The Deschutes County Voters’ Pamphlet provides a window into the heated battle over political districting in Deschutes County.
The guide includes bios and information on candidates for sheriff and county commissioner, plus city council and mayor candidates in Bend, Redmond, La Pine and Sisters.
But nearly half of the 56-page guide is dedicated to a single item: Measure 9-185, the proposed map to create new voting districts for Deschutes County Commissioner elections.
The pages are filled with 49 arguments both in favor and in opposition. Local politicians, business owners, advocacy groups and residents are all making their perspectives known.
There’s never been so many arguments filed for a local measure, said Deschutes County Clerk Steve Dennison, whose office published the guide.
“This one seemed to have struck a chord on both sides, both for and against, that drove it to some unprecedented numbers,” he told the Source.
Measure 9-185 marks the third consecutive general election cycle in which Deschutes County voters have been asked to change the structure of the County’s governing board. That structure could influence who gets elected to a board facing thorny issues like homelessness, rural land use and affordability in what’s still one of the fastest-growing counties in the state.
That growth has also resulted in a dramatic shift in a reliably conservative voting base — one where Republicans outnumbered Democrats less than 10 years ago — to one where Republican-backed candidates have struggled to win local elections.
While county commission races are nonpartisan, the fight over the proposed district map has become highly polarized along party lines. Candidates from both sides are leading two competing political committees that have raised tens of thousands of dollars for campaigns to support or defeat the district map.
Supporters, who generally lean conservative, say the proposed map would ensure representation for rural voters as the county board grows from three members to five. Opponents, who are generally left-leaning, argue the maps are a last-ditch effort to give Republican-backed candidates an edge in future elections.
Meanwhile, a third group is rallying funding and support for a different voting system they say would make it easier for candidates not backed by either major party.
There is at least one thing supporters and opponents agree on right now: It’s anyone’s guess whether the districting effort will pass on Nov. 3.
“My prediction is, it’ll be close,” Deschutes County Commissioner Tony DeBone, who is leading the committee in support of the map, told the Source.
How we got here
The committee led by DeBone, called Deschutes For All, had raised about $30,300 in cash as of Sept. 28. Most of that came from a $20,000 donation by the Deschutes County Farm Bureau, whose president, Matt Cyrus, is a Deschutes County planning commissioner and served on the committee that drew the map. Others include $2,500 from the campaign of Chris Dudley, the former Portland Trail Blazer and Sisters resident who unsuccessfully ran for governor earlier this year, and $1,500 from David Benson, co-founder and CEO of HVAC manufacturer BasX.
The opposing committee, called Don’t Gerrymander Deschutes, had raised about $33,400 as of Sept. 28. Its biggest donations include $9,000 from the Strengthening Central Oregon PAC, which supports progressive candidates, $5,000 from the Plumbers and Steamfitters PAC and $5,000 from Michael Bayard, who is opposing a winery near his home north of Bend.
The campaign against the map is co-chaired by Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler and Rick Russell, who was elected to a two-year term on the county commission in May. He won one of the two new seats added to the board after voters approved a 2024 ballot measure expanding the size of the commission.
Russell said he’s not sure how voters will react to the district proposal in November.
If they reject the measure, county commissioner elections will remain under the current system — anyone from any part of the County can run for any seat, and Deschutes County voters at-large elect each commissioner. The board’s future majority has signaled it plans to take a look at other models for representation.
If the measure passes, it would create a system similar to Congress or the state legislature. Starting in 2028, candidates would run for a seat in the geographic district in which they live, and only voters who live in the same district participate in the election. For candidates who already have a spot on the commission but don’t live in the proposed district tied to their seat, the measure could force them to move or run for a new seat.
Russell said he could see how voters might support the idea of districting, because it means people would get someone on the county commission who lives near them.
“If districting is about greater representation, I’m for it,” said Russell, a Democrat. “But this map is about favoring one party, and I don’t think voters are looking for more partisanship on the County Commission.”
The proposed map would split Bend along U.S. Highway 97 into two districts, east and west. Another district would cover Redmond and the surrounding area. Another stretches from Terrebonne to Sisters and wraps around the east side of Bend, and another covers La Pine, southern Deschutes County and reaches up into parts of southeast Bend.
Between 38,240 and 42,576 people live in each district, according to county documents.
In 2024, nearly two-thirds of voters approved a ballot measure expanding the commission. Two years prior, voters approved a measure that made commission seats nonpartisan, meaning nonaffiliated voters could participate in primaries. Parties still endorse and support candidates, influencing who gets elected.
The local Republican party was a main opponent of each of those reforms, while many supporters were local Democrats.
Michael Preedin, a city councilor and former mayor in Sisters, is an anomaly in the back-and-forth over the county commission structure. In 2024, he supported expanding the commission to five members. Now, he supports the districting proposal.
“It’s almost been a continuous process,” Preedin told the Source. “If you want better representation, breaking the County up into five pieces of equal populations is that next natural step.”
“I don’t think the process was so messed up they should just throw it out,” he added.
‘The map kind of makes itself’’
DeBone and Commissioner Patti Adair, who is running for U.S. Congressional District 5 this fall, began discussing districting not long after the 2024 election. When explaining his motivation to do so, DeBone often describes a conversation he had at the Bend Senior Center with someone who assumed the expanded board also meant geographic representation.
