The Bend City Council meets on June 18. This is a screenshot. (City of Bend)

The accuracy of a Bulletin editorial was brought up in the final minutes of the Bend City Council’s meeting on Wednesday.

“That’s not accurate,” Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler and City Manager Eric King said almost simultaneously.

They were responding to a question from Councilor Gina Franzosa. She asked about an editorial on the city’s position on Senate Bill 974, which said the city opposed it. The bill, signed by Gov. Tina Kotek earlier this week, aims to build housing more swiftly by speeding up permit reviews.

“We were sort of neutral on that,” King replied to Franzosa. “We wanted to see some process improvements to it, which we got…. The League of Oregon Cities, they were opposed. We tried to take a more nuanced position to it.”

Kebler told us later that although Bend is a member of the League of Oregon Cities, the city does not always take the same position on bills.

King wrote that there was a March amendment that the city opposed, asking for changes.

“As with most bills, our position evolves, so it just seemed odd to state an early position to an amendment this past March which had changed to neutral by May,” he wrote. “The point being, in the end, we were not opposed to this bill…. The headline of the editorial did not accurately capture our current position on the bill.”

The headline was: “City of Bend opposed a bill designed to speed up housing.”

The editorial said, in part: “The city of Bend seems to be always looking for ways to create more housing in Bend. So when it opposed a bill in the Legislature that was designed to speed up more housing, we had to take a look at that bill…. It’s important to note that the city of Bend’s opposition, along with other cities, was for an early version of the bill.”

We see King’s point about the headline. A better headline would have been: “Why did Bend have initial opposition to housing bill?”

Bend had comments in the legislative record for the bill classified as “oppose.” The classification of bill comments as “oppose,” “support” or “neutral” is admittedly imperfect. Looking into it, we came to believe that the city’s early opposition was deep. There were two reasons, spoken and written testimony.

“This bill would just make our existing process more contentious and adversarial than it already is,” Colin Stephens, the community and economic development director for Bend, said in March testimony on the bill.

In written testimony, Stephens wrote shorter timelines may be possible for government reviews that are more “narrow and discrete land use applications such as variances.” But as projects become more complicated, shorter timelines may be “not possible.”

Both things sounded to us like opposition applying to the original bill, as well as a March amendment. Stephens may have meant to refer only to the March amendment.

There is no question that Bend’s city government has been committed to finding more ways to get housing built. That can be true. It is also true that the city may oppose some proposed housing reforms. The friction points are worth paying attention to.