tradition concerns and we are so grateful to have our tribal council members here today with us and ready to listen and learn and start to forge this relationship. So thank you everyone for being here today.
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Today as we start this meeting with the song among our people we don't sometimes use word prayers to carry our message to the Creator. Because our prayers our wants our needs our asks are all within the songs that we sing and the words that we sing to the Creator. So asking for His Divine Presence today are the words that he places in our heart that guide us each and every day. And that those things that we learn from our prayers will carry us on into the future is a little bit interpretation of the song that I sang to start this meeting. Thank you.
Thank you very much tribal council member and everyone. So as we get settled here we're going to start with a brief overview of the drive by Secretary Treasurer and CEO Bob Bobby bounnam. Thank you, Bobby. Okay,
thank you, Mayor. Can you guys hear me okay? Yes. Okay. Great. So, yeah, thank you for the invitation and having our tribal council meet with your your city council here and I'm going to talk about the tribes just briefly here and better tribes Warm Springs. We have a treaty. That was June 25 1855. In that treaty, we reserved rights to fish hunt, gather our cultural foods and the pasture livestock on unclaimed lands. And so that's our treaty of 1855. In the treaty, we seated 10 million acres of lands to the US government to exercise these rights. In off the reservation. And those this area here, the city have been is within our ceded lands. So it's really important to to know that and to thank you guys for having having all of us here to in our ceded lands here. Where we exercise our rights. So I'm very, very happy about that. And the treaty also has 10 million acres. It also identifies the reservation, which is north of here but 50 miles and the reservation is 640,000 acres in size or 1000 square miles in size. Most of the reservation is forested lands. I know if you have driven through Warm Springs, you see a lot of range lands there and a lot of folks think that that it's mainly rangelands. It is not. The reservation is 444,000 acres of land is in forested lands. So there's, we have a lot of forest area a lot of people are very surprised by that because they only see the dry part of the reservation when they drive highway 26 to Portland. So that's the that's the Warm Springs and our little bit about our treaty. And there's three tribes on the reservation or Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. There's the Warm Springs people, the Wasco people and the Paiute people. So those are the three tribes that make it the confederacy of Warm Springs.
Hey, thank you very much. In turn, we were going to go over just very briefly the structure of the City of Bend government and city council. This slide here just shows some of our core areas of service that the city government provides. We're a city manager Council form of government so we sit as a policy board and our city manager Eric keen does all of the day to day hiring, firing and running of the city's operations. There are seven members on the city council, including a directly elected mayor and we're all elected at large by the whole city. And these are the things that we do for our city every day. Public Safety basic infrastructure, including water roads, and all sorts of other things that make the city run as well as you know, trying to think about how we protect our environment and how we promote economic development and work on housing strategies for our for residents. Every two years when the council is elected every two years about half of the council is elected in an election. And every two years we set goals for a two year period. And this graphic here just represents some of the areas that we've set our goals and and some of the values that overlay our goals. So we have accessible and effective city government Affordable Housing and Sustainable Development, Environment and Climate, transportation and infrastructure in public safety. In each of those. We have specific goals that we want to work on in the next two years, overlaid by those values you see there as well. So that's sort of how we're set up. And I think there's a lot of the shared values and goals between both of our governments and our constituents. And I think we're going to continue to talk about that as we move through the meeting. So next, we wanted to talk about the good neighbor policy that the tribes have.
Okay, thank you. Yeah, the Good Neighbor policies. The tribes have is something that we've worked with others over the years for many years. It's not a written policy is one that we all talk about, and it's about how do we work with each other? How do we collaborate with each other? How do we work on projects that are in common interests with each other so we move those forward and as a group and you can get a lot of work done? Being collaborative examples is the water work that's happening in the basin with the water collaborative, and how we all work together? In that in to do good things with with water is one example but there's many other examples of being collaborative and working with each other and moving our our common interests forward.
And could you maybe explain it? Who exactly you have these good neighbor policies? Is it federal agencies? Is it neighboring governments or who do you have establish good neighbor policies with
all of the above? Yeah, so it's NGOs environmental groups, conservation groups, Forest Service, federal agencies, BLM, cities, counties, so they're all so again, back to the water collaborative as an example, that has all those groups as part of that and so working, working with everyone with again, common interest
Yeah, I think that's a good segue into talking about some of the topics of interest that we may share, one of which is water resources. So I don't know if if you were going to talk about that, or maybe Vice Chairman moody, but we'd love to hear more about the tribes connection to water and how that's an important issue for you. Okay.
Yes, water is very important to the tribes. It's one that our community talks about a lot. It's been deep in our culture. It is the first gift of the crater giving to the tribes were supposed to take care of that water and look after it and it takes care of us. So water is very, very important. It's the number one gift in we talk about a lot in our different meetings that we have. And so looking out for water for our fish that are important to the tribes because we're a river people we come from the Columbia River so fisheries is very important. Also water quality, and the importance of good clean water. Warm Springs were lower in the system, and bins higher in the system in the basin here. And so for our community of Warm Springs itself, you know, we draw water straight from the Deschutes River goes into a water treatment plant and then serves our our community. So you know, water quality is a very important thing for the tribes and so having good clean water, good conserve water back into putting it back into the stream. So we have it for the fish and for the ecosystem there. Is always been a high priority for Warm Springs. Yeah.
Thank you. I think the next topic was land use and growth.
Yes, land use.
Curious as well.
Yes. Well land using growth that is, you know, something we have followed a lot over the years from off reservation to seeing what's the cities are doing what the counties are doing for growth and land use, and how is that affecting, you know, the environment and things important to the tribes that are identified in our treaty, fisheries, wildlife, vegetation. And so as things grow, what is that doing to the environment? What is that doing to deer herds that may be disrupted for their their corridors or their winter range or their summer rains? What is that doing to the landscape on watersheds for for good water and how much water is being used? And, you know, and how much is actually being conserved to so, you know, any growth of land use is, you know, is going to use those resources and also if there's root grounds that are important to the tribes, you know, we're gonna be looking at and seeing that that area that's going to be developed has some high quality roots in that area in you know, we need to say something. So identifying those and looking at and, you know, this is very, this community here is booming, and it's, you know, has a lot of growth going on. And so what does that mean out in the future, and I know you have a lot of land use laws, you have to follow a 50 year plan out. So what is that going to look like in the future and how does that affect us? The tribes in those resources that are important to us? And again, I go back to the Treaty of 1855. You know, that's, that's on our list on you know, how are we protecting those resources and how do we work with your communities in in making sure it's wise development and as it moves forward?
