The Bend City Council may pivot briefly on Wednesday from some immediate challenges of the city to influencing the form of the Deschutes County Commission.

When voters in Deschutes County vote in November, they will be deciding if the Deschutes County Commission should have five members rather than three. And the Bend City Council has on its agenda for its Wednesday meeting a question of whether it should make an endorsement on the measure. Should it?

Commissioners play an undeniable role in decisions that impact Bend. There are any number of examples. There has been occasional friction.

One instance: Commissioners and members of the Council disagreed over moving ahead in 2023 with a designated camping area for people who are going through homelessness on 1.6 acres of former Oregon Department of Transportation land near U.S. Highway 97 and Murphy Road. Councilors and commissioners both did offer support for the idea, initially. The county was going to provide some money to run it. The city owned the land and was going to hire a service provider to run it. Then things went kablooey. Commissioners Patti Adair and Tony DeBone got opposition from the community and voted against moving ahead with it.

“The county abandoned this pilot project before it even began and has provided no alternate sites or concrete options for the short-term solutions that we know we need right now. This is incredibly disappointing,” Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler said at the time.

Adding two more commissioners would do nothing to ensure Bend always gets what it wants from the county. It might make it more likely. The county as a whole has become less Republican and more Democratic and independent over the years — as has Bend. So perhaps the two added commissioners would tilt the political flavor of the commission less conservative than it is now. That would be a political reason for councilors to endorse the measure.

A better reason to endorse the measure would be that five commissioners is somehow inherently better than three commissioners. It could be, no guarantee.

More commissioners would mean more of them to engage with the growing community and to be engaged by the community. It would also enable more discussions among commissioners about policy matters outside of official meetings. Now, because of the public meetings law, two out of the three commissioners cannot talk about policy outside of officials meetings because that’s a majority and it would violate public meetings laws. Having five commissioners would enable some of those discussions to occur outside of public meetings. What matters most is who people elect to the Commission, no matter how many there are.

You should tell councilors what you think. Email them at council@bendoregon.gov.