybody to assume that Officer Humphreys is automatically guilty of anything, and the fact that he is named in the suit, to me, is not surprising.” He continues, “The fact is, his name has been dragged through the media for three years on a case that should have been resolved two years ago. I strongly disagree that he is developing a bad apple reputation. He is one of the hardest working cops that the Portland Police Bureau has, and just because somebody has a tort claim filed against them does not assume that the officer has done something wrong.

“Perhaps this woman or her attorney saw the arresting officer’s name and decided to try to capitalize on it,” Westerman continues. “Down the road, I am confident he is going to get honorably cleared.”

Westerman says he has also heard from police bureau sources that the Use of Force Review Board has recommended no discipline for Humphreys regarding the Chasse case, although that information has yet to be released by the city, which Westerman describes as “frustrating.”

“We don’t know a lot about the incident yet, but it certainly seems like Officer Humphreys has had his share of lawsuits filed against him,” says [Portland] Copwatch activist Dan Handelman. “Hopefully since the bureau is now tracking lawsuits against its officers through its employee information system, this will now lead to some corrective action.”

By The Oregonian editorial board, January 27, 2009

It’s a sad commentary on America’s mental health system that employee safety has become an explosive issue at psychiatric hospitals from coast to coast.

Last year, a patient severely beat a nurse at a state institution in North Carolina. A counselor in Texas was similarly assaulted. So was an orderly in Kentucky, a physician in New York, and untold numbers of other employees of U.S. mental hospitals.

Two years ago in California, hundreds of employees of the state mental hospital packed a meeting room in Sacramento, many breaking down in tears as they shared stories of beatings by patients, nightmares and stressed personal relationships stemming from their jobs.

It’s a problem that has ballooned under a pair of conflicting pressures on the mental health system. Cash-strapped states are finding it increasingly difficult to provide adequate hospital staffing and training; at the same time, the U.S. Justice Department is cracking down on abusive treatment of patients.

Inevitably, this vise has closed on Oregon.

As The Oregonian’s Michelle Cole reported last Saturday, 323 injuries to staff members were reported at the state hospital in Salem during the first 10 months of last year possibly the highest number of such injuries in the hospitals history.

Cole told the stories of employees who feel increasingly vulnerable at the hospital. Such an atmosphere is unacceptable, so its reassuring to see the institution taking steps to address it.

Dr. Bruce Goldberg, state human services director, says nine people most of them women accounted for 45 percent of the violence last year. The hospital will open its first maximum-security ward for women next month, and that should considerably enhance staff safety.

Goldberg says hospital administrators are also addressing the problem by working more closely with occupational safety and law enforcement officials, and by stepping up training to improve behavioral management. And, of course, they’re pleading with state budgeters for more staffing a plea that echoes in the halls of mental hospitals from Maine to California.

No one should seek to diminish the fact that reported attacks on employees have increased at Oregon’s institution. Its worth noting, however, that these unacceptable statistics may be the downside of some things that are improving at the hospital.

One may be that the place is doing a better job of record-keeping. Another likelihood, one thats much more far-reaching, is that the hospital is responding to federal pressure to improve the treatment of patients.

Goldberg says such efforts led last year to an 83 percent reduction in hours of patient seclusion and a 60 percent decrease in hours of patient restraint.

Those are welcome reforms. They do, however, increase the opportunity for a handful of patients to engage in violence.

Hospital staff and patient safety are equally important. For once Oregon lawmakers must fund the staffing and training such safety requires.

From the Oregonian, January 24 2009

Nurses and other workers are feeling more threatened than ever despite new security steps

When a conflict between two patients at the Oregon State Hospital escalated to a near riot on the night of April 11, Deb Dietzel found herself on the wrong side of two locked fire doors.

Dietzel, 51, a nurse at the state’s mental hospital for 14 years, says the rest of the staff had taken refuge in the day room. She was in another part of the ward and surrounded by a half-dozen male patients who were threatening to kill her.

“I thought I was going to die,” Dietzel said. “I kind of turned my back on them because I thought I was going to get it.”

Fortunately, another nurse came to Dietzel’s rescue, and the incident ended without harm. But Dietzel said: “It took a long time before I could talk about it without crying.”

In the first 10 months of last year, there were 323 reported injuries to state hospital staff caused by patients — a jump from 2007 and possibly the highest number of injuries in the hospital’s history. Officials can’t say for sure, however, because of poor reporting and record-keeping in the past.

Nurses and other workers say they feel more vulnerable than ever to attack from patients who are diagnosed as insane and not responsible for their actions and from other patients who staff say are committing premeditated crimes and getting away with it.

Concerned about the increase, hospital administrators have hired more aides for the most troubled wards, added security staff and next month will open a maximum-security unit for about a dozen violent female patients who administrators say create the lion’s share of the trouble at the hospital.

Last year, one violent female patient broke the arms of two workers within a 24-hour period. Hospital officials would not discuss details of those attacks, citing confidentiality issues.

But nurses and other workers say being kicked, shoved or knocked to the floor has become a regular part of the job at the state mental hospital. So is hitting the “panic” button at the nurses station to summon help.

Earlier this month, nurse Lonna Chase said she called for help only to be told another ward was also in trouble.

“We’re seeing more and more buttons going off and more anxiety,” Chase said.

A visiting state lawmaker got a firsthand look at the aggression last month when a patient threw water, dousing her and others. In another incident, she watched staff deal with a patient who didn’t want to be medicated.