Great and I think that also segues us into economic development and opportunities, including work around housing, that's something that is a top concern for our constituents here in Bend is making sure there's enough homes for everyone, and that we're doing that and building in that sustainable way. So what can you tell us about yourselves perspective on those topics?
Yeah, housing is it's important in Warm Springs, it's, you know, we're limited with housing also in Warm Springs. So how do we develop more housing for our community? We have a lot of folks that are still looking for homes. We don't have enough homes right now. So we have you know, folks that are living off reservation because of that. So they'll be living at the closest community which be Madras. So how do we do more work there, you know, we put in for a lot of grant funding to for housing development and Warm Springs. So that's that's an important piece. For us. So we're working on economic development is definitely important for the tribes also. What's the local communities doing with economic development? How can we help each other they're in some may know or may not know that, you know, we have a timber industry, we still harvest our timber. So we still have some timber we don't have a mill anymore. We have our partnership with Portland General Electric. We're, we're 49 cent owner of the project on the Pelton project with them so that's very important. To the tribes for economic. We have composites which is building these, these tiles that are for fireproof doors also. And we have our casinos. So there's some of the main ones. We also have the village that comida that there's a lot of folks are familiar and they have been to concrete over the years and get going again. So that's going to create some more jobs for our community and, and looking at other opportunities that may be out there for for development for our economy here in Warm Springs. So it's that is something that I know a lot of our folks are worked hard on. I know our direction from our tribal council is, you know, what do we do for more economic development? What do we do for land use and for housing, so yeah, a lot of very common interests with the community have been
Yeah, great. Thank you. I wanted to open it up to our other tribal council members. If there's anything you wanted to add, or say to those topics, you don't have to but just in case anything's been missed, or there's anything that any of you would like to add.
Right assuming no,
I guess the water you know, I always tell people I have to be careful how I say it because it may be a little too blunt. So I do want to I wanted to hear Ben as well. It's nice that you ask our opinion, but we were very cautious to watch what you're doing. The city as it grows. I was Jerry Knight the first time I've been down here and been downtown was a couple of weeks ago and I didn't recognize it. I mean, I came here as a little boy 50 years ago, 50 some years ago and so I'm looking at Bendis growing and understand and I asked the one counselor how big you guys are 34 square miles roughly within your city limits. Well over 1000 square miles. We probably have as many people as you guys have acres and we have as many acres as you have people so to ask you to, you know, keep us in mind as to the water. Always I mean not asking you to cater to us but to keep us in mind when we do. We do submit comment we'd like to be heard.
Yeah, absolutely. And I don't know if you want to add anything just on our approach water and water conservation and in how we can continue to collaborate in the future
because we have a philosophy as we grow that we want to use less water per person. In fact, we have data to show that that we're really doubling down on conservation, because it's it's expensive as you know, to run a water system. So conservation is also in good economic sense and good for the environment as well. And then we work in partnership, the Deschutes Basin Water collaborative, which has been kind of Reformed from the Deschutes water line. We have decades of work together and I think we have some opportunities in front of us to with the Deschutes watershed, the groundwater mitigation program expiring in 2029, as well as some rulemaking that's happening right now. And so we've been in talks about how we can partner to send a message that we want to stay together as a collaborative and share water in this region thoughtfully and we need all the tools to be able to do
that. Yeah.
Any other comments or I think that also is a good transition into one of the action items we wanted to have out of this meeting was actually a commitment of our two governments to meet at least annually, and that we would come to you next time and come to meet with your government up in Warm Springs. So how we do it at council if if folks are in agreement with something that doesn't necessarily need a formal vote right now we just sort of give a head nod and say yes, we support that. And I'm I'm seeing head nods around the table and I think this is something that we can pursue and we can have our staff start to work on the other the other thing that we were talking about doing after this was what's called a tribal harmony workshop and I don't know Secretary Treasurer if you'd like to explain what that is a little bit.
Right? Yes, I can. Yeah, Harmony workshop is a lot more in depth and detail on some of the points I just talked about today. So it'd be talking more in depth about the treaty, our land base, land status, the some Supreme Court decisions and how we treaties are formed. Talk about how we manage natural resources, how we plan and go through a lot of the things that I just talked about today but in a lot more gifts.
Yeah. And who have you done that harmony workshop
with? We've done it with the Forest Service. We've done it with the BLM. We've done it with the Natural Resource Conservation Service. We've done it with odf and W lot of state agencies. Mainly we started doing this with the Forest Service and the BLM federal agencies so they get to know with us because they're one of our trustees that look out for our resources. And then it's expanded over the years. We haven't done one in a few years. And so we're wanting to get back into doing those and I think they've been real productive over the years. So people learn who we are. And they learn a little bit about our culture and these also so we'll go in more depth about our culture. So yeah, if you want the full meal deal, it's like two and a half days. Wow.
Yeah, I think Council, I would like to first to commit to seeing how we could schedule something like that for us to attend and then also potentially inviting other local governments to see if we can combine and in all come together to learn together. I think that we can we can commit to doing that and we would love to have that resource and thank you for providing that. Absolutely. Okay, I think I think this was what we wanted to cover in our in our first meeting we do again want to commit to the next meeting occurring in Warm Springs. We thank you all very much for coming here. We know it's a drive, it's a travel. We got a chance to mingle and talk in the back for a little bit which was great. We have gifts for each of you to take with you on your way out. And we're going to stand up I think in transition kind of to our next next part of our meeting, but we would love Yeah, let me just finish my thought and then I'll come to you. We would love to have the opportunity to take a picture with anyone who'd like to from the tribal council just to help commemorate this this meeting today in council Robin, but
I want to thank the elected leadership of Warm Springs for for coming here like the mayor said. And I one thing that I hope is clear from what you're hearing from Council is that this isn't a photo meeting. This is a firm commitment from our government to continue to work with the tribal government on issues of deep deep concern for both of our governments and our mutual constituents because we recognize that we do share constituents in certain cases and that this is really I hope, the first of many concrete meetings and that we do a better job from the city side of honoring the the other governments on whose ceded lands. We are we're here today. So just to echo the mayor's gratitude, thank you.
