One year after Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber granted regional workforce groups more authority to launch job training programs and secure business grants, Central Oregon and a handful of counties hope to start a new coalition to make control of these efforts even more local.

Deschutes, Crook, Jefferson and seven other central and eastern Oregon counties are petitioning to form a new Local Workforce Investment Board.

The local boards bring business, labor, education and government groups together to try to bridge region-specific barriers to higher-skilled workforces.

The groups are behind a host of programs that link job seekers and employers through the state’s WorkSource offices. They also report work- and labor-force issues to the governor’s office.

Seven local boards operate across the state. But while six are located in Portland, Eugene, Salem, Medford, Corvallis and Clackamas, the Central Oregon counties are lumped in with 21 other counties in a rural coalition called The Oregon Consortium.

Central Oregon’s demographics have changed dramatically since the consortium formed in the 1980s. Deschutes County is now an official metropolitan statistical area with more than 160,000 residents.

The large, rural network “is just too big to work,” Deschutes County Commissioner Alan Unger said Tuesday. The rural consortium includes vastly diverse regions such as Wallowa County in far northeastern Oregon, Columbia County on the north Oregon coast and Coos County on the southern coast.

Unger serves on the state Workforce Investment Board, which oversees the local groups, and has been one of the leaders in the push to form a new organization.

Under the proposal, Deschutes, Crook and Jefferson, as well as Gilliam, Hood River, Klamath, Lake, Sherman, Wasco and Wheeler counties would break off from the Oregon Consortium to form the new group.

The idea is for the local workforce group to better represent Central Oregon and the surrounding area’s demographics, according to Andrew Spreadborough, executive director of the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council, one of the local groups in the rural consortium. Breaking off from the consortium could also help counties within the new group secure more state and federal funds tailored to their workforce needs.

“We’d be able to better address some of our regional needs by getting the right people at the table,” Spreadborough said.

The Oregon Legislature would have to approve the new group before it could break off from the rural group, so no formal action could take place until early next year. But state officials don’t seem to have objections.

“The governor has suggested for the counties to do what works,” Kitzhaber spokeswoman Melissa Navas said Tuesday. “If these 10 counties are deciding to band together, the governor is in support of that position.”

The hope is for a smaller group to be able to tailor its job recruiting and skill-building programs specifically to Central Oregon and its neighbors, Unger said. Agencies like WorkSource Oregon’s Bend office are helping link employers with workers, but the public sector hasn’t always taken the lead.

“When businesses tell me they go to Craigslist to find employees, that tells me the system now isn’t the best out there,” Unger said. “We’re trying to develop new partnerships and programs to better align K-12 (schools), community colleges and economic development groups.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7820, eglucklich@bendbulletin.com