Southern Oregon Government Watch: Should the Grants Pass City Council authorize spending tens of thousands to study local nonprofits?

Grants Pass City Councilor Victoria Marshall wants the city to study how many nonprofits are operating in Grants Pass, what services they provide, and what their service capacity or budgets look like.  The request for this workshop agenda item was made a few weeks ago, and the Mayor and City Manager rightfully turned down the request because the city does not directly govern or retain information about nonprofits and has no jurisdiction over nonprofit organizations.

Grants Pass Mayor Clint Scherf properly explained in the Council workshop of June 29^th why this request was turned down and why such a broad request would be an inappropriate project for the city to take on.  Not to be deterred, Councilor Marshall made the request yet again in the City Council meeting of July 1, where it nearly turned into a full “spirited” debate and at least two other Council members seem to be in favor of launching this massive project in some form.

The term massive could perhaps be in the eye of the beholder, but I tend to agree with the city staff who estimated that Councilor Marshall’s specific request would take hundreds of hours of staff time.  The average fully loaded cost per hour of having staff take on a project like this is probably $75 to $100 per hour, making the likely effective project cost potentially well in excess of $20,000.  The City Manager stated that there would likely be a recommendation that the city hire an outside consultant to do this project because of the size of the project.

The specific request from Councilor Marshall was for City staff to provide in a workshop the following information about nonprofits in Grants Pass:

• List of all nonprofits in Grants Pass
• What services they provide
• Are there any duplications of services or gaps?
• Whether nonprofit organizations have the capacity to perform contracts
• Whether these organizations get funding from the City, the State, or the Federal Government
• Whether multiple nonprofits are working together or competing for the same grants

This is indeed a massive project, depending on how detailed this information needs to be.  Certain other Council members appropriately questioned the value of this project.  Councilor Marshall stated several times that this is not her request, but that local citizens are asking for this detailed information.

As this debate dragged on, making a fairly long July 1^st Council meeting even longer, Councilor Joel King stated from a simple Google search:  “There are 500-630 nonprofits in the Grants Pass Metro area including 92 churches, 12 mental health organizations, 12 youth development organizations, 18 foundations in grant making,” and he went on with some other info that came from a simple google or AI search.

This was such a large request, the City Manager suggested he needed to put together a Council memo just to estimate the time and cost for the city doing this project.  And it took close to 23 minutes of Council discussion just to get to the point of agreeing to start with a preliminary memo from the City Manager to help scope out the project and provide some preliminary information about this request.

Allow me to add my two cents to this discussion, in hopes that it might save the city a little money and/or save the city some staff time.  I’ve served on nonprofits boards, I’ve served as the treasurer for two separate nonprofits at different times over the years, and I’ve done a little research into nonprofits at different times in the past.

1. List of all nonprofits in Grants Pass – even this part of the request is not simple or easy.  Would national nonprofits need to be listed here?  Would nonprofits based elsewhere in Oregon but sometimes provide services in Grants Pass be listed here?  As the City Manager stated in that last Council meeting, AI is not a reliable source for accurate information here (AI is generally limited to what information is made publicly available online).
2. What services nonprofits provide – I’m not aware of any central public database that provides this information, especially not one specific to Grants Pass.  Even 501(c)(3) nonprofits don’t have to disclose all services they provide in annual tax filings and only have to generally list information about what they do in annual filings.  Unless the nonprofit provides a comprehensive list of services on their website, each nonprofit would have to be contacted and would have to voluntarily comply with information requests.  And many religious or church organizations are not even required to make any annual tax and other government disclosures.  Some religious or faith-based nonprofits prefer not to have any contact with government.
3. Are there any duplications of services or gaps?  This is an extremely subjective question that could vary a great deal depending on who is answering the questions.  And what specific services are the “citizens” making this request interested in studying?  Nonprofits provide a very wide range of services, especially when medical-related nonprofits are added to the equation.
4. Whether nonprofit organizations have the capacity to perform contracts – this is nearly impossible to answer unless all the nonprofits out there voluntarily comply with information requests or the City narrows what sort of service contracts would be involved.
5. Whether these organizations get funding from the city, the State, or the Federal Government – This information may or may not be detailed in annual tax filings, and again not all “nonprofits” are required to do detailed tax filings that are eventually disclosed to the public.  Again, knowing this would be somewhat dependent on the nonprofits voluntarily disclosing this information when requested.  You can find annual tax filings for all 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, but they are usually at least a year or two old and nonprofits are not required to disclose their budgets unless they apply for a grant that requires such a disclosure.
6. Whether multiple nonprofits are working together or competing for the same grants – the quick and dirty answer here is nonprofits are always competing with each other for various grant opportunities – both in government grants and private foundation grants.  And there are thousands of privately run foundations that give out grants to nonprofits and others.

The bottom line is that to have accurate information, each nonprofit that operates in Grants Pass would have to voluntarily provide the information to the city that Councilor Marshall says that “citizens” are requesting.  This is a nearly impossible task, and certainly an extremely costly project just to gather as much information as can possibly be collected.

In my opinion, this is a waste of staff time and waste of public money to move forward with this project unless the request is significantly narrowed.  Citizens or Council members interested in moving forward with this project need to come forward and answer why they need this information in order to appropriately narrow the scope of the project.

But even if the project scope was significantly narrowed, it’s still not clear why the city should spend any amount of money or staff time on this project.  The City of Grants Pass has not historically been the provider of any “social” services, with a few minor exceptions.  So why should the city spend a significant amount of time and money studying the organizations that do provide social services of different kinds?

There are nonprofits out there that provide an extremely wide range of services.  Some are social services, some are the provision of fine arts or performing arts, some provide medical services, some are faith-based services, and so on.  The City is not in the business of providing these types of services, generally speaking.

So, what is the true agenda behind this costly project request?  If this request could be narrowed down to something like providing details on all nonprofits that provide services directly to the local homeless population, that might be feasible and perhaps even valuable.  But at the end of the day, the organization that is currently building out our new homeless services site wasn’t even providing any “local” services until they competed in a city grant proposal process.

Therefore, knowing the intricate details of all nonprofits operating in Grants Pass today isn’t the answer to everything, because nonprofits could expand what they do in Grants Pass tomorrow.  Ultimately, this is a massive market study that belongs in the private sector and isn’t a project that should be paid for by Grants Pass taxpayers.