Yeah, and I take very seriously the comment, vice chairman about having your comments heard. And I think that's something that we can talk further about maybe at the next meeting about how we're making sure that we're hearing your voice in our decisions. Thank you everybody. All right.
Anyone yeah yeah. Yeah,
we're gonna we're gonna jump right here. Behind the desk.
Right. Really, is it just
gets you any?
Okay,
welcome back, everybody. You we are gonna move to our bend city council work session and we are glad to have with us today some folks from our public safety system for a work session on just how our public safety system works and to answer a few questions. That we feel often from constituents. So if you all at the table, want to introduce yourselves and then I think we'll start with Chief Krantz.
Thank you Mike grants Chief of Police spin.
Steve Donaldson District Attorney petitions County,
that back room Deschutes County Circuit Court Judge,
thank you all for being here with us. Chief. I think you're going to start and if you wouldn't mind sliding the mic in front of you just so everyone can hear. Online in here. All right. Thank
you. Thank you for allowing us to be here today and share a lot of questions or answer a lot of questions that I know you get we get from the community. First of all, just a couple of minutes of introduction each to get us into it and I think the question and answer section will be really valuable. policing in the 21st century is a complex dynamic profession. There's no doubt it has changed drastically over the last five years the last 10 years. Policing is really more about relationships. Crisis Intervention, providing resources, education, mentorship, patrol, visibility, and in somewhere in that really dynamic list of the things we do also law enforcement and law enforcement isn't everything we do. So I think that's really a distinction between policing and law enforcement. Law enforcement is really more specific around responding to the 45,000 calls for service that we get as a Bend Police Department, from our community on both love and mercy lines and 911 calls. And when we get a call in typically is reported some sort of incident and if our officers will respond to that, and if it's a crime, that's where we then involve some parts of our colleagues here in the criminal justice system. So we have options as long for law enforcement officers and a lot of our discretion comes into play of how we solve the problem. Sometimes we respond and it's about education, sometimes respond and it is about enforcement. That could be through an arrest. If someone violated a crime that's that's an arrestable offense. It could be through document a police report and then sending that to our partners at the district attorney's office for review. It could also be through a citation, be through a parking citation. There's a lot of tools we have when it comes to enforcement around what we do to solve a problem. Generally what happens on that and as we if we make an arrest, if we arrive somewhere there's a crime, we make an arrest, that person is transported to jail or they're given a citation. They're not always taken to jail. And I think that's a good education education piece for our community because a citation is equivalent to an arrest, but people don't always associate that if someone wasn't taken to jail. We could also write a police report and that police report then gets forwarded to this district attorney's office where they really do a review and I'll let the panel's talk about that. And that's really our involvement as the police are the front end to the criminal justice system once a crime has occurred and is reported. So that's that's where we kind of have our emphasis on law enforcement and then we pass it to our partners at the DHS office. Great.
Do you want to talk to us about and and I just also want to say this is this is education for counsel, but also for the public who may be watching and we know some of this may seem kind of basic to some of us who have worked in the rural justice system, but for a lot of people, they don't know exactly what all the rules are. So we're really grateful to have folks here to help explain that. And then we'll get into some kind of specific questions, but the economics Yeah, thank you,
Bear. Keebler. Yeah, I can give you an overview of the district attorney's office, what we do how we function and kind of how we're made up we have 24 and a half total FTE prosecutors in the DHS office. Nine and a half FTE victim advocates who go into court and advocate on behalf of victims of crime and about 70 total employees. And the dean's office, which I think is larger than most people who aren't in the criminal justice system everyday dealing with it would think that a DHS office would be any sleepy little river city here in Deschutes County, but that's that's what we are. Our primary mission is public safety. And so that that mission can be accomplished in a number of different ways. One is with traditional prosecution. somebody commits a crime. We file criminal charges against them, go to trial, and convict them, send them to jail or send them to prison, things like that. And that happens every day. Really, that we have those cases. We also have a number of specialty court programs and specialty programs within the DHS office to try to divert people from the criminal justice system into a law abiding way of life, get them mental health treatment, get them substance abuse, treatment, things like that, to get them redirected and in a positive way. And those are some of the functions that we have. The chief talked about the process of law enforcement and how sort of the the investigation goes. Once it gets to our office. We review law enforcement reports police reports. And so we receive police reports from the Ben police department that's really probably our the plurality of the reports that we get from the police department. We also receive reports from the sheriff's office from the Redmond Police Department, the Oregon State Police from Black Butte ranch police and sun river police department as well as other agencies outside of this community who that investigate crimes that we could potentially prosecute in Deschutes. County. When we review those cases, we decide whether we can prove a proposed charge beyond a reasonable doubt. That's our standard because that's what we have to prove in the courtroom to a jury or to a judge. If we decide to file charges, we decide which charges are appropriate and which are not. And as the case goes through the system, it can go to trial or can end in a guilty plea and sentencing. And throughout that process. We have victim advocates who work with victims, going to court with them communicating with them about what their rights are and making sure that their rights are enforced throughout the whole process. Just one highlight from our specialty courts is the veterans intervention strategy. That's that's really our probably our newest address addition to the specialty programs that we have in Deschutes County. And this is a really positive way to try to intervene in the in the life of a veteran who finds himself or herself in the criminal justice system. The typical typical person who's involved in the criminal justice system, who's also a veteran, at one point in their life had a lot of discipline, new discipline knew how to conduct themselves. properly and so on. When they get discharged from the military or military service. A lot of people suffer from PTSD, which also in some cases leads to substance abuse or mental illness in that manifests itself in in very serious ways. And they become involved in the criminal justice system. This program is designed to get them connected with services, veteran services, mental health services, substance abuse services, to get them back on the right track to where they once were. And we've had good success in this program already and it's and it's like I said is a pretty new program. Cry crime, we're often asked about crime statistics whether crime is up or