City Ombudsman Wants to Hear From Vulnerable Residents

If you’ve ever grappled with an exorbitant towing charge, been issued a fee for returned payment on a utility bill or felt you were unfairly targeted with penalties because a neighbor complained to the city about peeling paint on the side of your house, the city’s independent Office of the Ombudsman may be able to help you. 

There, Portland residents who feel they have been wronged by the city can seek guidance and potentially resolution through the three-person office, which operates independent of the city and is part of the city auditor’s office. 

“We are an independent, impartial advocate for fairness and good government at the city,” Portland Ombudsman Jennifer Croft said during a briefing during this week’s city council meeting.

“We take complaints from anyone who feels the city has harmed them or treated them unfairly.”

But as Croft notes, not enough residents know about their services, or that the office has the capacity to follow up with investigations and in some cases secure refunds and effect policy change.  

Tracking Equity

The Office of the Ombudsman does not have enforcement powers, but its reports and recommendations have led to quality of life improvements in city policy. Last year, a complainant called to complain about the Portland Water Bureau’s practice of charging its customers a returned payment fee. The resulting Ombudsman investigation revealed that the water bureau was charged $16 by the bank for every incidence of a returned payment, then charged customers an average penalty of around $23 and on average spent $82 to recover this fee 

“The investigation also revealed that for three years the water bureau charged customers a higher fee than allowed under state law,” Croft said. “The water bureau is no longer charging these fees as of this fiscal year, and it credited the accounts of over 800 customers who were previously overcharged.”

She added that the city’s revenue division, bureau of transportation and fire bureau also stopped charging return payment fees.  

“This result was thanks to a single community member who was impacted and contacted our office and said ‘This seems wrong,’” Croft said. 

Many policy changes have been the result of a single complaint that the office followed up on, she explained, although the office can also launch its own investigations on its own when there is evidence of possible systemic problems within city agencies. Or a more wide-reaching investigation can result from complaints, which was the case in 2021 when the office released a report finding the city’s approach to property management enforcement had a disproportionately harmful impact on BIPOC residents.

The city’s enforcement is and remains largely complaint-based, making application uneven and inconsistent. There was a uniform fee for all violations, regardless of how trivial they were. Because penalties for unaddressed violations accrued quickly, and because the city responded to aesthetic concerns, not just issues of health and safety, the ombudsman’s office found some galling examples of vulnerable homeowners spiralling into debt: One Portland resident was subject to $30,000 in enforcement liens because a neighbor complained about peeling paint on the house’s exterior. That resident was struggling financially while acting as caretaker to multiple relatives and could not afford to prioritize a paint job, she said. 

Investigators found that complaints were most common in racially diverse communities with a high recent increase in home value, which is to say, gentrifying neighborhoods, and that a complaint-based system could be weaponized among neighbors. In short, the report concluded that penalizing home owners into compliance harmed low-income, elderly and generational residents. 

Croft said the city’s development services instituted some of her office’s recommendations, including de-prioritizing housing violations that don’t pose a risk to health and safety, and providing ways to reduce or eliminate liens once a violation is resolved.

“Changes to the city’s owner code as an example of how a complaint-based system can be reformed,” Croft said. “Due to those changes, now city action is triggered only after a certain number of unique complaints are received from people who actually live near the location.”  

The top six city agencies cited in complaints to the ombudsman’s office are transportation (27%), police (10%), management and finance (9%), permitting and development (9%), parks and recreation (8%) and water (8%).

The office reported that complaint numbers have increased every year, and that recent trends show they are hearing from more unhoused people and people living at shelter sites. In order to identify populations that may not know about ombudsman services, the office has been collecting demographic information, on a voluntary and self-reported basis, from individuals it serves, and has begun asking about housing, disability and veteran status, gender and sexual orientation and economic vulnerability. 

More recently, the office identified the wildly varying rates vehicle owners were being charged for private request tows, which police order for vehicles that have been in an accident or became inoperable on public roads. The city has a contract with tow truck operators that regulates pricing, but the contract at the time did not include private request tows. One tow company did not voluntarily adhere to the contract, and unsuspecting vehicle owners were charged as much as four times the contract rate – sometimes as much as $2,000 for a short-distance tow. 

“While this practice was legal, it exposed vehicle owners, who were already in a highly stressful situation, to widely disparate rates, depending on which company responded to the tow request,” Croft said. 

The tow company in question responded to the office’s report by agreeing to adhere to contract rates, and PBOT has said it is reviewing the matter. 

“Currently we’re looking at the issue of towing from private properties, focusing on the impact of towing from apartment complexes on renters with low incomes,” Croft said. 

Working With Council

When the office is unable to resolve a case, it has sometimes made recommendations to city council, not always successfully. But during this week’s city council meeting, many local leaders reflected on how to strengthen communication between the ombudsman and their offices. Councilor Candace Avalos noted that with the city’s new representative form of government, she and her colleagues are hearing more district-specific concerns and complaints, and expressed a desire to better partner with the ombudsman’s office.

“We often recommend council testimony if people are raising more of a policy concern rather than something the city has done to them specifically,” Croft said. “I think where our office can bring added value is more with cases of community members coming with issues that are not so straightforward, where it’s not necessarily just connecting them with the bureau, where there would need to be more inquiry and investigation. And that is something we have the capacity to do. So I would encourage those cases that look more complex or are not so straightforward, those could be good candidates to pass on to us.” 

“Your job is to basically state objectively the problem, and then our job is to care about that and then actually take time to build a better system so that problem starts to go away,” Councilor Dan Ryan said. “I don’t think we’ve utilized what’s come out of the auditor’s office as much as we should.”

To contact the city ombudsman, visit https://www.portland.gov/auditor/ombudsman/make-complaint-about-city-bureau-or-office. For more information about the office, visit https://www.portland.gov/auditor/ombudsman.