After announcing that its $30 million budget deficit had been slashed in half earlier this year thanks to better-than-expected federal funding, the city of Portland’s housing authority said last week it had miscalculated the numbers.
The deficit, Home Forward interim executive director Michael Buonocore told the agency’s more than 300 employees in a July 7 email, was in fact $31 million, not the $13.8 million the agency had announced earlier this spring.
“There’s a lot of work ahead of us to restore Home Forward’s long-term financial health,” Buonocore wrote of the revised deficit. “We’re revamping our reporting processes so there will be more frequency and visibility on the state of our finances…I know that the idea of budget cuts is scary, and it’s hard to live with uncertainty about what those cuts will be.”…