“What struck me was the culture of fear — among staff and patients,” said Rep. Sara Gelser, a Corvallis Democrat who spent hours inside one of the forensic wards for treatment of people who have been found guilty of committing a crime while insane.

Hospital superintendent Roy Orr attributes some of the attack spike to improved reporting starting last January, the same month a federal Justice Department review team issued a scathing report on hospital conditions and patient care.

But Orr says the hospital is also seeing more patients who suffer behavioral disorders that make them violent, antisocial or resentful of authority. When appropriate, he said, he’d like to see patients punished for their actions. “I don’t want anybody to get the impression that I think any level of aggression on staff is OK.”

Last month, Orr invited the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to Oregon to consult on improving worker safety. He also started regular safety and security meetings with employee unions and with state and local law enforcement officials.

Policy change cited

Nurses and other hospital staff say attacks against them have increased as the hospital changed its practices in response to the Justice Department report, which threatened legal action if conditions weren’t corrected.

“We’ve tried very hard and very successfully to reduce our use of seclusion and restraints, and there has been more violence,” said Daniel Smith, a psychologist who had his nose bloodied by a patient.

The Oregon State Police major crimes unit investigates all serious incidents reported by the state hospital. State police Capt. Maureen Beddell says the hospital — not state prisons — was the No. 1 client for the unit’s Salem office in 2007 and 2008.

Between January and October last year, state police investigated 163 cases at the state hospital. Of those, 120 involved alleged patient misconduct.

The good news, Beddell said, is that the number of state hospital cases the major crimes unit investigated last year was lower than in 2007, including fewer felony assaults.

Still, she acknowledged: “If you’re the one that gets hit in the face, it doesn’t feel like it’s getting better.”

Difficult to prosecute

The Marion County district attorney’s office decides whether to prosecute patient-to-staff assaults in court. The cases are difficult to pursue because they often involve mentally ill patients and compromised evidence, said Paige Clarkson, a deputy district attorney.

A couple of years ago, Clarkson said her office prosecuted a patient who attacked a staff member with his pen and another who hit a worker with a table leg. In both cases, she said, the defendants pleaded guilty but insane. The punishment: more time at the state hospital.

Clarkson’s boss, District Attorney Walter Beglau, said he needs state financial help to prosecute more assaults. He’s also interested in finding ways short of prosecution to hold patients accountable.

“Let’s face it,” Beglau said, “We have not been able to provide good public safety services in that facility.”

Workers say they would like the hospital to create a trauma response team to help with emergencies in the wards and assist staffers with their post-traumatic stress. Orr says he’s willing to find a way to make that happen.

In the meantime, Dietzel, the nurse who was cornered by patients last spring, asked to be reassigned to the graveyard shift, when most patients are asleep.

The reason, she said: “It’s safer.”

From the Oregonian editorial section, January 22 2009

Oregonians should take advantage of a unique opportunity to help finance production of a commercial-quality documentary film on a fascinating subject: the Oregon State Hospital in Salem.

And, yes, fascinating is the right word. In a state known far and wide as a bastion of progressive values, the 126-year-old institution is a grotesque anomaly. Its original structure, built in 1883 as the Oregon Asylum for the Insane, is still there, and part of it is still in use. No new buildings have been erected on the hospital campus in more than a half a century.

The place is an overcrowded, inhumane dump — an environment so awful that Hollywood producers chose it as the setting for the movie classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” That was more than three decades ago. It’s even worse today.

In 2005, The Oregonian called it “a 19th century fright house” in an editorial series that called on lawmakers to replace it. Now the state is indeed about to begin tearing portions of it down in preparation for construction of a state-of-the-art new psychiatric hospital.

Cue the cameras: Before the wrecking ball strikes, however, the Mental Health Association of Portland, Oregon’s foremost independent advocate for persons with mental illness and addiction, wants to produce a high-quality documentary on the hospital. The group has lined up a terrific director, Portland’s own Brian Lindstrom, director of the acclaimed documentary “Finding Normal,” a heart-wrenching look at recovery from drug addiction by addicts in Portland.

Movies cost money, though, and here’s where everyone can help. Send your contributions directly to the Mental Health Association of Portland (a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, at P.O. Box 3641, Portland, OR 97208. You can learn more about this exciting project here.

Michael Evans, son of Susanna Foster, has collected and edited a wonderful obituary for his mother on his blog, The Susanna Foster Chronicles – Phantom of the Heart.

Susanna Foster died on January 17, 2008 of heart failure in New Jersey. She was born on January 6 1924 and was 84.

She began her career in vaudeville at the age of five and was a singer, actor, a movie star, stage star. She’s best known for her starring role with Claude Rains in The Phantom of the Opera in 1943. Foster also suffered from alcoholism and mental illness which for the most part ended her career by 1945.

According to Wikipedia,

Foster suffered from alcoholism and mental illness in her adult life. Her mother and sister were also heavily afflicted by mental illness and alcoholism. With no warning, Foster walked out of her marriage to Evans, citing the reason that she was not in love with him. She could barely support her two young sons, who endured a hellish childhood sometimes living in squalor.


Wilbur Evans apparently was long unaware of his ex-wife’s problems and instability as a single mother. By 1983 Foster had been on and off welfare, lived in her car, then moved back to Hollywood from the east coast to make a “comeback.”


She lived for a time with a doting fan in a tiny apartment on Cherokee Avenue in Hollywood. For a time she attended the occasional film convention or Phantom of the Opera screening and signed autographs, interacting with her fans. She claimed her son Philip was a drug addict and he also became an alcoholic.


