A Land Swap 20 Years in the Making Could Result in Another Managed Camp. It's a Good Plan

Right now, a land swap deal between the Oregon Department of State Lands and Deschutes County, underway for 20 years, is nearing completion. The deal will swap some 137 acres of county land near East Antler Avenue in Redmond for 140 acres of state lands south of the Deschutes County Fair & Expo Center, which the county wants to use for “future Fair and Expo use.”

One caveat: the county must remove the people currently occupying its land. The plan at this point is to engage in a 10-month-long process that will remove people from that 137 acres and relocate them to another piece of county-owned land nearby.

On its surface, this seems fair. For one, the relocation will fall under the tenets of a state law, HB 3115, that seeks to ensure the safety and dignity of people experiencing homelessness — a fairly far cry from the response people might have imagined when in June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, which sought to fine people for sleeping on public property. The fear there was that with the Grants Pass decision, cities would opt to employ more draconian methods to remove people experiencing homelessness; but Oregon’s law precludes that.

The county’s proposal also seems fair in that it includes provisions for portable toilets, garbage and water at the new location. That’s more than people currently living on the 137 acres of county land are experiencing.

Still there are some areas of concern.

One, it’s not entirely clear whether Deschutes County and the City of Redmond have the funds to maintain this level of service in perpetuity.

Second, there’s the problem of finding a service provider to run the thing — to answer phone calls, lay out and enforce rules and manage emergencies, among other duties. When the Coordinated Houseless Response Office issued a request for proposals to run a managed camp on the county’s land earlier, no one came forward. According to documents issued from the office of Deputy County Administrator Erik Kropp regarding the relocation, staff reported that “it will be easier to find a service provider to provide mobile case management services.” Challenges to providing a managed camp include lack of capacity among local nonprofits and the “overall magnitude” of the project, the documents stated.

So when it comes down to it, the issue here is capacity. The local nonprofits that are already doing this work are busy in other parts of the region. If capacity is the main issue, will an option for mobile, rather than constant on-site services, be enough to get someone to come forward to do this work?

On another note, the status of the Coordinated Houseless Response Office is in flux, according to recent reporting from The Bulletin. Did that office conduct the level of outreach necessary to make that project fly, or is Central Oregon really at an impasse in terms of our ability to staff the necessary services for projects like this?

Public servants in this region routinely lament the dynamic they’re seeing: Too much need, too few resources and people willing to do the things that need to be done.

In this case — assuming the funds are there to provide these services in the first place — we now have some political will behind the notion of a managed camp. It would be a shame to see the holdup here be a lack of someone to actually do the work on the ground.

This article appears in Source Weekly August 1, 2024.