Deschutes 2040: Last Call For Your Input To Help Our County Grow Well

Population growth, more drought, longer fire seasons, and a steady stream of tourists lie in our community’s future. Deschutes County 2040, our Comprehensive Plan under construction, is supposed to help us navigate that future and guide our growth, development, and resource protection for the next 20 years. The draft plan released on March 15 falls short and the people of Deschutes County only have a few more weeks to correct that.

Our Comprehensive Plan should be a statement of what our community wants to be when it grows up. The population of the County has increased by 50,000 people (or 32%) since the last Comp Plan update in 2011 and all signs point to continued growth. The Comp Plan should lay out a vision of what we hope to create or develop in our County and also what we value and want to preserve. That vision should be operationalized into concrete goals, policies, and actions that should translate into zoning, land use regulation, and infrastructure investment decisions.

The Plan will touch the lives of every single person in Deschutes County. There are chapters on housing, recreation, natural hazards, economic development, farm and forest lands, and natural resources like water and wildlife habitat. Our quality of life, our public safety, our economic livelihoods, our rural environment, and our sense of place will all be affected by it.

Hundreds of community members have provided input to County staff and the Planning Commission on what they’d like to see in the plan. They expressed concern about depleting our limited water resources and asked for measures to conserve water. They shared hopes that we could preserve farmland, wildlife habitat, and open space. Many asked to limit new destination resorts and rural residential development because of impacts to land and water.

But many who submitted comments to the Planning Commission don’t see their input in the goals, policies, and actions in the draft Comprehensive Plan. Yes, there are statements about the value of high desert habitat and open space, but there are also policies that facilitate rezoning of those important resource lands for luxury rural residential development. High level statements about the need to conserve water resources are not backed up with land use policies that would drive real conservation, only policies that support planning, studies, “encouraging” conservation and waiting for state action. While the draft Comp Plan reminds us that under state law new destination resort development will be restricted within 24 air miles of a city with over 100,000 people (policy 11.7.4), much of chapter 11 is dedicated to explaining how the County will provide for development of new destination resorts.

Speaking of destination resorts, even though the County recognizes the 24 air miles law in the plan and that Bend is now over 100,000 people, many are concerned that County Commissioners will still try to approve the next new destination resort application that crosses our desk. This concern about the goals and policies in the Plan having no teeth played out last year around mule deer habitat. Though the 2011 and current draft Comp Plans both include a policy to “ensure Goal 5 wildlife inventories and habitat protection programs are up-to-date through public processes and expert sources,” a majority of the Board of Commissioners refused to update our mule deer winter range habitat map in 2023 despite new data compiled by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The people of Deschutes County have choices to make about how we grow. We can express our preferences in strong measureable goals, policies, and actions in the Comprehensive Plan. The final Hearing on the Comprehensive Plan with your County Commissioners, the ultimate decision makers, will be on May 8th at 5:30 pm at 1300 NW Wall Street in Bend. If you can’t make it in person, you can testify by Zoom, or submit written comments to nicole.mardell@deschutes.org and citizeninput@deschutes.org by May 29th.

Do you have a point you’d like to make or an issue you feel strongly about? Submit a letter to the editor or a guest column.