By: Jessica Floum
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler called inaccurate reporting of 911 call hold times to the City Council and the public a "failure of leadership" Wednesday. Yet the city still employs the leader responsible for the false reports.
Former 911 director Lisa Turley, who gave the City Council overly rosy statistics as recently as March despite knowing they were wrong, retired from that post on March 31. But the city is still paying her to advise it on creating a non-emergency 311 call system.
City officials did not say Wednesday how much they are paying Turley, but Jen Clodius, spokeswoman for Wheeler's Office of Management and Finance, characterized Turley's new role as a highly paid analyst.
A city salary schedule suggests Turley could make as much as $40,000 for three months of work.
Clodius said her bureau agreed to place Turley in the position for April, May and June because then-911 Commissioner Amanda Fritz asked the finance office to do so. The 911 agency is covering her pay, she said.
In a report released Wednesday, City Ombudsman Margie Sollinger explained that the 911 center had omitted all but a few seconds of hold time for all 911 calls from cell phones, which represent 75 percent of the calls Portland 911 receives, from its public reports.
The problem stemmed from a flaw in the technology tool used by the 911 center to screen cell phone calls to make sure they are not accidental "pocket dials."
The ombudsman found that bureau leadership knew about this problem as early as 2015 and should have known more than a decade ago. Even so, Sollinger reported, the bureau reported the falsely positive numbers to the City Council and the public in the last two year's budget sessions.
"I believe this was a failure of leadership," Wheeler said. "I believe this was a failure of accountability. I believe the City Council was misled."
Turley told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Tuesday that she's tried to forget her time at the city and with the bureau since retiring in March. But the 911 bureau is still paying her while she finishes a report explaining the city's options for implementing the 311 system. Her employment, first reported by the Portland Mercury, is set to expire at the end of the month.
Fritz managed the emergency communications bureau from 2009 to 2012, and again from this January to April, when the mayor took over management of all bureaus. Fritz did not respond to requests for comment about hiring Turley for the 311 role.
Turley also did not respond to requests for comment.
Mayoral spokesman Michael Cox noted that the mayor is in charge of overseeing the management office, where the non-emergency call system is likely to land.
"We are committed to exploring the possibility of a 311 system here in Portland," Cox said. "We are not committed to housing that in (the Bureau of Emergency Communications)."
The Portland City Council voted 3-0 Wednesday to improve oversight of the city's 911 center and to examine its call-time data, following the recommendations in Sollinger's report.
Commissioners Dan Saltzman and Chloe Eudaly were absent.
Wheeler, Fritz and Commissioner Nick Fish agreed that the City Council needs to examine operational decisions and data reporting in the 911 office, which, unlike most bureaus, operates without the direction of city code and rarely brings decisions before the council.
But Fritz sparred with Fish and Wheeler over the cause of the bureau's problems, which she attributed largely to staffing, both at the council meeting and in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive Tuesday.
With its unanimous vote, the council directed the 911 bureau to work with other bureaus to accurately measure the bureau's performance and charged Portland's Technology Oversight Committee with reviewing any technology changes.
Wheeler said he believed that data problems in the 911 office are "more serious than it has been characterized" and that he did not believe the cause was a staffing problem.
Fish raised a palm to Fritz when she attempted to help interim 911 director Lisa St. Helen answer his question about why the bureau reported false numbers after discovering the mistake. He told Fritz he wanted to hear from St. Helen, whom he later asked if the problem could be attributed to short staffing.
"It does not have anything to do with the short staffing," St. Helen said.
Fish pressed on.
"You have identified something very very serious, and that is incomplete information coming to decision makers," Fish said. "We are free to make bad decisions. Our system allows us to make bad decisions. But we rely on having good data upon which to make good or bad decisions."
Fritz later returned a subtle jab to Fish.
"The city budget office, which I know Commissioner Fish shares my pride in having helped create... also missed this issue when we were evaluating whether performance measures were met," she said.