There’ve been claims of a Mr. Mander moving into Deschutes County – folks call him Gerry. He’s from Massachusetts originally, but with deep ties to the South, and recently got run out of Texas by a federal court.
Former Oregon Deputy Attorney General Pete Shepherd used reptilian imagery to describe the process of gerrymandering, where a region’s voting districts are designed to advantage one party disproportionally: “slimy,” “slithering,” and preferring “darkness to sunshine.”
On Wednesday, Nov. 19, Shepherd, Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler, and members of the District Mapping Advisory Committee showed up in protest for a meeting that the Committee had already voted, 4-3, to cancel a week prior. Outside the shuttered Barnes & Sawyer boardroom, Shepherd called it a “premature termination of deliberations” in a speech to the small crowd.
“We were expecting a meeting today,” said Kebler, who served on the DMAC. She forwarded an email to the Source from a confused constituent. “A lot of Deschutes County residents were planning to attend… especially given the fact that the 11/19 meeting has been on the schedule for months,” the email reads. “Why was the last meeting canceled before the community had the opportunity to make final comments?”
The mapping advisory committee was formed in July to create and choose between proposals for the geographic boundaries of theoretical county commissioner voting districts.
Commissioners currently hold at-large positions, representing the entire county as opposed to each representing a section, but a prospective ballot measure on the DMAC map could establish separate political districts – a first for Deschutes County.
Since summer, DMAC has been meeting and discussing different map proposals. At the Nov. 12 meeting, DMAC voted 4-3 to advance a proposal, Map C, to the Board of County Commissioners for review. That four-person committee majority consists of two appointees each from County Commissioners Tony DeBone and Patty Adair, while Commissioner Phil Chang appointed the remaining three.
In 2022, voters approved Measure 9-148, which made commissioner seats non-partisan – at least on paper. DeBone and Adair are Republicans, meaning that Chang, a Democrat, is often outvoted when policy differences arise.
Put simply, Republicans control the highest-level electoral body of Deschutes County. Opponents say they’re utilizing districting to keep it that way, ignoring the demographic reality. Chang used the words “partisan power grab” to describe the proceedings.
Measure 9-173, which voters approved last year, will expand the three-person Commission to five members in 2027. Commissioners asked DMAC to come up with five districts – A, B, C, D and E – to put before voters to approve.
DMAC’s proposed Map C “leaves Districts A, C, and E favoring Republican votes,” according to Mark Kelley, a former member of the county’s Facility Project Review Committee, “by putting almost all of Bend (with approximately half of the County’s population) into Districts B and D.”
Paul Lipscomb, a retired Marion County judge, called the map, “an attempt to maintain the current Republican majority of the commissioners in a majority Democratic county.” Kelley pointed to the 2024 general election, where Deschutes County voters went 53.47% Democratic and 43.06% Republican.
“Yet,” he wrote in a memorandum to the Commission, “Map C would have the Republican-voting precincts end up with 3 of 5 Board seats starting in 2028… Whether by design or by coincidence, the map bears the hallmarks of gerrymandering.”
Commissioner DeBone disagreed with this analysis. “We live in a 49/51% world,” he told the Source. “This is a non-partisan seat and there are more independent/unaffiliated voters than Democrats or Republicans.”
DMAC relied partially on voting records (without looking at party affiliation) to create map proposals. Lipscomb called this “legally impermissible,” warning it could lead to a court battle. “No other county in Oregon has ever used voter registration data to establish commission districts,” said Kelley.
After DMAC’s conservative majority approved Map C on Nov. 12, the final Nov. 19 meeting was canceled “without sufficient public notice,” according to former Deputy DA Shepherd and Committee members Carol Loesche and Andrew Kaza.
“I observed that the process was open/public, advertised and promoted in the environment we have today,” DeBone said.
Some oppose the idea of districting altogether. “The Commission required you to disintegrate our community into five fragments,” Shepherd wrote in a letter to DMAC. “The arguments in favor of this proposal explicitly appeal to our differences, rather than emphasizing our many and vastly more significant common concerns.”
“While on the one hand districting can create a closer connection between an elected official and their constituents and enable more focus on the issues and needs of the district, this can also cause a more divisive approach to the job they were elected to overall,” Judy Stiegler, a former state representative and current political science instructor at OSU-Cascades, told the Source. “Specifically, districting has the potential to narrow the approach of the elected official… it is a tug-of-war not only philosophically, but practically.”
DeBone said that the County Commission “will be receiving the [DMAC] recommendations at our regularly scheduled meeting on Dec. 3” before taking “next steps” to put Map C on a future ballot. With a judicially and politically experienced opposition amassing against the districting proposal, those steps may be on shaky ground. “I don’t like conspiracy theories, but I don’t believe in coincidence either,” Kelley professed.
This article appears in Source Weekly November 27, 2025.
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Districting subverts “one person, one vote”. In creating districts, commissioners are effectively choosing voters, rather than voters choosing commissioners. We’ve never had districts for commissioners in the past….why now?
Fight fire with fire here partisan go for the throat politics is a nationwide trend. It’s just being applied to the county and I do not agree that this is fair nor is it legal. Additionally, if we’re being asked to vote on a map then give voters two choices not just a yay or nay to a Republican generated map that allows minority rule!
Agree. 2 or even more choices. A nonpartisan committee consisting of trained mediators and retired judges, for example, could be empaneled to draw a map. No need to rush to completion in time for the May election; give this vital matter the time it deserves.
What it really comes down to is presenting two options for voters. One that favors red (map C) and an alternative that favors blue (??). This is truly the only fair way to let the electorate decide. And DeBone’s claim that we’re 49/51 is untrue. If the maps were drawn based on last election votes then Dems were up by 10 points over Republicans, not to mention all the people who voted for a non-electable candidate. But that’s a story for another day!
The 2 Republican Deschutes County Commissioners who voted for nonpartisan elections threw that idea out the window when they set up their Mapping Advisory Committee. That and every other aspect of the run up to the May 2026 “primary” have turned hyper-partisan.
Interestingly, this scheme by local Republicans to cling to power by map manipulation mirrors recent rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the May 2024 ruling in the case of Alexander v S. Carolina NAACP, the 6 conservative judges gave permission to southern states to draw Congressional district lines that favor Republican election prospects by diluting Black representation
Judge Alito in his majority opinion in this case unabashedly said that seeking to make a seat safer for a Republican is a goal that does not violate the Constitution.
Similarly, the partisan-biased Mapping Advisory Committee’s work product packs as many Democratic voters in as few districts as possible.
On the other side of the question, making all 5 County Commission seats at large seats would be a ghastly betrayal of the 65% of the voters who supported John Heylin’s ballot measure. From it would hatch one party rule, and an all at-large Commission would certainly guarantee a Democratic Party-ruled Deschutes County for some time to come.
It’s a large county with diverse interests–and all of those interests deserve to be represented.