Oregon State Capitol

State leaders in Oregon have announced that they will be combining their state’s tax revenue with federal stimulus funds to create hundreds of new nursing home jobs.

The Associated Press reported (“Federal aid will create nursing home jobs,” March 28) that lawmakers are talking about using a combination of state and federal dollars to help pay for more than 300 new nursing assistants in long-term care facilities in all 36 Oregon counties.

The Register-Guard in Eugene called this development a “welcome instance of job creation during an economic recession” (“Nursing homes to hire 300 employees,” March 27) and said:

Legislatures have underscored the importance of creating new jobs at a time when more than 211,000 Oregonians are unemployed. However, the measure was initiated not as a job creation program, but an effort to improve safety in Oregon nursing homes.

A governor’s commission in 2007 recommended increasing staffing levels at Oregon’s nursing homes to improve quality of care. The new job creation project will enable the state to fulfill the recommendations of that commission.

Leslie Frane, director of SEIU Local 503 in Oregon, said the new jobs will start at $10 per hour.

They will be paid for over a 28-month period by the increase in federal Medicaid funding that was enacted by the economic recovery package. Dr. Bruce Goldberg, director of Oregon’s Department of Human Services, estimated the state would spend $3 million to $4 million of its own money on the project while the federal government will spend $8 million to $10 million.

“These 300 jobs are an important part of what we do at [the state Department of Human Services] — keep people safe. And we know that increased staffing does that,” he said.

In a related development, the long-running Oregon Project Independence (OPI) program, a home-care service that provides basic services such as meal delivery, adult day care, and transportation, and thus enables some people over 60 to stay in their homes and avoid going into long-term care facilities, is due to run out of money by the end of June but may receive new funding if a house bill passes. The same bill also proposes the creation of an Aging and Disability Resource Center program.

Advocates for elders and the disabled have spoken out in Oregon newspapers in favor of continuing to fund OPI (see “Funding state program will save money in the long run,” Estacada News, March 25; “Elders’ health deserves legislators’ support,” Statesman Journal, March 9).