In 1985 Philip lapsed into hepatic coma (liver failure) on Susanna’s living room floor and died three days later in Van Nuys Hospital. Eventually, Foster’s excellent acting ability could not conceal her mental problems; she was unable to keep a job or support herself.


Her surviving son, Michael, who had tried in vain to help her, finally brought her back to the east coast where she spent the last years of her life living in nursing homes.

Author Sharon Rich shares her interview with Foster, from 2005. READ – Interviewing Susanna Foster in regards to working with Nelson Eddy in “Phantom of the Opera”

READ – Singer-actress Susanna Foster dies – Star appeared in ‘43 ‘Phantom of the Opera’, Variety
READ – Susanna Foster dies at 84; costarred in 1943 version of ‘Phantom’, LA Times

By Peter Korn at the Portland Tribune, January 15 2008

Hard life, cold death – George Grigorieff lived on the streets – died, during storms, in a Portland cemetery

Renters at the apartment house on Southwest Jefferson Street in Goose Hollow had been patient. They’d let the homeless man camp underneath their front porch for a week.

But the smell of urine and alcohol was becoming overpowering. And then the man, who was frequently drunk, began breaking glass containers, which the renters had to clean up.

They asked him to leave. They left notes, explaining that the landlord was due for an inspection. Finally, on Thursday night, Dec. 18, with the first knife’s-edge cold of another winter storm approaching, they called the police, who found the homeless man had outstanding warrants for public intoxication and trespassing.

The police took him downtown to the Justice Center Jail.

Four days later George Grigorieff – homeless for 20 years – was dead, through nobody’s fault but his own.

Nobody did anything wrong. Nobody had reason to feel guilty when Grigorieff’s frozen body was found Dec. 22 in Lone Fir Cemetery in Southeast Portland. He had taken himself there without even a sleeping bag, even though emergency warming shelters were opening all over the city.

Grigorieff was the only Portland resident to die of exposure during the December storms. In a way, he chose his death. He may have chosen the time and place.

But during the past three decades, a number of choices were made – by Grigorieff and others – that, if different, could have led to a different death. And they could have led to a different life for a man who spent 20 years living on the street.
One of the cool kids

Grigorieff, 63 at his death, grew up in the Woodburn area, about 40 miles south of Portland. A football player at Gervais Union High School in the early 1960s, he was described by his half-brother, Jim Grigorieff, as one of the cool kids at school, as popular as his 1956 Chevy was hot.

Then came the Army. Grigorieff enlisted and served in Vietnam as an engineer, according to his brother. He returned home in the late 1960s a changed man.

“He just went on an endless drunk, basically,” Jim Grigorieff said.

That “drunk” lasted until his death. For about a decade he lived on and off with family and performed odd jobs. Eventually, the downward spiral of alcoholism combined with post traumatic stress disorder pushed Grigorieff into the subset of homeless people who will not enter shelters and who reject nearly all attempts to help them.

His family coaxed him into a Veterans Administration facility in southern Oregon for mental health and addictions treatment. But he left, unable to abide the facility’s rules, family members say. Never violent, he tumbled from one minor disaster to another: a house fire, getting hit by a car, petty crime.

Informed of his death, close family members registered surprise – they thought he had probably died years ago.

In Portland, if Grigorieff was going to get help, it likely would have come from Southeast Portland’s JOIN, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the chronically homeless.

JOIN’s untraditional social work is based on the idea that the chronically homeless, in addition to food, shelter and possibly mental health services, need a support system, what Executive Director Mark Jolin calls “a good friend that people need in their lives.”

That friendship often can lead to trust, which becomes a means to provide help and eventually reintroduce the chronically homeless to society.

“For too long as a community we have assumed because somebody has been outside for 10 years, they are not interested in going back in, or they have chosen homelessness as a lifestyle,” Jolin says. “In our experience, in the vast majority of cases, that’s not true. They don’t want to die on the street.”

For Grigorieff, the good friend was JOIN outreach worker Lio Alaalatoa. Ten years ago, Alaalatoa began visiting Grigorieff two or three times a week at his campsite near the west end of the Ross Island Bridge. Grigorieff had lived alone there for three or four years, according to Alaalatoa. He’d made a little home there behind a 7-Eleven, with a small kitchen area and a flower garden, and a bed up on bricks.

Alaalatoa recalls Grigorieff insisting on feeding him when the social worker would come to visit. One time, he was sitting in the campsite eating a sandwich Grigorieff had prepared. Toward the end of the meal, Alaalatoa noticed Grigorieff making little whistling sounds and watched as large gray rats scurried out of the bushes to take food scraps from Griforieff’s hand.

Alaalatoa knew that he could help Grigorieff get one of the subsidized supportive housing apartments that JOIN has access to, if he could help Grigorieff come up with an income.

As a veteran with an honorable discharge, Grigorieff had a pension coming, but had never applied for the benefits. Three times Alaalatoa arranged appointments for Grigorieff at the Veterans Administration office in downtown Portland. In Alaalatoa’s mind, it would be an unspoken last chance effort by Grigorieff to re-engage society after years spent distancing himself from it.

But the VA application process can be cumbersome, according to Tom Mann, public information manger for the Oregon Department of Veterans Affairs. It can take up to a year before the first pension payment begins.

Grigorieff, according to Alaalatoa, became frustrated as he was asked to fill out form after bureaucratic form. When told he had to contact his old Army base to obtain paperwork proving his service time, Griforieff gave up.

“That was the last hope he had to reconnect,” Alaalatoa says. “From then on, it was just George.”