down. One thing that should be surprising to anybody I grew up here in Deschutes County and I if, before I started working at the dean's office, I would have been shocked if the DEA was at a public meeting saying that the DEA is Office files, 5000 criminal cases per year. That's should be stunning to people. That's a lot of cases for us. But that's what we do. And it's it's grown over time. It hasn't spiked, particularly in fact during the COVID time it's actually dipped, and now it's rising back up and we're about where we were pre COVID Maybe a little bit higher. The only difference in the level of the number of cases that we file is the measure 110 The reduction in possession of controlled substance charges because that's no longer a crime by statute. And so when you eliminate those, we're actually a little bit higher than we were before the pandemic. A couple of this next slide demonstrates the reduction which is a vast reduction in the number of drug possession charges that we file in a given year. And as as you can see there. We've went from 257 Heroin possession cases to six this year, pre pandemic to now that's because most of the possession charges are now not crimes by definition. And possession of methamphetamine has dropped from 633 to 62. So 90% reduction and methamphetamine possession charges because of measure 110 Not because we're doing a great job. preventing people from using controlled substances in the communities. In terms of overall cases, I listed five different categories of cases and they are all relatively stable. In terms of case filing numbers in most of those categories. You'll notice that DUIs dropped precipitously, the first year of COVID, lockdown from over 1000 to 600. And that is almost entirely we believe, because of bars and taverns being shut down and restaurants as well being shut down so that people could go out to drink and people were likely drinking at home. But not driving which that's that's in a way a good thing. So that's that's one stat that that is of interest. We file over 1000 DUIs a year, almost every year, we'll file over 1000 This year, for certain. And that's another statistic that really is kind of embarrassing, and it should be shocking to people I think. One thing we're asked about is violent crime and murder cases. Have have gone up very sharply during the COVID time from 2019 where we had one murder, which is one murder to many, but that was consistent with the years before COVID leading up to it. We would have been in the Dean's office for 30 years. We typically have 01 or two murders, leading up to 2019. We had one and 2019 We jumped up to four in 2024 and 2021. We had eight murders in 2022 which was astonishing for me, going out to those scenes every other weekend. From from March until August. It was it was really kind of amazing and and horrifying thinking what is happening here. This year we're down from that high of eight to three. I hope and pray that that's the end of it for this year. And that going forward. We're we're back down to zero. And we can you know we could all use the rest. So that's an overview of our office and I'm glad to answer any questions. Thank you.
Thank you. I think we'll we'll roll through the judges presentation and then we can have some questions at the end. Appreciate the transparency with excessive statistics. So we have judge Beth's back with us to take us through kind of how the court system works and in touch on a couple of different topics. So go ahead check it
How could he be again, counsel, I'm a circuit court judge in Deschutes County, Oregon, there are nine of us as of 2021. There had been seven of us for the entire time I've lived in Bend prior to that. So we are now a bench of nine. We are the circuit courts in Oregon or the trial level of courts in Oregon. So any decisions made there if they're appealed or appealed to the Court of Appeals and then after that to the Oregon Supreme Court, but we do all of the work on the ground we hear and decide all of the cases criminal family law civil landlord, tenant, you name it. We are the 11th judicial district so smack dab in the middle of that map then number 11 Deschutes County and so we are one of the 27th judicial districts in the entire state. We we answer to the Chief Justice's initiatives and proposed policies but generally each district is fairly autonomous and how they operate within the building.
Go to the next slide.
As a trial court, we are a court of general jurisdiction so we really do handle all matters criminal, which involves of course police and district attorney as well as the court, civil family law and juvenile matters. Most of our juvenile matters are heard up north of town at the juvenile building by community corrections. And we, with the addition of our two newest judges fairly recently, we were able to add some capacity to the courts ability to handle workflow, we created two additional dockets. So at this point in time, we have two separate criminal dockets, one of those dockets we call Criminal Court. One. Those are the out of custody matters. These are people who are not in jail for the pendency of their criminal matter. We have criminal court to and those are the people who are in custody in jail for whatever reason during the pendency of their criminal matters. And then we have two different dockets for a combined civil and family law. One is a short matter docket short matter use lightly two hour hearings or less. And then we have a long matter docket where we have we can have longer hearings on that and then addition to that we have four trial docket. So when we have capacity in terms of courtroom and space and judges, and you know no one is out sick or at training or anything else, you know we we can theoretically operate four courtrooms and operate trials out of those four courtrooms during the course of a week and try multiple trials in those courtrooms during the week. We can skip by that that's what I look like long ago when I was elected in 2012. It just reminds me how time is March all over my face. And body since then. But in 2022 Those are the last good stats we had for the entire calendar year. You can see we had 14,442 total cases filed and we conducted 54 jury trials the majority of those will always be criminal trials. There are some civil matters that go to jury trial. But most of our jury trials are always criminal trials. In addition to that we had 382 bench trials. Sometimes we try. Sometimes criminal matters are tried to the bench to a judge only without a judge that's the election or decision of the defendant. There may be many reasons for that. Other bench trials that we are typically conducting are the family law bench trials, those are without jury info on the next slide. We have I'm sure chief Krantz as well as the gunnels no have experienced the mental and behavioral health crisis. We feel that in the courts as they do in the community and in prosecution. We have had a fairly significant spike in what we call aid and assist cases. We don't have a a we have an informal aid and assist docket in the courts. And the purpose of that was to just funnel these individuals to one docket, one judge as opposed to having these cases float around amongst nine different judges and having nine different touches and risk. You know losing somebody in the cracks. aid and assist refers to an individual who is charged with a criminal offense who may not be able to aid and assist in their own defense. They're suffering from some sort of mental illness or mental disorder. And so those individuals when they are deemed on able to aid and assist that's usually after some sort of evaluation. They are placed on our aid and assist docket and we work along with community partners and behavioral health to try to get them able to aid and assist. Civil commitments have also increased dramatically last year over prior years. So you know there was a similar spike and increase in civil commitments which are a non criminal pathway, as well as people who were deemed unable to aid and assist at some point in their criminal case.
