With a Bigger County Commission, a Messy Middle

If numbers from the last election are an indication, voters in Deschutes County were enthusiastic about the notion of making the Deschutes County Board of Commissioners larger. In November, voters supported that citizen-led measure 64.55% to 35.45%, authorizing the Board of Commissioners to grow from three to five members. Locals gathered signatures to put that issue on the ballot, and then it passed handily.

That decision seems to be borne from the experience of the current three commissioners, who admittedly have big jobs overseeing everything from county behavioral health to the embattled sheriff’s office to the construction of homeless camps and shelters. The three of them are spread thin. Maybe, by assigning each of the soon-to-be five commissioners a district, that workload could be more focused and a bit more manageable, the thinking went. This newly proposed process could help district commissioners become subject-matter experts in things like sewers in La Pine or fire hazards in Sisters, for example. But because all of those five commissioners will still vote on issues affecting the entire county, it’s hard to see how they won’t still have plenty on their plates.

So far, the parts of this process have been fairly democratic – but one part involves a protracted process before voters can decide on it. The notion of having five districts, in which voters would get to vote for just one commissioner who represents their own geographic district, rather than the current system of commissioners voted upon “at large,” was a decision advanced solely by the current county commission.

This month, a seven-member committee, the District Mapping Advisory Committee, had its first meeting. Each of the county commissioners got to choose DMAC members, with Commissioner Phil Chang getting three selections to the other commissioners’ two.

One of those Chang selected was Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler, who said at the meeting that her goal as part of the committee was to represent Bend and its interests. Of the County’s nearly 163,916 currently registered voters, close to half, or 77,671 as of most recent numbers, live in the city. If district map lines are drawn, as they are supposed to be, with equal numbers of people in them, that would allot Bend at least 2.5 of the seats on the commission — not exactly a tidy number, when another of the goals of drawing the maps is to keep communities of interest inside the same districts.

And that, really, struck to the heart of some of Kebler’s other comments at the initial meeting of the committee on Sept. 3: What purpose does drawing five lines around the County really serve? In other words, as Kebler elucidated at the meeting, do new districts serve voters better? These are valuable questions to ask.

Here’s another fly in the ointment: As of right now, as many as nine people have announced their intent to run for seats on the County Commission. None of them know whether they’ll live in the districts that they’d represent during future terms, because the lines are not drawn yet. The people who win in the newly created seats will serve for two years, and then, ostensibly, have to run again in whatever district they live in. How confusing for busy voters. Might it be better, as Kebler seems to have been suggesting, to hold off on any implementation of district maps until the new commission comes in? (We might otherwise say to hold off on bringing in new commissioners, but those dates are set.) There’s something to Kebler’s suggestion that the mapping process be slowed until the next election — but if that’s not to be, commissioners should at least consider adding in a requirement that lines be redrawn following each U.S. Census. Populations in Central Oregon shift quickly.

DMAC Committee Chair Neil Bryant told the Source that the committee will move forward with drawing maps that have five distinct districts, as the commissioners directed them to do.

In the end, whatever the committee comes up with, the vote about whether to put district maps on the ballot, for all voters to decide upon, will fall to the commission. If they do put it on the ballot, voters will get their say about the makeup — and the overall notion — of the district maps.

Along the way, expect a lot of robust discussion.

This article appears in the Source September 11, 2025.