But Grigorieff had his stable campsite, and was still one step removed from a vagrant’s life. That bit of stability disappeared too, when Grigorieff was rousted from the campsite by police and forced to move out about eight years ago.

Moving from campsite to campsite after that, it is likely he shed some of the few possessions that made his campsite into something resembling a home.

Over time, Grigorieff would amass dozens of police citations for violations of Portland’s anti-camping ordinance, in addition to citations for public drunkenness, trespassing and illegally riding MAX trains. He would be brought to jail at least 45 times during his 20 years of homelessness in Portland.
‘Out of sight, out of mind’

The city’s six-year-old anti-camping ordinance, which prohibits overnight camping on public property, is controversial among the homeless community – the subject of a lawsuit in federal court – but also among police officers who enforce the law, according to Mike Reese, commander of the Portland police Central Precinct.

Reese says that about a third of the homeless people whom police encounter in Portland are like George: because of mental illness or addictions, they are unwilling to go to a shelter. And once in a shelter, Reese says, those people often become violent.

Knowing this, Reese says, police don’t really want to enforce anti-camping laws against those with few options, and do so only when complaints are registered.

“Typically, what we tell these folks is find low-impact camping places,” he says. “Out of sight, out of mind. Find places where we’re not going to get complaints.”

Homeless advocates have talked about green zones – areas that could be declared legitimate for camping. But Reese says such zones create large camps full of homeless, and large camps breed fights and drug dealing.

Reese believes a change in law might have saved Grigorieff. But he doesn’t think the anti-camping ordinance is the one. He says Grigorieff should never have been brought to a jail on the Thursday night of his arrest, but instead should have been taken to a hospital or institution that could have helped him with his mental illness and alcoholism.

That would have required a civil commitment, nearly impossible to obtain in Oregon, says Reese, who calls the state’s commitment process “broken.”

By law, Grigorieff would have had to have been judged “an imminent danger to himself or others.” That standard is too high, Reese says.

“Here’s somebody who obviously isn’t in his right mind,” Reese says. “He’s out camping in severe weather and dies of exposure. He’s a danger to himself, but we don’t have a mental health system that allows us to hold him.”

Washington state, according to Reese and city attorneys, has commitment laws that allow police to act in cases such as Grigorieff’s. Reese says the police have been working with the Multnomah County district attorney in an attempt to change the law so that police, on that Thursday night, could have taken Grigorieff to a medical facility on a mental health hold rather than to the jail.

But any attempt to loosen the civil commitment laws would bring an outcry from civil liberty groups and advocates for the homeless, and could become a logistical nightmare, given that Portland already suffers from an acute shortage of hospital beds for people suffering mental illness.

Monica Goracke, an attorney with the nonprofit Oregon Law Center who filed a federal lawsuit against the city’s anti-camping ordinance in December, doesn’t think civil commitment laws should be changed, despite Grigorieff’s death.

“The lack of a sleeping bag is what really gets me, the fact that he had no protection,” Goracke says. “He spent a lot of nights outside, he would know that. Does that mean everyone who chooses to sleep outside on a cold night without a sleeping bag should be committed? I don’t think in a free society you can do that.”

City Commissioner Nick Fish, who oversees the city’s Bureau of Housing and Community Development, says more supportive housing is the best hope for helping the chronically homeless, and the reason why the city for four years has followed a “housing first” doctrine. That doctrine is to get people like Grigorieff off the street and into apartments, even if they have addictions and mental health issues. With stable housing, the other issues can be addressed.

Reese supports the housing plan, but notes the current 10-week wait for getting the homeless into housing through the nonprofit Transitions Projects Inc. in Old Town, and the city’s limited number of housing vouchers to pay for the supportive housing.

“I support the 10-year plan to end homelessness,” Reese says. “But I think we need a 10-minute plan. What are we going to do to get people off the street today?”
Changing jail protocol

Following his arrest in Goose Hollow, Grigorieff was brought to the downtown Justice Center at 11 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 18. It took three hours for county jail officials to process him; most of that time he spent watching television with other inmates.

At 2:08 a.m. Friday, Dec. 19, Grigorieff was released into a night where the temperature was beginning to drop below freezing following five days of snow. Another heavy snowstorm was on the way. His dirty clothes had been washed and dried. He did not appear to be drunk. And, on intake he gave officers no reason to believe he might be suicidal or high.

Because of the storm, the lobby of the justice center had been declared a warming center. There were no beds, but people could stay in the lobby as long as they wished to escape the snow and dropping temperature outside.

Grigorieff signed for his meager possessions and signed a form promising he would return Friday afternoon for a court date. He had a winter jacket, according to jail officials, and sneakers. No sleeping bag.

He could not be forced to stay inside, according to Paul McRedmond, deputy sheriff for Multnomah County. By law, McRedmond says, Grigorieff’s outstanding warrants for trespass and public drunkenness would not allow the jail to hold him for longer than three hours in what jail officials call a “book and release.”

The officer at the jail’s release door probably was not even aware that Grigorieff was homeless. And, McRedmond says, the releasing officer is not trained to consider weather conditions or the appearance of the inmate about to be released, to call authorities to arrange transport to a shelter, or find a sleeping bag for a homeless man who has none.

“He didn’t rise to the level of any kind of protocol,” McRedmond says. “It’s his responsibility to take responsibility for his own safety.”

But as of this past Monday, a new large sign confronts inmates at the county jail’s release door, the last sign they see before stepping outside. In three languages, the sign tells inmates they can ask the nearby release officer for help, such as finding a place to stay.

