Bend City Councilor Barb Campbell and her partner, Foster Fell, live next door to a residential mental health treatment facility in northeast Bend, and they’re not particularly happy about it. Their latest problem centers on the Telecare home’s basketball hoop, the use of which, they say, creates too much noise.

Having already lobbied her fellow city councilors about what she sees as the home’s problems, Campbell has taken her troubles to the county. She’s getting precious little help from county officials, however, who clearly understand the situation better than she does.

First and foremost:

Under the federal Fair Housing Act, communities — in this case the city of Bend — banks and others cannot discriminate against housing for those with disabilities, including the mentally ill. They cannot, for example, relegate them only to certain neighborhoods or certain lots within neighborhoods. Sex offenders, by the way, are not covered by the provision.

Nor, as Campbell claims, is the home a “24-hour business” any more than a foster home is a 24-hour business.

Too, as Deschutes County Commissioner Tammy Baney points out, if basketball players — be they patients or a group of neighborhood teens — are too noisy late at night, that might be a violation of the city’s noise ordinance, but it certainly doesn’t break any county rules.

Meanwhile, while Campbell and Fell are distressed about what they see as a problem, it is, to some extent, all part of living in a neighborhood. That’s where people throw sometimes-noisy parties, rev up their motorcycle engines, or, as in one case we’re aware of, begin their garage-band practice at 10 at night.

Campbell has crossed an ethical, if not the legal, line that says she won’t use her office as a city councilor to get what she wants as a resident of Bend. She’s done so, in part, by using her city email address to message both her fellow councilors and Deschutes County officials. That government address should be for official business, not for the complaints one neighbor has about another next door.