Last week, Multnomah County taxpayers learned that officials can’t account for roughly $150,000 in gift cards and cash equivalents distributed by the Health Department. This week, Chair Vega Pederson pushed through a deeply divided vote to appoint Nathaniel VerGow as the county’s new director of homeless services.
The county already has an accountability problem. This week, it hired someone from a bigger one.
$150,000 in Missing Gift Cards
Between 2021 and 2025, the county’s Health Department distributed thousands of gift cards meant to incentivize participation in focus groups and preventive health programs.
It turns out, over 120 orders for these cards — totaling more than $150,000 — have absolutely no documentation showing who actually received them. The county had a strict policy requiring staff to log these cards within five days of distribution. But that policy was ignored.
The county’s proposed solution? A pinky swear promise to start actually following the rules they already had in place.
Four years of ignoring the rules, and no one was held accountable because nothing in the current structure requires it.
That’s six figures in gift cards. The county’s new homeless services director comes from an agency that lost track of ten figures.
$2.3 Billion in Missing Services
Before being appointed by Chair Vega Pederson, Nathaniel VerGow spent nearly a decade at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, joining in 2017 and serving most recently as deputy chief program officer — a role in which he was, by the county’s own description, responsible for overseeing LAHSA’s programs and redesigning its systems. He remained in that role through early 2026.
Last year, a court-ordered independent audit reviewed roughly $2.3 billion in homelessness funding funneled through LAHSA, covering June 2020 through June 2024 — years when VerGow was in senior program leadership. The findings were devastating:
Auditors found LAHSA routinely paid invoices without verifying whether the services were actually delivered. In one instance, the agency failed to provide documentation to verify the existence of about 2,300 housing sites it was supposedly responsible for. Attorney Elizabeth Mitchell, representing plaintiffs in the underlying lawsuit, called the system’s dysfunction and lack of programmatic oversight a “moral failure.”
The county’s announcement frames VerGow’s tenure as a credential: he “strengthened capacity,” introduced “data-driven decision-making,” and launched a real-time shelter bed tracker. Those things may be true. But there is a question the county has not answered, and does not appear to have asked:
How does a senior executive spend nearly a decade redesigning programs at an agency, and emerge with his reputation intact when a court-ordered audit finds those programs had no meaningful oversight?
There is a charitable interpretation.
VerGow was clearly aware LAHSA was broken; when LA County supervisors voted to dissolve it in April 2025, he appeared before the board to push back on the decision, arguing that LA County was moving too fast without a real plan. You can read that as an executive defending a failing institution. You can also read it as someone who understood the dysfunction better than the politicians replacing it, and was skeptical that a rushed reorganization would fix anything.
Reasonable people can disagree.
What is harder to defend is the county presenting his LAHSA tenure as a series of accomplishments when the agency was dissolved following a multi-billion-dollar accountability failure. That framing asks us to take a lot on faith at precisely the moment when the county has done the least to earn it.
Acknowledge, Promise, Repeat
Gift card tracking rules were being ignored. The county promised to start following them. LAHSA’s failures had been public for years. The county hired one of its executives anyway.
The pattern is the same both times: acknowledge the failure, promise to do better, and change nothing about the structure that produced it.
The Real Solution Is Consolidation
You can shuffle executives around, and you can promise to rewrite the internal policies. But as long as we maintain a fragmented system of government, these accountability failures will continue — the structure itself makes accountability optional.
The gift card failure happened in a department with no chain of command connecting taxpayers to results. The Joint Office of Homeless Services operated much the same for a decade, because the city and county could always point at each other when things went wrong. (And they did!)
We don’t need to import solutions from agencies that couldn’t manage their own. We need a structure that makes accountability unavoidable.
Consolidation wouldn’t eliminate bad judgment. But it would eliminate the jurisdictional maze that makes it so easy to hide.
We’re gathering signatures right now to put this question before a charter commission. If you haven’t signed yet, join the movement and sign the petition today.