A briefing memo has been sent to corrections deputies, telling them that when weather conditions become dangerous, or even when they don’t, they should be on the lookout for inmates about to leave who might need help.

The new sign and the memo, according to McRedmond, are a response to George Grigorieff’s death.

“Sometimes the push to make things better comes from tragedy,” McRedmond says. “And that’s the real tragedy.”
A messenger

Sometimes, even the most autonomous people – and George Grigorieff, wanting nothing to do with society and other people, was one of those – touch lives.

Grigorieff was buried Jan. 6 in a military ceremony at Willamette National Cemetery in Southeast Portland. An honor guard saluted Grigorieff with a volley of shots that sent a momentary shock wave through the quiet Mount Scott air. Two soldiers precisely folded a U.S. flag and a solitary bugler played taps.

The ceremony was attended by three members of Grigorieff’s family and a fourth person, a woman unknown to the family. With a scarf covering her head so that only her striking, angular face and wisps of silver hair showed, she introduced herself as Carole van Dyke and explained that she had discovered Grigorieff’s body at Lone Fir Cemetery.

Van Dyke said she lived near Lone Fir, and that she takes a walk there every afternoon, to a favorite spot where she often stops to sit beneath two yew trees. On Sunday, the day before Grigorieff died, she had laid in the snow a few yards away from the yew trees and let snowflakes settle on her face as she thought about how sad and lonely she had been. She had, in fact, thought vaguely about ending her life.

“I felt like it would be very easy to pass on,” van Dyke said.

Eventually, van Dyke moved her arms and legs and made a snow angel, stood and walked home. The next afternoon, Monday, she returned to the yew trees and found Grigorieff already dead from exposure. She noticed his two pair of blue nylon running pants and thin cotton socks. Nearby she found a quarter, a nickel, a dime and two pennies Grigorieff had apparently dropped or scattered.

In van Dyke’s mind, she and Grigorieff had connected for a reason.

“I felt like he was a messenger, a gift to me,” says the soft-voiced 56-year-old. “The message was, maybe I’m meant to stick around a little longer.”

Cassandra Tebo, the Portland police officer who responded to the 9-1-1 call, found Grigorieff in the same position as van Dyke had – shoes off, jacket unbuttoned, shirts lifted up so his belly was exposed. Maybe he was waiting to die, maybe he was too drunk, and too far into the late stages of exposure, to know what he was doing.

With the storm in full fury, Tebo says, even the hardcore homeless were in shelters.

“When you drove the streets that night, you didn’t see anyone out,” she says.

But there was Grigorieff, his position unmistakable.

“He had done a snow angel,” Tebo says.

Commentary by Scott Westerman, president of the Portland Police Association, published in The Rap Sheet, December 2008

I am proud and honored to have been elected to represent you as PPA president. I will be forever grateful to the countless number of members who took the time to engage others in conversation about the issues we face and the strengths I would bring to the PPA to help me address those issues. Without your involvement and support, I wouldn’t be here.

Before I get to the meat of my article, I would like to address the tone of The Rap Sheet. I, along with many others, have stopped reading it from cover to cover. This is due, mostly, to the negativity that has emerged. I want that to change. This paper is not a forum for personal attacks against Police Bureau employees, management, or PPA members. This is your union publication. However, distribution of The Rap Sheet reaches far beyond our membership. The Rap Sheet should highlight good work performed by PPA members. And articles should comment on, or protest specific management decisions, working conditions, or situations that affect any or all of us. This is what this paper is supposed to be about, not personal attacks. I ask that you offer solutions when complaining about a policy or decision. To be blunt, no one wants to hear only complaints, people want to hear solutions. Again, this is a union publication that is distributed to the public and reflects on our entire membership. Please keep that in mind when submitting articles for publication.

Now, on to the issues at hand. Mitch Copp and I, along with the Executive Board, have been working together to address the Use of Force and Performance Review Boards. I am sure you have already heard about the Executive Board’s decision regarding these boards. In December, I encouraged the
Executive Board to file a grievance over the Bureau’s use of these boards. In addition to voting to file the grievance, we unanimously voted to recommend that PPA members NOT appear before either of these boards until the many problematic aspects of them have been fully addressed.

This was not a decision I took lightly. I fully recognize the Bureau’s need to have transparency in regard to the use of force, especially deadly force by Portland Police officers. It is not my intent to prevent that from happening. However, the Bureau and the PPA simply disagree with the manner in which this transparency occurs. The Citizen’s Review Committee currently looks at all complaints against the police with names of the officer(s) and other information necessary to identify the exact incident redacted to allow them to focus solely on the actions and not the person or incident.

The PARC report also evaluated the Police Bureau’s past use of deadly force in a similar manner. I am not opposed to the Police Bureau conducting a similar review for all uses of force and performance reviews. This would allow them to have citizen input regarding training needs and performance issues.

I do oppose the calling of an officer to a board to answer questions that have already been answered three and sometimes four times earlier.

In an idealistic world, this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. But when our members are subjected to unprofessional questioning where the member is grilled, embarrassed or berated by members of these boards, it is unacceptable.

The Executive Board also considered the fact that the majority of officers who have appeared before these boards have felt they were presumed guilty prior to their appearance. This has been reiterated, however unintentionally, by command personnel who frequently mention that these boards are “in the best interest of the member” because it puts a face to the proposed discipline. For the members who have gone before these boards and have had their discipline reduced from what was originally proposed,

I would submit that the same “face” can, and has, been put on the person during the due process mitigation hearing with the police chief. Furthermore, many members have described these boards as “traumatizing.”

