On Election Day, voters in Deschutes County overwhelmingly approved a measure that expands the Board of Commissioners from three members to five. Measure 9-173 had garnered 64.46% of the vote as of the latest returns Wednesday.
The positions created by the measure will appear on May 19, 2026 ballots in Deschutes County, with the new commissioners taking office in January 2027. Those commissioners will serve for two years before the schedule changes a bit, to allow elections for the new positions to be held during presidential election seasons after that.
“Ballot Measure 9-173 set a schedule for the election of the commissioners to coincide with the Presidential Election cycle,” County elections officials explained to the Source Weekly. “That means the two newly elected commissioners will serve an initial two-year term. Then in 2028, three commissioner positions will appear on the ballot and the elected commissioners will serve the usual four-year term.”
With two more people on the Commission, County officials will need to carve up the budgets differently in order to make room for two more salaries. County commissioners earn $125,149 per year as of 2023.
While those new salaries won’t come from new taxes, and won’t won’t be factored into the current budget cycle, commissioners will get practice in tightening their belts this year, with a tough budget cycle coming, commissioner Tony DeBone told the Source Weekly.
“If Phil and Tony could go have a beer together, maybe it wouldn’t be so contentious, you know?” —John Heylin
“I’ve been in office for, this is my 14th year, and it’s always been kind of a 5% growth with the cost of doing business following that,” DeBone said. “We’ve never worried about our structural deficit in our future budget, but last year and now this year, it’s starting to happen because of the cost of doing business, inflation compounding on itself, health care, the PERS costs, just everything is going up. So we’re going to be in a tight spot this year, and so we’re going to kind of practice being tighter with our budget.”
DeBone came out against the measure expanding the county commission, he said, partly because of the additional cost to the County. Fellow Commissioner Patti Adair also publicly opposed the measure.
“We’re not raising taxes. We’ll just take some resources from somewhere — direct resources on the ground and put them in the front office,” DeBone explained.
With the new commissioners running in May 2026 and taking office in 2027, and with DeBone and Adair both up for reelection in November 2026,
County Commissioner Phil Chang, who won reelection to the Board this year, is the only current member of the board who’s guaranteed to serve with the two new commissioners — and whoever wins DeBone and Adair’s seats.
“Taken together, this vote, which overwhelmingly passed, and the nonpartisan commissioner measure in 2022 that overwhelmingly passed — I think that these two votes together are sending a message to the Board of Commissioners that the voters think we could be doing a much better job, and they’re going to make our positions nonpartisan, and they’re going to send us some help, because they want us to do a better job,” Chang told the Source Weekly.
And while Chang also admits the addition of two more salaried positions in the County will have “real costs,” he said, the additions may also help the County have better oversight of itself.
“I think that having two more brains at the table is going to help us not make horrible financial mistakes, like some of the ones that I can point to from the last 10 years, which have cost us millions and millions of dollars,” Chang said. “I would point to the — largely symbolic for taxpayers — property tax rate reduction in 2018. And I would point to poor oversight of the sheriff, who has been a political ally of a majority of the Board of Commissioners at key periods in the past. So they let him do things that came back to bite us later on, legally.” Chang was referring to various lawsuits settled by numerous former employees against current Sheriff Shane Nelson, accusing him of retaliation and civil rights violations. Nelson did not seek reelection.
Advocating for more budget oversight is also the position of John Heylin, the Bend resident who spearheaded the effort to expand the County Commission. Heylin, who owns Unofficial Logging Co. in downtown Bend, spent the better part of a year collecting the over 7,000 signatures necessary to get the measure on the November ballot, along with a group of volunteers.
“My argument all along was, it is financially irresponsible for two people to be in charge of a budget of almost three quarters of a billion dollars,” Heylin told the Source Weekly. “You can point to lawsuits, you can point to past decisions that they’ve made that have cost the county millions to say that, you know, if we have better oversight, we’d be saving.” The County’s total adopted budget for fiscal year 2025 is $727.8 million, according to county documents.
Adding two new commissioners also lifts a restriction commissioners have experienced under a three-member board: quorum rules that limit a majority of board members from meeting without making the meeting open to the public.
“Two commissioners will now be able to meet privately outside of a formal meeting, which is not possible with our current structure,” County officials explained.
With commissioners’ votes often going 2-1, with DeBone and Adair often voting opposite of Chang, Heylin believes lifting quorum rules might help commissioners have more informal gatherings that could ease tensions and relieve potential misunderstandings before they meet in the more-formal County meeting setting.
As he put it, “If Phil and Tony could go have a beer together, maybe it wouldn’t be so contentious, you know?”
This article appears in Source Weekly November 7, 2024.
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That whole “budget tightening” thing is such a red herring. We’re talking about 0.04% of the county budget.