Bend, Deschutes County to Increase Juniper Ridge Homeless Funding

The City of Bend and Deschutes County will spend an extra $550,000 to keep a designated homeless camp north of the City open for an extra six months, through June 2027.

The two governments had already agreed back in January to delay the expected closing date for the camp. A resolution approved by the Deschutes County Board of Commissioners on Monday formalized the agreement, with the Bend City Council expected to follow suit Wednesday evening.

That resolution changes an initial agreement Bend and Deschutes County signed back in 2024 to create a “Temporary Safe Stay Area” on undeveloped City and County-owned land off of U.S. Highway 97, called Juniper Ridge. It was a move to address public safety concerns, help move people into shelter or housing and eventually clean up a growing encampment where people had been living in RVs and trailers for years.

They agreed to share costs for portable toilets, trash service, water, cleanup, security patrols and nonprofit outreach work while incrementally reducing the allowed camping area before closing the area to camping.

Temporary Safe Stay Area Location

With the timeline delayed, total costs are expected to rise to more than $1.5 million for the County and $1.2 million for the City, not including cleanup costs. Per this week’s resolution, each will chip in an extra $125,000 for case management and another $150,000 for operations.

County commissioners approved the funding by a 2-1 vote, with Phil Chang and Patti Adair in favor and Tony DeBone opposed.

“We don’t have funding for this,” DeBone said. “I love people and I want to help people, but we don’t have a structure for how to do this.”

So far, the funding has helped nearly 70 people move out of the site into shelter or housing since February 2025, according to a City data dashboard.

But 185 people are still living there, according to a Sept. 14 County staff presentation.

“I am concerned that there are not other places established for people to go if we were to close the temporary safe stay area in December,” Chang said during the meeting. “We will have more places for people to go in the future. Some of those things are going to take a little bit more time.”

Even with some low-income housing projects on the horizon, shelter space is limited, and there is little funding to open more. Even with extra time, the City and County will have to increase its current rate of moving people from the camp into housing by more than double to avoid displacing campers next year.

Homeless advocates with the Central Oregon Homelessness Alliance urged the County to approve the extra funding at a Sept. 14 meeting.

“I believe the money appropriated thus far has been well spent, considering the time it takes to establish trust with a chronically homeless population,” said Chuck Hemingway, an advocate who has taken local governments to court over recent homeless camp sweeps. He warned that closing the camp at the end of this year could result in exponentially greater costs down the road, like emergency medical calls to more remote parts of the County, more staff time dealing with dispersed populations and potentially greater wildfire risk in other areas.

The County has used grant funding to thin juniper trees and cleared brush to reduce wildfire risk at the safe stay area. Wildfire was one of the public concerns that spurred officials to create the safe stay area in the first place, after a cooking fire at a camp ballooned into an 80-acre blaze on a hot and windy day in August 2024.

Although the City has reported dozens of people moving out of the camp into shelter or housing, there are still more people living at Juniper Ridge than when the safe stay area was first designated.

County staff attribute that mostly to people moving in after sweeps of other large encampments in Central Oregon, mostly notably the May 2025 closure of China Hat Road in the Deschutes National Forest, which displaced between 100 to 200 people.

As of June, the City and County have started preventing new residents from moving into the camp, Erik Kropp, deputy county administrator, told county commissioners. At the same time, they’ve reduced the size of the allowed camping area from 150 acres to 75.

Since then, the number of people at Juniper Ridge has dropped from 214 to 185, according to a staff presentation.