Go to the next slide. The court
does operate a few specialty courts and specialty programs. The longest standing one at this point in time is the domestic violence deferred sentencing program, DV DSP that's in partnership with the District Attorney's Office, Judge Ashby, who's the presiding judge presides over that and maintains and handles that docket. We have juvenile dependency court. So juvenile dependency matters are cases in which Department of Human Services Child Welfare has become involved children have been removed from parents and we have one judge handling those matters typically on one docket because that's best practice. So we have sort of a separated juvenile dependency track. We have mental health court, which is different than Aiden assists mental health court is for generally lower level criminal offenders who were affected by a mental disorder, mental disease, mental illness. And the goal there is to try to treat them and provide them services and rehabilitate them and get them out of the criminal pathway and that that's a program that has been around for quite a while. And then more recently, da Gama has touched on this. We have a court connected program, which is the veterans intervention strategies. So this is not a court dedicated docket necessarily, but the court is working in partnership with the district attorney's office to participate in that program and provide a little bit of of oversight there. Just in terms of the few things recently within the past few years about our court within this community. Remote hearings really began in force in at the beginning of COVID in 2020. Remote hearings prior to that time, mainly involved Portland attorneys calling him on the phone for civil civil cases. That was the that was the extent of our remote capability. That all changed and we conduct many hearings remotely at this point in time, but from about 2020 in till mid 2022. We were conducting just about all non criminal hearings remotely through the WebEx platform. We were conducting many criminal matters. arraignments and other intermediate matters not including trial remotely. And that was the bulk of majority of our work for quite a while. We are currently we have some sub committees within the courthouse building, who are trying to determine the path forward in terms of what we will continue to do mostly what we will not do remotely and require in person appearance for it has remote hearings, have afforded greater access to justice and greater access and entry to the courts. You know, there are some downsides. There are a lot of disruptions. There are a lot of issues with connectivity at times. So we're trying to balance those things and try to do what is going to be best while achieving both of those goals. You know, being able to conduct and manage court while also giving people meaningful access to the courts, who might not otherwise be able to participate very well. We have engaged in a statewide program to re address pretrial release and have new pretrial release guidelines. We have moved during orientation online, which hopefully is more convenient for jurors and encourages greater participation in the jury process. We have a new process for receiving and reviewing search warrants as a small matter. I'm on call this week. This is one of the things I do so there is a decent chance I might be interrupted for so I'm going to try to speak faster to get through this. Please excuse me if I have to walk out and we have a fairly newly formed Diversity Equity and Inclusion committee involving the bench in the bar to try to pursue those initiatives as well.
can go to the next slide.
So just basically this is probably the most important slide if we were the human flowchart we are in the right order. So my I'm at the end as as a judge but in terms of criminal justice and public safety and criminal cases that starts with the police and their investigation. And when the police have concluded their investigation and they make an arrest or the refer that matter to the district attorney's office. Now the district attorney's office becomes involved and they determine what if any criminal charges should issue. Once that happens, it comes to the court those charges may be filed in the Court and then the court takes it from there in terms of taking the case from beginning to end. Our role at that point. Before any charging decision is made our role could be reviewing requests for warrants, which is what I'm doing now for this week, is making some preliminary release decisions before someone has had an opportunity to appear in front of a judge whether they're going to be held at the jail until Monday for example, their restaurant the weekend or whether they will be released at the time of arraignment which is a person's first appearance in front of a judge in a criminal matter. We make release decisions and if we release somebody impose conditions if appropriate on that release. After that point. You know, we may accept pleas or preside over motion hearings. Or if a matter goes to trial. Most cases are not resolved by trial, they are resolved through some sort of negotiated plea. If they do go to trial, then we preside over the trial. If the person is convicted, we sentenced that person if they are placed on probation. We may be dealing with that at a later point in time if they violate conditions. of probation, they may be returned to court. That's kind of the the circle of life for the judicial system in public safety and criminal justice. So I think I will end my overview presentation there and if there are any specific questions, happy to answer them.
Yeah, I will. I'll get the ball rolling. Well, while folks are getting the questions formed, I think a lot of the comments we get from constituents are around folks who are experiencing homelessness and behavior that may be criminal that's fairly low level, trespassing, littering, things like that. And Judge I just wanted to start with you as far as what are when you see folks in front of you who are for sentencing are involved in criminal justice and they're experiencing homelessness? What are the things that the system can do to help and what are the things that may not be helpful or available for that person? That's part of the criminal justice system. I'm just thinking about, you know, someone who's experiencing homelessness and being sentenced to do XYZ, right. How do you approach that when you see folks in that situation and what are some of the pros and cons of actually being involved in the justice system at that point? Well,
if someone was before me for sentencing depending on what they are being sentenced for, they may be placed on probation, supervised probation to parole and probation where they would have a probation officer and that officer, you know, may have access to and be aware of certain local resources that could assist them in their supervision. That would not be the majority of the cases majority of the cases involve a person who is either being given a sentence without probation or maybe what we call bench probation. So that is probation to the court, but it's not actively monitored. The Court itself as an entity does not have a lot of resources to offer a person but we are mindful and try to remain mindful about the challenges faced by people who are experiencing homelessness or house lessness or, you know, other difficult conditions and certainly not try to impose obligations in terms of probation or have expectations that are unrealistic. You know, when when we do sentence them, but they're, they're not specific services per se that are embedded within the court or that we can refer people out to other than for example, referring someone to Deschutes County Behavioral Health for a behavioral health assessment, and, you know, directing them to, you know, follow up and engage in any sort of referred or recommended treatment. But in terms of the resources, we don't necessarily have those to give to, you know, wrap around the individual. There is a little bit more of that in our mental health court, because that does involve a lot of other community partners, and the case planning and the case resolution.
All right, counselors questions you'd like to have this panel answer. Be helpful. Don't all speak
on one question that came up was around just the fact that fentanyl use and how it shows up in some of those statistics because you talked about heroin and meth, but is it just under the heroin because it's the opiate opioid category or? Yeah,
so we still see heroin being used in the community. But you're right, there's there's a question about how much that number would have dropped anyway, because of the replacement of fentanyl, and that fentanyl doesn't replace methamphetamine. Methamphetamine is a stimulant, so So the that number is probably that 90% reduction is probably a more accurate depiction of what one measure 110 does in terms of our ability to to prosecute somebody for the crime of possession of methamphetamine and get them into treatment. That's that's really more realistic. 90% reduction is enormous, though. Yeah. That's about it.
