Deschutes County will continue working with the City of Bend on establishing a semi-managed camp in Juniper Ridge. After voting to reject a resolution last week, and receiving pressure from Mayor Melanie Kebler to come to a agreement on this project, County Commissioners voted unanimously on Oct. 23 to approve a resolution establishing the proposed 170-acre sanctioned camp, called a “Temporary Safe Stay Area.”
After the Board’s earlier decision to reject the resolution, Kebler said a decision was necessary to kickstart the funding process for the camp in Juniper Ridge, meant to
address ongoing safety concerns on land north of Bend, populated by hundreds of encampments.
The new resolution, which lays out what’s allowed in the area, the intent and the City and County’s commitment for funding, limits camping to approximately 40 acres and reduces that to 20 acres in the second year of this resolution. The initial agreement allowed camping on approximately 170 acres of property owned by the city and county.
While the City of Bend still needs to approve this new resolution, Kebler is confident that will happen, she said at the Board meeting.
On Oct. 16, County Commissioners Phil Chang and Patti Adair rejected the original resolution. Chang was worried the original resolution left the County open to legal issues, while Adair saw some changes she wanted to make, including minimizing the area people will be allowed to camp in.
Following that meeting, Kebler urged the Commission to reconsider its action, telling them they needed to approve a resolution before Oct. 23, or the City would have to use funds for a different project, like more safe parking.
“I appreciate the work that everyone has done in the past few days, staff especially, to try to put together some compromise and options to put forward here today,” said Kebler.
County legal staff advised the Commissioners to not approve the original resolution, according to Chang at the meeting. After some discussion, it was clear the City and County staff did not agree on which plans were viable.
While the agreement has been explored in many forms, Commissioners were ready to make a decision.
“I very much want to see the agreement that we made on Sept. 5 move forward. We are hearing from the City of Bend that they will only accept one form of the agreement to move forward,” said Chang at the meeting. “While I really believe that we could have proceeded in a number of ways, if this is the only way that we are going to get our agreement from sept 5 implemented then I will vote yes.”
Now that Deschutes County has agreed to the proposed resolution, the City of Bend will likely vote to approve the resolution, allowing them to move forward.
This article appears in Source Weekly October 17, 2024.
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Whew, good! Thanks for this excellent report, Ms. LaFollette. We are finally on a rational, feasible path toward finally getting people off the streets and into the stability of a safe location. But, please, let’s not reduce the size of the semi-managed camp location in the second year if the need is still great. Then we would be back where we started.
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What exactly are the details of a proposed “managed camp”? And what exactly does a kick start the funding process involve? Tax payers dollars? Putting that on our water bill without a vote as done with transportation tax? Maybe the readers would like to know why the county legal staff are concerned? Could you give the readers more details of how that manage camp works for accountability and data purposes? The problem is that many of these individuals suffer with substance abuse and mental illness and they belong in a high barrier facility to treat the root cause and it would actually be a more humane effort to build a proper high barrier medical treatment center. Letting them park and create a situation where they remain oppressed because most don’t want the help they need, is not humane. Too bad Phil Chang flipped. We need to build high barrier shelters to actually help these folks. Why don’t you take that land and build a proper high barrier facility and not a camp ground that perpetuates their situations?