Critics took issue with the process almost from the beginning. DeBone and Adair each appointed two members to a seven-person map-drawing committee. In an attempt at balance, they gave Phil Chang, the lone Democrat, three appointments. The group split along those lines throughout the process, including when the committee decided to use voter registration numbers instead of U.S. Census data to balance the districts, whether to hold a final scheduled meeting after the maps had effectively been decided, and the final map proposal.
The committee also clashed over the topic of whether to examine party affiliation of registered voters in the districts. A majority of members voted against officially using that data with hopes of avoiding bias on the advice of County lawyers.
But based on recent presidential voting results, the proposed map does tend to favor conservatives, according to an analysis from the Sightline Institute, a progressive think tank in Portland. In both 2020 and 2024, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won among Deschutes County voters with 53%. But Trump would’ve won the three more rural districts on the proposed map — a majority of seats — by anywhere from 2% to 19%.
About 35% of registered voters are not affiliated with either party, while 30% are Democrats and 27% are Republican, according to Deschutes County voter registration numbers from September.
In a recent interview with the Source, DeBone acknowledged districting is “one of the most inherently partisan things you can do.”
But said he feels the map was created based on logical geographic divides, not to favor his party.
“The map kind of makes itself,” DeBone said. “That ends up being the dynamic of … maybe the effort to go to five was to pack the court — maybe, nobody’s told me that — referring to partisan decision-making and who gets elected. We’re nonpartisan seats.”
DeBone has served on the Deschutes County Board of Commissioners for 16 years. He was defeated in May by Jamie Collins, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran and climate scientist who was backed by the local Democrat party.
In January, Democrats will hold a majority on the County Commission for the first time in decades. It’s expected the new board will change course on several high-profile topics by limiting conversion of farm-zoned land outside of cities for low-density housing and taking a more willing approach to investments in homelessness projects.
And with the exit of DeBone, who lives in South County, and Adair, who lives near Sisters, at least four of five candidates on the new board will be from Bend.
Without districts, proponents of the map argue, county commissioners will become concentrated to one area: Central Oregon’s largest city. As an example, they’ve pointed to the Bend City Council, which doesn’t have districts, and six of seven members live west of the Deschutes River, according to Deschutes County property records.
County Planning Commissioner Cyrus, whose farming group gave $20,000 to the pro-map campaign, told the Source the farm bureau’s board was “very concerned about what this county might look like with complete Bend dominance.” He cited more bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, vehicle registration fees, fees on new natural gas homes and high-density rental housing — what he called a “Soviet-style land use model.”
But Russell, who lives west of Redmond, pointed out that the two Republican candidates on the commission ballot also live in Bend.
“I think the only explanation for that is that this is not really about rural representation,” Russell said.
What comes next
Tammy Baney served as a Republican on the Deschutes County Commission for 12 years before losing to Adair in a 2018 primary. She now works as the director of the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council.
In 2006, when Baney was first on the ballot, voters shot down a measure to create a home rule charter for Deschutes County, similar to a local constitution. It would’ve expanded the commission, made the seats nonpartisan and created districts — the same reforms that have been on the ballot in recent years.
The current piecemeal approach to changing the County Commission structure is a symptom of voter disenfranchisement, and has resulted in polarization, she said. She feels the County could benefit from another look at the charter, which could address a broad menu of items from commission structure to whether the sheriff is elected or appointed, an increasing discussion amid turmoil in local law enforcement elections.
Baney called the proposed districting an “ill-advised direction.”
“Rather than waiting until the community is frustrated, I really encourage the community to go to the commissioners and say, ‘Let us really look at this. Let us spend time. Let us not be backed into a timeline because we want to put something on the ballot because we’re angry and frustrated. Let’s actually be intentional and meaningful about what the options are and whether we like them or not,’” Baney said.
If the current district proposal is defeated, the board’s new majority would have the power to craft a new measure to create districts.
“I am basically recommending to people that we defeat this ballot measure and then the new county commission gives it another try,” Chang, who chairs the commission, told the Source. He said a new “appropriately appointed and balanced” committee could explore different models for districting, like having some seats elected at-large and others tied to districts.
Chang and other Democrats elected to the commission haven’t taken a strong stance on efforts to bring ranked-choice voting to Deschutes County, which could make it easier for candidates not backed by either party to get elected.
Deschutes Defend Our Democracy Coalition, which started out as a campaign against the proposed district map, has collected about one-quarter of the signatures needed to place ranked-choice voting on the ballot in Deschutes County.
Brian Smith, director of the Tribal Democracy Project, a political action group helping lead the effort, said reforms should happen at the grassroots level, outside of people in power on the county commission.
“I think it’d be difficult to have the folks who have been the beneficiaries of a broken system to take the lead on reforming a system,” Smith said.
Others who oppose the current districting effort say they also wouldn’t support a renewed effort under future leadership.
That’s the case for Pete Shepherd, a Sisters resident who served as a deputy attorney general with the Oregon Department of Justice. Last year he wrote letters to the county commission warning about flaws with the process. On a recent Friday afternoon in Sisters, he joined Russell and a few others to help wave signs along U.S. Highway encouraging people to vote no on Measure 9-185.
“The risk that politicians in the future will succumb to the desire to pick their own voters … I don’t think it’s worth it,” Shepherd said. “It’ll create the opportunity for politicians in the future to give into their worst nature.”
This article appears in the Source October 1, 2026.
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