Clackamas County is currently paying about $4 million annually to rent hotel rooms to transition people out of homelessness and would have only had to pay about $1 million annually on a mortgage to purchase the hotel.

1. Tootie Smith’s reversal on transitional housing will cost over $3 million annually
2. Mayors slam Clackamas County for helping ‘fewer residents for more money’

The obvious should have been pointed out in Pamplin Media Group news article “Mayors slam Clackamas County for helping ‘fewer residents for more money’” that none of the authoring mayors of that letter reside in an area that would be directly affected by transitional housing that the residents of both Clackamas proper and Happy Valley openly reject.

My family chose to move from the Portland area due to the increase in crime and vagrancy, decaying schools and reduced police services that left opportunists to threaten the security of our home and family every day. Now Portland wants to push its problems east (notice how few efforts and spaces are being made by the West Portland communities, where the money resides) and no other Clackamas County communities want to absorb it. What our city council did was stand up for residents and businesses who live in the immediate area and who do not support the addition of this transitional housing.

If it means so much to the mayors of cities like Lake Oswego and Gladstone, then by all means, ask the residents of those communities how they feel about using more of their own space to capture that Project Turnkey funding. They need to quit bullying and threatening our elected officials to avoid being put into positions where they’ll be called out for their own hypocrisy.

Chase Granger is a resident of unincorporated Clackamas County near the city limits of Happy Valley.