Thank you all for being here. This is great. So, one of the reasons one of the things that precipitated this meeting was the discussions we've had in the community regarding the adult treatment court. And I think, Well, I think it'd be great for the community if, you know we could describe what that was. Whether there is a potential in your view to resurrect it, what we could do as a body to assist in that regard. I know I will be working on this on the lipstick on the local public safety Coordinating Council, at least the discussion not necessarily taking an approach, but in my mind, just having been through those graduations, as an observer, that was a really valuable asset in this community and I was saddened to go to the last graduation. Just wanted to hear any description you can talk about if there's a promise of resurrecting it or what we would need to do,
I would say not a promise. There's a hope of resurrecting it. I was the drug court prosecutor for over 20 years. And so I've I've been on that, on that ride from the beginning when Judge Brady created essentially the program and and, you know, it's been a very successful program. We've had a lot of people get their lives turned around so that they're good parents for their children. They are productive members of our community. They've got jobs, they're staying clean, and they're raising children to adulthood. Which for some of the participants in our program who've got it turned around is a little miracle. And so this is you know, it's it's hard for me to to accept adultery McCourt shutting down and I don't accept that it's going to shut down permanently. The reason that it shut down is basically the workforce problems that everybody's experiencing in terms of available applicants for a position. When the former drug court or adult treatment court coordinator left to go to another job in the Willamette Valley. There was an opening the courts went through a series of interviews of potential applicants, and and there were none who were able to fill that role. There's also an issue with finding a treatment provider who can meet the very high standards of the adult Treatment Court program. And so those those two things together are really at play. There's also part of it that has has to do with the reduction and the number of possession of controlled substance cases coming into the system. That's that's maybe 10 to 20% of the problem. it's really
about the workforce, the labor issue, and our offices has experienced it, probably every one of you have seen it as well, but it's it's real, and that's the core of the reason that the program shut down. And I wasn't looking for a promise from you. I was saying is there a chance How can we do a lot of potential promise resurrecting and so I appreciate it? No, I I appreciate that. And it's like, I really hope that before I retired, that it's up and running again and it's, you know, bringing in people and helping them yeah, good questions. Let's do counselor Parkinson counselor minutes. I'm sure chief Krantz knows what I'm going to talk about right now. But you know, one of the things that that you you sort of addressed this at the beginning, but I wanted to come back to it. One of the other reasons why we wanted to talk today was about the fact that there are those in the community that think that either the City Council is is or the city is telling telling you not to enforce laws or not to arrest someone that may be living on our streets, or or basically not doing not allowed to do anything. And I was hoping you could can again, talk about you know, your process when when something like this happens and also if the campaign code has impacted how you do that work, when anyway. Yeah, I mean, I think we all get that question. I know you all get it I get it. In my emails frequently. Our officers get it. And our enforcement authority comes from Oregon Revised Statutes from what we enforce as well as federal code at times, city ordinance rules that that's the piece you have a part in creating a city ordinance. But once those ordinances are made, those are our authority to enforce. We're also obligated to ensure that people's constitutional rights are protected. So and then we we go about our enforcement by also looking at those changes in law. Just because it's written in the RS doesn't mean it's actually something we can enforce. Sometimes there's case precedent case, case decisions, appellate court decisions that affect how we do those enforcement actions or if we can take enforcement action on a law that may be written in the books. Frequently, I think what we see is and I don't want to with all due respect, city council doesn't have authority to tell us how to enforce the law. So I think that's that's really the biggest issue is there is no there's no direct connection between city council policy to how police officers enforce the law that are that are really written the books and that are our job to go out in force. Where some of that confusion comes in is our community, sometimes when they call the police have a certain expectation around what they think should solve the problem for them. And we respond, we observe what's happening, whether it be a crime or maybe not a crime, and our solution because we're limited by again, rules, laws, rights, court decisions, level of violation: we're limited by that of what types of actions we can take to solve a problem. And something like I said before, sometimes our problem solving is education, leniency compassionate response around learning what people's issues and concerns and problems are, and then having some different solution, but what we see is our approach to solving those sometimes is doesn't meet the expectations of the community. Because frequently people just want to see whatever problem they called for go away, and that's not always the case. So then that's when we get that frustration and of the police officer didn't do anything right and their hands are tied or city council or somebody's telling them not to do anything. I got it. I get it to me too, is you're telling your officers not to take action. It's just not accurate. It's just that we take the action based on what we have authority to do and what we think will solve the problem at the time. And it doesn't always need to commute expectations. Thank you. That's okay. Could I Yes, Councillor Campbell? Thank you. Thank you again for being here. It's nice to meet you in person. I so I just have to admit, I did not understand about measure 101 I absolutely understood that those previously illegal drugs were being decriminalized for possession. But the part I didn't understand was that using those drugs in public is has also been decriminalized. I know you can't comment on any kind of, you know, proposed ballot measure or anything. But, you know, do you think is a way to make that change? And leave without interfering with that goal of measure 101 to decriminalize just possession in someone's home for example.
Right. So there are proposals right now to criminalize the the use of controlled substances in public. And most of those proposals are attached to a criminalization of possession of small amounts of drugs as well, but nothing is finalized. It's in the legislature. I know I've spoken to at least a couple of legislators about about that. And it's a formula that's that is nowhere near put together. They're trying to figure out what the best solution is to the problems that are being experienced by measure. 110 use of controlled substance substances was never a crime in Oregon, only possession was interesting. So there was actually case law that said that it is not unlawful for a person to use controlled substances only to possess it, which creates some some angels on the head of confusion, but but that's always been a lot. So once the possession became decriminalized under certain quantities, then there was no there's no way to enforce open, open air possession other than with the violation that's available under measure 110
And two, I understand correctly, that it's a violation to use alcohol in public.
Well, that was not even said yet, but
it might be spoken to the chief about this. So I think he knows you know what I'm getting at that was what, you know, that was that comparison is what brought this to mind for me was you know, I literally said to someone, oh, it's like alcohol. You can't use that in public and found out I
was wrong.
Right there. There are ordinances and laws around possession of an opening container in public on alcohol as well as rents and smoking marijuana under the Marijuana Act. It changed the rules that was illegal to smoke marijuana in public as well over in their violation level. But that didn't that didn't really affect what what happened to measure 110 and how that impacts opener drug use right now.
Thank you. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.
Five minutes, I just want to express my support around that drug court. I have had family who benefited from it. And so if there's anything I can do as a city councilor in terms of Trenton, you know, supporting, getting it up and going again in our community. I know that it's a portion of the people that are going to benefit from that. But I've personally seen the experience that can positive benefits can come from it. So if there's something we can help with in some way, please reach out to me. Thank you. And I think on behalf of the council, absolutely. We want to see that. restart again, somehow in our community.
Great. Unless there's any final thoughts we're about to wrap up chief? Do you look like you want to say something? Should I get the mic?