Again, I fully recognize the Bureau’s need for transparency, and I don’t believe it was ever the command staff’s intent to humiliate or embarrass our members. While this move by the PPA may be considered a line in the sand by some, I have every intention of working with, not against, the Bureau administration to find a suitable review process.

I encourage you to engage your PPA representative in discussion about these boards and any other issues important to you.

OUR COMMENT – any psychiatrists in the house?

From the Portland Mercury, January 15 2009

Deputy District Attorney David Hannon had a surprise waiting for him in Room 536 of the Multnomah County Courthouse last Wednesday morning, January 7, in the form of attorney Elden Rosenthal.

Hannon, whose salary is paid by the city as part of its controversial Neighborhood Livability Crime Enforcement Program (NLCEP), had been expecting to argue the constitutionality of the program with Lisa Pardini, Brian Schmonsees, and Spencer Hahn, three public defenders he has met in court before.

Instead, without warning, Hannon was facing the prospect of making the city’s case for the NLCEP’s constitutionality against Rosenthal, one of Oregon’s most celebrated and experienced trial attorneys, whose resumé includes winning $12.5 million in damages against White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger for inciting skinheads to kill Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw in 1991.

Several observers agreed: Hannon looked pretty scared.

Pardini, Schmonsees, and Hahn are each defending clients who have been charged with felonies for residue drug possession, instead of standard misdemeanors, because their names are on the city’s 350-strong secret list of downtown offenders. The three defense attorneys have now partnered with Rosenthal, whose services were secured by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Oregon, to argue before Judge Dale Koch that the secret list is unconstitutional.

Further hearings are expected in late February, with a verdict expected from Koch sometime in March.

The Mercury first uncovered details of the secret list last April, when it emerged that 52 percent of those on the then 408-strong list were African American—even though African Americans make up only six percent of the local population. In May, the Mercury discovered that the criteria for getting on and off the list aren’t written down anywhere.

Rosenthal grilled Jeff Myers — the Old Town cop who first came up with the program in 2003—about its details in depth, over a day and a half of hearings last week. Hannon, meanwhile, tried to get Myers to talk about the success of the program in reducing downtown crime, but Rosenthal continually objected to Hannon’s line of questioning on grounds of relevance.

“The issue is not how successful or not the program has been,” he argued. “The issue is whether or not secret lists are constitutional.”

To the defense, the secret list seems to be a classic bill of attainder, which is forbidden by the Constitution: The state cannot single out citizens for harsher treatment because they are on any list. The defense also maintains that the list may violate equal protection and equal privileges protections in the federal and Oregon Constitutions—the government can’t treat people differently, under the law. Furthermore, the fact that the list is secret, and there is no way for a person to challenge one’s status on the list, would seem to violate constitutional due-process protections.

“In our system, secret police lists have no place, and that’s what this is about,” Rosenthal told the Mercury last Thursday, January 8. He declined further comment on the case for the time being.

Myers told the court that the NLCEP program had been “put on steroids” in the fall of 2007, following former Mayor Tom Potter’s decision to sunset the controversial Drug-Free Zones program, after a consultant’s report damned their racial inequity.

Officer Myers was also ordered by Judge Koch to review his boxes of information relating to the list and produce—free of charge—any information relating to the enhanced prosecution aspect of the list. Previously, the police bureau would only agree to do this for the defense if they were paid over $3,000.

“As much as I knew about what was going on, this was very enlightening in terms of how we’re focusing on these particular offenders,” said Judge Koch at the conclusion of the hearing. “Regardless of how everything works, the issue is whether it meets statutory and constitutional muster, and we’ll resolve that when we come back in February.”

City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who has taken over responsibility for the police bureau under Mayor Sam Adams, wrote an editorial for the Portland Tribune praising the NLCEP program on December 18, 2008.

“Dan’s very supportive of the program,” says Saltzman’s chief of staff, Brendan Finn. “But obviously this is a court proceeding and we will await a verdict to see how we should proceed.”

From the Portland Mercury, January 15 2008

A union activist and employee of an Old Town homeless shelter has been put on a “work plan” by her supervisors, she believes, in retaliation for speaking out about low wages for shelter employees.

Rachel Hansen, a veterans’ caseworker at Transition Projects, Inc. (TPI) was quoted in the Mercury last month in an article about members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union threatening to strike over a promised pay rise that has been delayed for TPI workers since last June.

The Mercury interviewed Hansen outside TPI’s shelter at NW 5th and Glisan on December 12. She says she received a letter from her supervisor, Steven Carreker, on December 16, directing her to spend less time talking with clients, and focus instead on getting more of them into permanent housing. In his letter Carreker quoted an informal lunchtime conversation about a client between Hansen and TPI boss Doreen Binder, writing, “It appeared to Doreen that Rachel was not concerned about the client’s mental health needs being met or the client’s general success.”

“But what I’ve heard from other people is that Doreen decides who she wants to fire and she just finds a way to do it,” says Hansen. “I feel unduly and unjustly targeted for my union activity.”

Hansen says she was talking—during the informal lunchtime conversation with Binder—about how she felt she never had enough time to service the needs of each client properly. Hansen had felt positive about the conversation, not that it would be used as grounds for discipline.

Upon hearing about her work plan, Hansen’s fellow shelter employees have voted her employee of the month for January 2009.

Research done by AFSCME shows that the average salary for TPI workers is $26,748, and that it would cost just $66,000 to give employees the 3.5 percent cost-of-living increase they are seeking. Meanwhile, TPI has averaged $250,000 in excess revenues over expenses since 2000, according to AFSCME.

