Expanding the number of Deschutes County commissioners from three to five commissioners this year would be an irreversible mistake. It would be costly to taxpayers, significantly reduce government transparency in decision-making and increase the amount of partisan politics in a level of government that is historically non-partisan.

Earlier this year, two large counties in southern Oregon, Jackson County (Medford, Ashland) and Josephine County (Grants Pass) have rejected similar expansions of their Commissions by decisive votes. Deschutes should follow suit.

An expansion will definitely lead to more “politics”, since this measure is being proposed by a group of progressive, Democratic-partisan city councilors and Democrat activists from Bend, Sisters and Redmond. The rest of the voters who will lose out are those of us that live in unincorporated areas of the county and those of us through-out the county who have the challenge of paying our bills and don’t want more government spending and taxes to pay for unnecessary new programs.

According to the adopted 2024-2025 Deschutes County budget, the current County Commissioners are budgeted to cost $931,476 for this fiscal year. This breaks down as $310,492 per commissioner. This figure includes three salaries and health and retirement benefits and costs of materials and services. Using this math, if Deschutes had two new commissioners this year it would cost an additional $620,984. This is slightly different than the breakdown that the provided the county provided in August. Regardless, in future years we can expect those to be higher, year after year.

In addition, expanding from three to five commissioners will also require the remodeling of the County Services Building and creating new offices for the commissioners and possibly an increased Commission board room and increased Commission work session. Costs of that are unknown but have been estimated by county administration as $140,000 as of August 2024.

We know from experience that five commissioners will also require more interactions of staff in the departments and the administration than three Commissioners do. This will no-doubt cause more administrative costs in future years.

Finally, an expansion will put Deschutes County at odds with the vast majority of counties in Oregon. Only six out of 36 Oregon counties have five commissioners. Two of those counties are small (Clatsop and Hood River) and the commissioner jobs are part-time, so they are not a fair comparison with Deschutes County.

However, more to the point, of the 15 largest counties in Oregon only the 4 largest counties have five commissioners. Those counties, (Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas and Lane counties), are much larger than Deschutes County. Between the four of them they have over 2.2 million people in their jurisdictions. These range from 821,000 people in Multnomah to 378,000 people in Lane. All four of these counties are significantly larger than Deschutes County which has approximately 203,000 residents.

After the top four, the next 11 counties ranging in population from 347,000 to 70,000 all have three commissioners. Two counties larger than Deschutes in population have only three commissioners — Marion (pop. 347,183) and Jackson (pop. 223,827) have three commissioners — as do the next eight counties smaller than Deschutes in population size.

Currently Deschutes Commissioners represent the unincorporated areas of Deschutes County and work closely with excellent county staff. Having only three commissioners makes that possible, and necessary. With the instigation of five commissioners much of that process will be lost or redirected to serve the incorporated cities. Compare the decision-making to what we see in the large “committee-style” city of Bend — and Deschutes County is more transparent.

Deschutes Voters should help maintain our county government in its effective form. Please vote “No” on Ballot Measure 9 – 173.

Editor’s Note

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