Guest Column: Support Morgan Schmidt and Oliver Tatom for Deschutes Commission

Published 9:15 pm Friday, November 4, 2022

Over the past six years, I have attend countless Deschutes County meetings and at times provided testimony to the commissioners. I have met with commissioners individually and in joint meetings to discuss issues ranging from mental health services, to traffic safety, to our housing crises.

From these meetings and as my times as the chief of police it has become clear the key issues we face are a shortage in affordable housing, lack of access to treatment for those suffering from mental illness, camping on our streets, and the general safety of our communities. As Commissioners Tony DeBone and Patti Adair ask for our votes, it is only reasonable to review what they have accomplished over the last four years to address these key issues.

Commissioners DeBone and Adair have actively supported opening up rural lands for the construction of high-cost housing, while at the same time voting to increase the costs of construction for affordable working family homes in Deschutes County. A recognized best practice includes governmental bodies donating their surplus parcels of land to nonprofit organizations for use in building affordable housing. Such donations significantly reduce the cost of buildings homes for low-income families. Commissioners DeBone and Adair ignored best practices and forced nonprofits to pay over $2 million for surplus county parcels on SW Simpson and NE Connors avenues in Bend, significantly increasing the cost of building 140 low-income homes in our community.

County budget summaries from 2020 through 2023 highlight the nexus between homelessness, lack of affordable housing, camping on our streets, and lack of access to mental health care. By statute Deschutes County commissioners are required to provided adequate mental health services to meet the public need. Commissioners DeBone and Adair have failed to adequately increase funding to sufficient levels required to meet the documented increasing demand for treatment in every year they served. This leaves city police officers and fighter/paramedics doing the work county mental health workers are trained to do and should be doing.

It increases police and fire department costs to the cities, has required police and fire agencies to increase their staffing levels to meet the additional calls related to mental health not being addressed by Deschutes County and has increased the response times to calls for assistance for officer and firefighters/paramedics as they prioritize and manage these increases in calls related to mental illness.

This month, Commissioners Adair and DeBone voted to exclude most abortion health care coverage for county employees. Both Commissioners Adair and DeBone justified their decision based upon their “feelings” and “personal values,” not upon county operational or administrative needs. Their actions add additional obstacles to female employees attempting to exercise their rights of choice as guaranteed in the Oregon Constitution since 1983.

In summary, during the last four years Commissioners DeBone and Adair have shifted cost of the mental health crisis response from their county to city budgets — negatively impacting police and fire response times; increased the cost of building affordable housing — not decreased it; and initiated an attack on female employees’ constitutional right to seek health care. They now state they are using their personal feelings on given issues to make county policy and budgetary decisions, moving county policy to the extreme right. They are entitled to use their “feelings” to make policy in their own business, but not in furtherance of Deschutes County’s operations.

A vote for Oliver Tatom and Morgan Schmidt for county commissioner is a vote to bring county policy making back in alignment with fiscal and operational needs, increased commitments to mental health treatment and expanded affordable housing.

Just as important, a vote for Morgan Schmidt and Oliver Tatum is a vote to renounce the current policymaking based upon DeBone and Adair’s “feelings,” personal beliefs and partisan politics.

I respectfully submit this not as a Republican or Democrat, but as a native Oregonian, a veteran, a resident of Deschutes County since 1991, who has supported, donated to and voted for both Republican and Democratic candidates over the past decade.

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