Susheela Jayapal, now running for Congress, tried to influence a bidding process as county commissioner, auditor says

Multnomah County Auditor Jennifer McGuirk raised concerns Friday that an elected official influenced a county bidding process to favor a Seattle based nonprofit. McGuirk said the elected official in question is Susheela Jayapal, who was then a county commissioner but who has since resigned to run for Congress.

The nonprofit she favored, Housing Connector, initially ranked six out of eight prospective contractors, too low to get the work, according to a memo McGuirk sent to current county commissioners and members of the media on Friday. But after Jayapal intervened, it ultimately secured a $780,000 contract, the memo says.

McGuirk told The Oregonian/OregonLive that, while Jayapal “tried to influence” the process, the auditor’s office determined that Jayapal did not commit fraud or abuse her position. Officials in the auditor’s office did not find any personal connections between Jayapal and the nonprofit and thus found no personal benefit to her, McGuirk said.

Jayapal told The Oregonian/OregonLive that she did not do anything improper. The bidding process was designed to select nonprofits who would help connect people experiencing homelessness to private landlords under a program called Housing Multnomah Now. “The Housing Connector program is a proven model for moving people from the streets and one that I believe will make our system far more effective and efficient,” she said in a statement.

“I have no regrets about advocating for it. It is unfortunate that some people think I pushed too hard, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as pushing too hard when it’s a matter of addressing our homelessness crisis, delivering results and getting people the resources they need and off the streets as quickly as possible.” In March, their intention to work with , even though it did not apply for the work until May, the memo said.

The nonprofit is based in Seattle, and two of its seven board members work at real estate tech firm Zillow. It relies heavily on the Zillow platform to carry out its nonprofit work connecting tenants who have experienced homelessness with landlords willing to rent to them. After Housing Connector was ranked below the minimum qualifications for the work, Jayapal talked to workers in the joint city of Portland Multnomah County homelessness agency, the memo said.

The Joint Office then changed the scope of work and asked all eight bidders to respond, the memo said. Jayapal said that she did not dictate how the Joint Office should respond to her concerns and she agrees with McGuirk that the proper approach would have been to cancel the initial request for proposals and start over.

The changes in the scope of work and the fact that Housing Connector was awarded a contract compelled McGuirk to notify commissioners what her office found, she wrote. “I am concerned that the county’s contract award allocation process was not insulated enough from outside influence to assure impartial and open competition, and that outside influence put undue pressure on Joint Office employees,” the memo says.

McGuirk said Jayapal and then Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson, who had yet to be elected county chair, learned about Housing Connector during a visit to Seattle to see King County’s relative better success than Multnomah’s at getting unhoused residents into apartments. Because the selection process was changed at the urging of an elected official, there is not the normal level of documentation for why the changes were made, McGuirk said.

Jayapal is among several Democrats longtime U.S. Rep Earl Blumenauer in Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District..