One thing you get a lot and I know you do too is when someone does get taken to jail, where are they released? I think maybe the judge. Right, some of that information.
Yeah. What it's considered when someone's in front of
a passenger like you're passing the mic and so I touched briefly on pretrial release. If someone is arrested whether they are held in jail or whether they're arrested at all, as opposed to you know, given a citation in lieu of arrest, you know, will depend on the nature of the offense will depend on you know, any, you know, risk or danger that person may have to an individual victim or to the public. So, there the all of the judicial districts in the state were required to to draft a pre trial release schedule in cooperation with their local jail and they didn't have to all be the same. But there was a general director from the chief justice that this was to happen. So every district adopted guidelines that were meaningful and relevant and tailored to their own judicial district. So we worked with the Deschutes. County Jail, we do have a pretrial release schedule. You know, one thing that I must mention is that the purpose of pretrial detention is first of all, detention is supposed to be the last resort. There are very few criminal offenses in which you can hold a person in jail without bail. Those are murder entries. And so everything else a person is entitled to have security set and posting 10% of security is what we refer to as bail bail. Is 10% of that security amount. And the purpose of that structure, that scheme is to ensure that people return to court, you know, they don't flee and go away to ensure safety to the public or to an individual, that crime victim. So when so so all of that as part of the calculus in terms of a pretrial release schedule. What happens before a person sees a judge at all, and then when a person sees a judge, the judge in a brief hearing at arraignment makes a decision about pretrial release. Again, and security or release and if released certain conditions. So you know, the perception that while the police may arrest someone in the right out of jail, it could be true in some cases, but there's a lot more at work there than the police and the jail and the court you know, not wanting to keep someone in custody. You know, we are constitutionally prohibited from using pretrial detention for anything other than securing attendance at future court hearings and trial. And if there's some identifiable threat to public safety are an individual victim. And if those things can't be demonstrated, we are really required to release somebody and then ideally, release that person with conditions. Don't go back to this place. Don't have contact with this person. Don't use alcohol. Don't drive a car unless you have a license and insurance and so forth. Great.
Can I follow up on them? So what about the folks who don't do what they were told they were told to come back to trial, and they failed. And so now there's a bench warrant in the very depths of COVID I know the number it was big, there were more than 1000 people with warrants, but I know our own police were not actively pursuing those folks. Can you talk a little bit about that process? And if that list is still a lot of people I
think, and I think we may all have something to say on this. So I'll start at the where we are now. I think the court has worked through just about all of that backlog. That's and that was done in cooperation with the District Attorney's Office and identifying the cases that really needed to have those warrants issued and that process continue. So, you know, in about a year's time, maybe less but proximately a year. The court has been able to work through that huge backlog. Part of the reason why people were not being held and we're you know, being given a date to come to court and maybe not coming to court. There were capacity issues at the jail before COVID with COVID and with distancing requirements, and with everything that jail was required to do to try to keep people safe and healthy while they were incarcerated. We had to limit that pipeline of people going into the jail. So that again, you know, had to be a conversation in partnership with the district attorney's office and with the jail and with the court, you know, to try to triage and prioritize those those things. But as we sit or stand today, we have kind of worked through that bubble of cases that that backed up, and we are pretty much where we were pre pandemic.
Congratulations, sincerely. That is quite remarkable, because the number was big. It was big. It was it was for a while there. Yeah, thank you.
Yeah. So the the warrant queue is what you're talking about. Okay. And so that's those were the warrants that were issued that weren't they were deemed kind of backburner warrants. And so they weren't actually issued they didn't get out. They didn't get entered into the system. That's why the police weren't able to enforce them. So they weren't they weren't available or visible through the data system that the police used when they're looking at warrants for somebody. And the reason for that is that if they had all issued, it would have overwhelmed the jail at a time when the jail couldn't stand to be overwhelmed. And so the decision was made to put those on the back and they were, they were more of the low level crimes with warrants. They weren't, you know, attempted murders and things like that those issued those went out into the system, but the lower level ones stacked up and we were we were in that position of needing to minimize jail population for such a long period of time that it grew to 1000 warrants because we have a lot of failures to appear, even in the healthiest of times and during so that it was even more so. That's the explanation for it. And so in terms of the police not not pursuing those, it wasn't police love to arrest on warrants. When there's a warrant and they Ensign he needs to be arrested. The police are not shy about enforcing that because it's a court order that needs to be enforced. So it the reason that that wasn't getting enforced is because it wasn't it wasn't really available for them.
And I believe part of that, but it was before you got the two additional judges as well. I think I was on lipstick earlier. And so I was aware of those challenges that were building up. Thank you so much.
Thanks. All right. I think that's the end of our time with you all this evening. Thank you again for coming. Very informative and helpful. You can appreciate your time. Thanks so much. Yeah. You have more just used to standing. Yeah. All right.
I'm gonna ask the folks that are representing envision vent if you would like come up and join us at the table and I know Mickey dirtying is online. She's pulling up the presentation. I'll just tee this up. So this kind of long journey that really started Oh 15 plus years ago with what was then been 2030 community based effort that was primarily supported with city funds in its first iteration 2005 2006 that then created a vision plan included specific actions at that time, it was like 200 and some actions that were approved at the city council level in 2007. So fast forward 15 years later time to refresh that vision. Different, a little different approach this time. So still a nonprofit organization that was leading the effort. That was part of the outcome of that first visioning process. So they came to the city and you all through multiple presentations at the subcommittee level and with full council approved funds to help us refresh that vision. So that was there was a significant milestone about a month or so ago in the launch of that vision action plan. Right before the launch of that the there was a presentation that envision been provided to the stewardship subcommittee. So we did that at a very high level. We're not going to repeat that presentation. There's just a small element of just getting us caught up the full council caught up as to the how we got here. And so I'll let the folks from Envision ven do that. But really, what we want to focus on today are those items in the vision action plan that have identified the city as the lead partner, there's about 10 of them. So we're going to have Mickey dirtying in the city manager's office going to walk through that after the presentation from Envision bend so you can get a sense of that plan and I will see that Matt Scott actually, if you want to hand them out now, the vision action plan in print, so you can see those items
when I didn't bring it with me give it back. Right.