Binder, whose salary is listed as $82,422 on TPI’s tax return for the year 2006-2007, did not respond to a call from the Mercury seeking comment on Hansen’s allegations by press time.

From AP.com, January 15 2008

Oregon will receive $8.9 million of an $800 million national settlement with Eli Lilly after an illegal marketing campaign for the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa.

Oregon Attorney General John Kroger said Thursday it is the single largest Medicaid fraud judgment ever won by the Oregon Department of Justice.

Zyprexa was the first of a newer generation of medications approved to treat severe psychological disorders.

Eli Lilly was accused of promoting it for unapproved uses, including depression, anxiety, irritability, disrupted sleep, nausea and gambling addiction.

Federal law prohibits pharmaceutical companies from promoting drugs for uses that are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The marketing campaign ran from 1999 to 2005. Kroger says Eli Lilly was also providing physicians with cash and gifts forbidden by federal Medicaid rules.

READ – Lilly Settles With Feds, States, Pleads Guilty To Criminal Charge, Furious Seasons
READ – Lilly settles Zyprexa suit for $1.42 billion, AP.com
READ – Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption, New York Review of Books
LISTEN – Oregon To Receive Millions From Eli Lilly Settlement, OPB.org

What if your favorite co-worker told you she was going to become a man? What would your response be if a friend from church told you the same thing? Or, what if he was your brother-in-law or she was your aunt? Your best friend from school? Your spouse?

Switch: A Community in Transition is a new documentary that explores these responses from one community comprised of co-workers, congregants, friends and family.

On February 4, 2009 at 7:00 PM, Boxxo Productions, in association with Film Action Oregon, will present the first public screening of Switch: A Community in Transition at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon.

Produced by local filmmaker and longtime activist Brooks Nelson, this documentary explores the impact of a gender transition not on the individual going through transition but on the surrounding community of family, friends, co-workers and others.

The primary focus of Switch: A Community in Transition is the experience of Nelson’s own gender transition and how through the process he became aware of how much the responsibility for change fell on the people around him. Friends and family have to switch language, switch gender pronouns and examine their own attitudes and what it means to be male and female. The film also highlights different roles and responsibilities of each individual to reinforce their own and others’ gender, race, physical ability and the different identities that make us individuals.

This film is by no means the sole definitive work on community responses to gender transition but it is entertaining, frank, and finely crafted. Switch: A Community in Transition presents extensive information as well as heartfelt sharing about what it means to have a person in your life transition. We all know someone in this movie – the mom, the boss, the best friend and no matter our own relationship to gay or transgendered people most of us will leave the theater asking “What if…”.

Switch: A Community in Transition will screen 7 PM February 4, 2009 at the Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd, Portland, OR 97212 (503.281.4215). Tickets: $8, available at the door, or in advance through the Hollywood Theatre website. For more information, contact Brooks Nelson boxxoproductions@msn.com or see also www.boxxo.org

From Willamette Week, published online on January 13, 2009

Sgt. Scott Westerman, the Portland police union president, is taking another swipe at Chief Rosie Sizer for delaying her decision on whether to discipline the officers involved in the 2006 death of James Chasse Jr.

Using strong words in the upcoming issue of The Rap Sheet, Westerman writes in the union newspaper that one of those officers, Christopher Humphreys, has been “publicly ignored and discarded by the administration.” The article was obtained by WW in advance. The new issue is expected to go online later this week.

Westerman told WW last month that the officers have been cleared by the Police Bureau’s Use of Force Review Board. That decision has not yet been made public. Westerman feels that until Sizer’s choice is known, the officers involved are still twisting in the wind more than two years after Chasse’s highly publicized death.

Since Westerman was elected union president in October, he says he’s had repeated conversations with Sizer urging her to make her recommendation on whether to discipline the officers. Once she makes her decision, she hands it to Police Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who makes the final call.

Here’s an excerpt of Westerman’s remarks in a final draft of the article [ from the January 2009 The Rap Sheet - eds ] .

We need to support each other in positive ways as we are all in this together.

To make this point more clear, all anyone has to do is look at Officers Jason Sery and Chris Humphreys. Both of these officers were very well respected by everyone they worked around, both citizens and fellow officers. They exemplified everything one could imagine a police officer should be. They were dedicated, professional police officers doing the job when something tragic happened. Both of these officers were involved in different situations that, when reviewed objectively, were found to have done everything right. They were both cleared by the grand jury, and every subsequent level of oversight. Yet both of these officers have been crucified by some in the media, some members of the public, and worse of all, publicly ignored and discarded by the administration. The sad reality of police work in Portland is, every single one of us is just a radio call away from being mistreated the same way. This is why we should remember that we are in this together. If you see these officers, give them your support. More importantly though, when you engage the citizens of Portland in discussions about police work, take a moment to express your support for them then too.

While we all know we will never gain the support of every citizen of Portland, I wholeheartedly believe we still have the support of the majority of the citizens. We will once again enjoy a time where it will be socially acceptable to praise the police publicly. Maybe if we can get the citizens to start PUBLICLY speaking in support of us during socially charged incidents, we can get the administration to do so too. Until then, we have only ourselves to rely on.

From Matt Davis at the Portland Mercury, January 13 2009

Downtown cops and business advocates began a push for tighter laws on involuntary commitment for people suffering with mental illness at a meeting at city hall this morning.

