The Redmond Managed Camp Cleared a Funding Hurdle. Can It Clear the Toughest One?

If you were in Central Oregon before the pandemic, you would have seen a very different landscape as it pertains to the people living unsheltered. People camped in the junipers and overstayed their allotted time on public lands. Tent encampments were still visible. But what did not exist as it does now: The breadth of services, including overnight shelters, safe parking and tiny home villages that now seek to house some of the hundreds of people who are experiencing homelessness every day.

In 2019, the Source reported how local service providers were once again rallying to stand up a winter warming shelter to give respite to people on some of the coldest nights of the year. That was the extent of Bend’s low-barrier, overnight shelter offerings. A similar thing was true in Redmond, Sisters and other locales. But after the tumult of the pandemic, massive amounts of public dollars — largely federal but also state dollars — helped construct the public shelters and the safe parking spaces that exist today.

With American Rescue Plan Act dollars about to dry up, and with state funding for homeless services being cut back due to federal cuts, stable funding is going to be a big problem. Some of the facilities that cropped up to meet a need have already been in danger of closing. So far, Deschutes County Commissioners have moved to meet some of the need by allocating funding for safe parking. This month, during a panic over Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding, they also allocated County dollars to NeighborImpact and The Giving Plate.

These policy decisions are helping some of the agencies already doing the work — but what about other plans that are still in the pipeline?

Case in point: the managed camp planned for Redmond. County and City of Redmond officials approved the funding for construction of the camp late last month — but that’s just for the building. So far, the camp doesn’t have a service provider signed on to run it… and even if it did, there’s no real guarantee of stable funding. As Deschutes County Commissioner Tony DeBone pointed out during the meeting in which commissioners voted to approve additional funds for the camp construction, if a government is going to make an effort to start something that then gets stopped due to funding gaps, it’s potentially more destabilizing than not starting at all. That’s why DeBone voted no.

Another issue DeBone brought up: Who owns the camp? If and when things go wrong, who can the public reliably turn to in order to gain information about the place? In other words, who’s going to be accountable?

Take a gander at a site like NextDoor and you’ll see that when issues around government-funded projects come up, a primary thing people want to see is accountability. Running a government-funded apartment complex or managed camp is no different than building a government bridge: The public wants a transparent process about how the sausage is made. When problems arise, the people running the facility (at the behest of the government) should answer to that.

Over the last several years, a lot of money has flowed into this community in hopes of easing homelessness. In some cases, we’ve seen how a shortage of qualified service providers has caused some projects to fail to launch. In this funding landscape, there’s always a chance that that happens again. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t still have high expectations for good service.

As local governments work in tandem on this next piece — the operation of the Redmond managed camp — is it possible to bake more accountability into the process? And if sharing information with the public about both successes and failures scares certain service providers away, they probably weren’t equipped to handle the job in the first place.

This article appears in the Source November 13, 2025.