After seven years in the juniper forest, Sami Brimmer doesn’t take flat ground for granted.
“Look how level that is,” she said, pointing to the gravel parking space below a lengthy camper trailer. “Can you imagine trying to level a trailer out in the dirt?”
Brimmer is one of 15 or so residents to move into a new developed homeless campground in the High Desert east of Redmond. The camp is coming to fruition more than two years after the Deschutes County Board of County Commissioners set aside land for the project. Leaders are banking on the camp — a homeless shelter model untested in Central Oregon — both as a first step to help people out of homelessness and as a means to clear people from hundreds of acres of government-owned land slated for industrial development in the area.
For Brimmer, 70, it’s about much more than flat ground for her trailer.
She now has easy access to porta-potties and can walk just a few hundred feet for water, instead of leaving camp and driving miles across winding dirt roads to collect it.
Most of all, she can sleep with the feeling of safety, as a long fence with a locked gate lines the perimeter of the camp.
“This was a godsend,” Brimmer told the Source, adding, “I do believe everybody in here would tell you it is or they wouldn’t be here. This is just a start.”
Deschutes County Commissioner Phil Chang said he believes the managed camp will be a key piece in the local shelter network.
“The managed camp is going to meet a lot of people’s needs for whom the other options aren’t available, or they just don’t fit,” he said.
The move is a significant milestone: Before last Monday, the 36-site camp sat finished, but empty, for five months.
Deschutes County and the City of Redmond split the $676,000 construction cost to build it. Construction finished up in March, but it took several months for the County to settle on an organization to run it. At first, the County sought one group to provide trash takeout, security, portable toilets, snow plowing and other operations, along with individual support to and service coordination for camp residents. The region’s largest homeless service organizations shied away from the proposal, with some saying the ask was too much to accomplish with a $500,000 budget for two years.
The County scaled back its request, asking only for the case management and daily support services. When no new organizations applied, commissioners chose to move ahead with a contract with First Light, an addiction recovery and street outreach nonprofit.
Executive Director Lorenzo Perez founded the nonprofit in 2022 after two decades working as an addiction recovery counselor in Central Oregon. He recently brought on Isaac Montoya, a community health worker who helped start up St. Vincent DePaul’s tiny home village in Bend, to help out with the camp.
The County has allocated $150,000 per year for about three hours per day of onsite support for residents. Perez and Montoya said they’ve already been putting in four hours or more each day helping people settle in, get new phones and replacement tires and line up medical appointments.
“There’s a lot more work to do that we’re willing to do ourselves,” Montoya said.
First Light coined the managed camp “Healing Village,” after a type of “healing-focused” case management, aiming to relieve symptoms of stress and fatigue with peer support and recovery groups, Perez said.
He said he’s already noticed a sense of safety and security with the campers. Even access to basic utilities like bathrooms and water can relieve stress, he said. Perez and Montoya said they also plan on providing portable showers, laundry and a central cooking area.
The County has allocated $100,000 per year and is relying on existing contracts for operations like trash, portable toilets, security services, cleanup, towing, snow removal and municipal water.
A new model
When it comes to moving people into the camp, Redmond and Deschutes County are prioritizing people living on government-owned lands in an area where homelessness is holding up industrial development, according to Redmond Deputy City Manager Steve Ashworth. That includes a neighboring 137-acre property slated for a land swap with the Department of State Lands and the CORE3 emergency and police training center. After clearing those lands, the priority will move to people camping on public land closer to the Redmond city center. After that the camp will intake people from other safe parking shelter sites as they close due to lack of funding, as well as a dispersed camping area north of Bend designated in an agreement between the City and Deschutes County.
The new managed camp is a step up from the designated “safe stay” area, with developed gravel parking sites, a fence, water and electrical outlets.
It’s also slightly different than safe parking programs, said Rick Russell, director of Mountain View Community Development, the region’s largest safe parking nonprofit. Safe parking allows people to park cars or set up tiny shelters at church lots, or with other willing property owners, and, like the managed camp, provides individual support. But the key difference is size: Safe parking sites are limited to a handful of people — which makes them easy to operate and cuts down on security costs — while the managed camp will host three dozen.
The density of the managed camp is noteworthy and could pose a challenge, said Russell, who is also a county commissioner-elect.
“If you’ve got 36 units all operating off of 36 generators, that’s a lot of noise to sleep in every night,” he said.
Chang, the county commissioner, said he is optimistic about the managed camp model.
“I wish we had more funds for them to have more hours” for service providers on site, Chang said. “I do believe it will be enough to make it work.”
Even if it does, future funding is still a major question mark surrounding the project, Chang said.
“I still don’t know how we’re going to continue to fund it after two years is up,” he said.
This article appears in the Source August 27, 2026.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