I wrote in depth about the civil commitment process, here in Portland, last February, but the bottom line is, that there are laws in Oregon that allow the government to involuntarily hospitalize someone whose mental illness makes them an imminent danger to themselves or others, or who is unable to take care of their basic needs. And there was talk of pushing in Salem for those laws to become stricter at a meeting of the downtown Public Safety Action Committee this morning.

There’s no doubt that times are going to be tough in Portland on this front over the next year. For a start, Governor Kulongoski’s proposed budget cuts the state alcohol and drug treatment budget by 83 percent; and cuts community-based mental health services by 90 percent. That means that people whose basic needs would have been met by some of those services are more likely to end up roaming the streets in states of distress and crisis—which is unlikely to do anybody any good.

“We’re facing a humanitarian crisis, really,” said Steve Trujillo, co-chair of the PSAC group. “We’re asking law enforcement to do mental health work, and jails to do treatment.”

Now, in response to a reported rise in suicide attempts in downtown Portland, the PSAC group has written to City Council in support of pushing the state legislature to make involuntary commitment statutes tougher.

“Is there a reason there’s no diminished capacity clause in our statutes so that we don’t have to wait until they’re imminently dangerous so that we can do something?” asked Old Town cop, Jeff Myers.

“I’d like to see it changed,” said Jean Dentinger, the county’s supervisor of involuntary commitment.

Dentinger quoted the Washington state laws on involuntary commitment, which have a lower standard of proof, merely to show that a person is “gravely disabled,” she said. There seemed to be consensus around the table that a statute closer to Washington’s might be more favorable, here in Oregon. Read all about it, after the jump.

“I understand that in the 60s and 70s, mental health facilities were not perfect, but the solutions that we’ve put in place now seem to be worse,” said John Hren, boss of private security firm, Portland Patrol, Incv, who said one of his officers was recently assaulted by a mentally ill man who had just got out of hospital. “Very clearly this guy has issues, mental issues, but we can’t get him into the system,” Hren continued. “The system is broke in this country.”

“We’re very concerned about some of the [commitment] court’s rulings,” said Central Precinct Commander, Mike Reese. “People who are very dangerous and are threatening suicide or other people around them, and there’s nothing we can do. It’s like throwing a hand grenade out there and waiting for it to go off.”

Dentinger also blamed cuts in the District Attorney’s budget for attorneys to work on prosecution in the commitment court for some of the rulings—currently, the court is staffed by deputy DAs in training. “We don’t have any full-fledged lawyers,” Dentinger said. “Whereas on the public defender’s side, there are some very skilled attorneys. It puts us at a huge disadvantage.”

Reese asked whether the court might be suffering from an increase in advocacy by the defense bar, and Dentinger agreed that the court is “extremely legalistic. I’ve had people go free because a box on a form wasn’t checked,” she said.

“So the court is not necessarily doing what’s right for the person,” said Reese.

Mike Kuykendall, the vice president of downtown services for the Portland Business Alliance, and co-chair of the PSAC committee with Trujillo, was supportive of the move to lobby hard in Salem for a change in the law.

Leaving aside the civil rights implications of pushing for tighter civil commitment statutes, there’s a likely financial impact to doing so that was not discussed at this morning’s meeting.

“But if they manage to do that, there’s a financial impact,” says Jason Renaud, of the Mental Health Association of Portland. “And these business people have not been very good at getting more money for mental health treatment in the past. We’d be glad to see more beds available, but as soon as we have talked about more money in the past, the business folks have tended to walk away from the conversation.”

“The thing is, too, that if we had more money for mental health treatment in the community, these sorts of things would not be necessary,” Renaud continues.

On the other hand, let’s hope that the slashed budgets and increased pressure on law enforcement and private security to pick up the pieces doesn’t result in another tragedy in Portland.

READ – Oregon Suicides Not Linkable to Economic Downturn

From the Salem Stateman Journal, January 11 2009

Many programs face budget cuts – Budget reduces care for some seniors, spending for alcohol, drug treatment

Social services make up the second-largest chunk of the state general fund.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s budget proposes spending 22.9 percent of state tax and lottery dollars on human resources programs.

He has proposed increases in spending on health care for children and poor adults.

But those will come at the expense of other programs.

The governor’s budget reduces care for seniors above certain income levels. About 6,500 seniors and people with disabilities will no longer qualify for in-home care.

It cuts the state alcohol and drug treatment budget by 83 percent; and cuts community-based mental health services by 90 percent.

It cuts child-care subsidies for 3,500 low-income working families.

And the post-TANF (welfare) benefit would be reduced from $150 to $50 per month.

Social service leaders say they’ll lobby the Legislature to restore some of that funding.

“We are going to be interested in protecting TANF and employment related day care,” said Cathy Kaufmann, policy and communications director for Children First for Oregon. “Those are critical programs for very low-income families.”

Lawmakers are likely to seek ways to cancel the worst cuts.

And Kulongoski has said he’s hoping Congress will increase federal dollars to states, offsetting some of the cuts.

READ – No Easy Way Out, Oregon lawmakers face tough budget decisions in the new session, Eugene Register Guard, January 11 2009

OUR COMMENT – There are two conclusions a reasonable observer can make here. 1. Ted Kulongoski cynically uses community interest in maintaining human welfare, relying on others to do the right thing and pay for services for people with mental illness and addiction. 2. Ted Kulongoski callously doesn’t care about persons with people with mental illness and addiction. Callous or cynical, he fails this vital test of leadership because either way he’s toying with the lives of some of our state’s most fragile persons, their families, their friends and neighbors, and those concerned with their welfare.