Local News

Getting out the voteIt’s 9:24 a.m. and Bend Area Transit (BAT) bus number three buzzes along its route through the city’s south side, picking up passengers headed for destinations as diverse as its individual riders, when Annis Henson, seated in the second row, starts speaking out about voter registration and the November election.

Henson grips a clipboard snapped shut on brochures, voter registration forms and a pen. Everyone on the bus swings to attention at the sound of her voice.
"If you haven’t registered to vote yet, I can help you do that this morning," Henson says. "If you’re 17 years old on or before October 14 and you turn 18 by November 3 you can register to vote in the state of Oregon." She answers a bus rider’s question about registering if someone just moved here from out of state. She passes him the clipboard and he begins filling out a voter registration form. At Henson’s count that’s 70 people she’s now registered.
Henson is a member of Citizens for Bend Area Transit (C-BAT), a group of volunteers working to spread the word about a ballot proposal that would create a transit district for Bend and transfer BAT’s operating expenses from the city budget to a permanent property tax increase - 39.3 cents per $1,000 of a home’s assessed value, or about $48 a year for a home assessed at $287,000.

At a Deschutes County Board of Commissioners work session on July 9, the true financial problems of the Humane Society of Redmond came to light. There was, of course, already plenty known about the monetary crisis the animal shelter had found itself in by this point, but the public was nonetheless surprised when board members told county commissioners that they had no other option but to close the facility…unless they could strike a deal with the county.
Since then, the county has floated the humane society more than $41,000 to keep its doors open and is discussing the possibility of loaning the shelter almost $1 million to keep the organization afloat. Call it a hometown bailout.
The initial meeting with the county came only a matter of days after the executive director of the Humane Society of Redmond, Jamie Kanski, said she was asked by HSR board members to resign in the wake of making the shelter's financial woes public. Fast forward to mid-September when the shelter announced that their current debt was in the neighborhood of $1.5 million. Just days later, HSR board president Dale Gilbert stepped down from his position amid criticism from HSR members.
These are the flash points of the long and winding saga that is the much-troubled story of the Humane Society of Redmond. In between the lines are stories of long-lasting financial and organizational mishaps, some downright bad luck, all of which is peppered with infighting between shelter members, board members and staff. Also lost in the shuffle is a focus on the programs and staff positions that were cut as a result of significant budgetary cuts.
But it's important to note, as new HSR board president Dr. Rachel Oxley, a Redmond-based veterinarian, notes that the shelter is indeed open today, and there is certainly hope for a shelter that some had come to think of as a lost cause.
"There has definitely been a focus on people rather than the animals, and I'm really hoping and have been working on bringing the focus back to where it should be," Oxley said.
She went on to say that the board is currently in the middle of several efforts aimed at not only reestablishing a sense of organizational structure to the HSR, but also rebuilding some trust from the community that has been lost as a result of the financial shortcomings.