Message from OWEB’s Executive Director: OWEB Budget and Staff Changes

Message from OWEB's Executive Director: OWEB Budget and Staff Changes

NOTE: The following information is for OWEB’s operating budget only. The agency’s grant fund updates can be found on our website at https://www.oregon.gov/oweb/about-us/Pages/board/2020-Jun.aspx.

OWEB is proud to be a strong partner to many of you across Oregon, so we wanted to give you an update about our staffing challenges and next steps. You have likely heard about the severe budget shortfalls in Lottery revenues. Based on those shortfalls, we let staff know in May we would need to reduce our agency’s operations budget—including staff—by 33%, or 11 staff. Over the last month, we have been working to finalize options, including finding reassignments or positions outside the agency for those OWEB team members. While we’ve been successful in finding places for staff to work with other agencies, we will be losing their great expertise and customer service for the remainder of the biennium.

The staffing shifts are happening quickly, given the incredibly serious budget situation facing OWEB. In fact, many shifts already have occurred. We are currently working to identify functions that each reassigned staff person fulfills for the agency and, to the extent possible, will move essential functions to other staff. However, as you can imagine, there will be tasks we can no longer complete and services we can no longer fulfill, given the 33% operations budget reduction. In other cases, we will be able to complete tasks on a very limited basis. We ask for your patience as we work through this process.

Very shortly, we will finalize points of contact for each of our grant programs, and will reach out to our grantees and partners with that information. If you find yourself without a point of contact due to staff departures, please contact the following staff for assistance:

• Fiscal and grant agreement questions – Courtney Shaff
  
• Grant program questions – Eric Williams
  
• Monitoring and reporting questions – Renee Davis
  
• Policy questions – Meta Loftsgaarden

Please contact us with questions, as there may be functions we haven’t thought to find a home for yet. Again, we appreciate your patience during this time. We want to remain good partners, but will be stretched thin. Please be aware that you may see longer times for payment processing or responses to questions.

We will continue to track the budget as we move through this biennium, and into the 2021-23 biennium as well. OWEB is a strong organization, and we will weather this storm, but you will see major changes in the coming months and over the next year. We commit to keeping you informed as we move forward.