So what we do want to do is really focus our time today on those 10 action items to talk about whether they aligned or not to the current city council goals. I want I'm really interested in getting your reaction to those items. We have some on the staff level, just some. We've done some analysis of those items, and we'll share that with you. And then we just want to hear counsels reflection on on those items in particular. So less on the bigger sort of more focused on the city.
Yes. All right. Then I'll turn
it over to David. David White, the chair of the Envision bend board.
Thank you, Harry. That was great.
Thank you to Mickey. I appreciate all your work on this. Next slide, please. So thank you again for having us here tonight. I really appreciate it. This is great for us. It's a little bit blowing my mind that we're actually here right now, after it's been so long. But I you know, thinking about why the Big Vision project. If you think back to 2005 2006, one bench 2030 started here at the city. I was reminded recently to of all the other organizations that have had visioning plans in the past and we wouldn't be here if it weren't for all of those organizations that helped us get to where we are today. And the other thing I was thinking about is that with our investors, our partners, our leadership alliance, our volunteers, our board, the community in general. Our vision action teams that were a huge part of this. If it weren't for those, those organizations and people in the community that showed the fabric of who we are as the city of Bend, we wouldn't be here. And I think that that is really what shows the value of this vision plan that we've we've brought to you today. Next slide with you. In a nutshell, most of you are already familiar with this, but you know, we started this with Envision band back in 2021. There was a lot of board input and consultants that worked on this with us. In phase two, we set the stage in the spring and summer of 2022 with an unbelievable amount of community outreach. We were turning cinder blocks in a booth around every event that would let us be part of it. But that's how we got the community involved. Which was really great. In phase three, creating the vision was falling winter 2020 to 23. That was our community input and data crunching. And then in Phase four developing the plan. That was pretty much the vision action teams that was where everything really really got dialed in into a nice, compact and digestible report and then launching the plan which was just recently. So that's where we are today.
And I'll jump in here. Matt mentioned Executive Director and Thanks, David. I think the key point here for folks, you're familiar but the foundation of this plan is community input. And I think the extent of the 17 month project was really focused on community input, as David David mentioned, and using some innovative and non traditional techniques to get that input through focus groups with hard to reach groups and interviews not only with leaders of organizations in our community, but also community connectors that have sort of informal roles, but are still movers or shakers. So that really helped flush out some of the issues that were then validated through the Community Survey and the poll to help hear from the community. What are some of the current issues and ideas and hurdles and where are we at I think was sort of our effort and making sure that we heard from all pockets of the community as much as possible. From those and next slide, Nikki, thank you from those 1000s and 1000s of comments are coalesced into a couple of 100 ideas that were then refined by the vision action teams in 228. Same strategies. Those vision action teams were 60 community members, many of which were content experts, some working for the city, and then also many community members at large. And we offered a neat stipend through that process to make sure that representation was broad and that we could invite folks who might need childcare or live further away or outside the UGB that they could afford the transportation to come into those five, two and a half hour work sessions that we held this this summer and it was a pretty intense we are always telling people to speed up their eating because we had a lot more to get through. But it was really a really great process for us. And one thing I'll note on that diagram is the plan is color coordinated. So there's four focus areas. As you look the side of the plan will have those different colors, you can find the section a little bit easier, but there's a lot of information and we're working on how to condense this and package it so it's more accessible for the community to sort of digest it quickly. Okay, thanks, Mickey. Next slide is great. The big question we've been getting is okay, what's the role of Envision Venn now that the visioning is done? And I think we're figuring that out. We're currently pivoting as an organization to be in a position to be the stewards of the plan. And I think what we've heard from our partners is that there's still a need. Yes, our focus might change a little bit from community engagement to implementation, but I think community engagement will always be a part of implementation of this community document. And also, I think building a platform for us to help share what we're already doing and where, where we're taking steps and share that out with the community and help amplify what's already going on so people know and can get engaged I think civic engagement is a huge opportunity for us. Also, we'd like to strategically be able to continue convening partners around specific strategies. If something needs a nudge or you know, maybe is falling off the priority list. How can we bring people together to keep that conversation going? We look to do an annual benchmarking exercise with community members to measure our progress, and also make updates to the plan. We want this to be a living document. And last thing I'll note on our role as it's evolving and shaping as we're looking to partners to really help help us define where we can have the biggest impact. I think anything this large and unwieldy in some ways at a community level. It requires a level of being organic and dynamic as we sort of solidify our role. So we're looking to hear from you all to areas that we could help and then the last bullet there securing project funding is something I think this plan creates a megaphone for our community for greater bend. And that megaphone can also be turned into a funnel to help funnel resources from from state and federal partners as well and be a tool for our lobbyists and legislators. So I'm really excited how that it's a it's a unique and innovative level of organization for a community and kudos to all those who went before me and the board to really lay the groundwork to make this happen. My last slide before I pass it over to Mickey is just around what's the role of partners in the plan and a lot of organizations are contacting me with that question that we haven't been able to connect with until this point. And really it's the 128 partner or orgs and the plan are there to help implement this community plan. They were recommended by the vision action team members and the project management team as organizations in a role or in a position to help play a significant role or a supporting role. So lead partners are those public, private, civic or community based organizations that are in a position to really champion and take on a strategy. And as Eric mentioned, there's 10 of which the city is listed there. And then supporting partners or those that are more in a collaborative role will be at the table supporting but not necessarily in a leading role. And a key piece that I think we found through this process of hearing from the community is that many of these issues and gaps won't be easily addressed. It's something that we may not have the capacity currently to take on or not one single organization could take on so I think recognizing that there's some groundwork and coalition building that will be be needed to be successful with this. And my encouragement before I pass it over to you, Mickey to walk through the strategies where the city is listed is just learning recently, you know, we didn't have a centralized sewer system. In our community until almost the 1980s. And if we didn't have that, you know where it would be today that was 50 years ago. So thinking about 50 years from now what what actions, what steps? What milestones can we place for ourselves as a community to make sure that we're in a better position in 510 50 years, and I appreciate this council and the city leadership for being visionary and bold in their leadership, and I'll pass it over you Mickey for the next slide.
Thank you, good evening, Mayor Mayor Pro Tem and councillors. Mickey dirtying Strategic Initiatives manager city manager's office. I'll go over the high level summary of the 10 and vision bend strategies where the city of Bend is recommended as a lead or CO lead, and then whether it matches with City Council goals or not. And then afterwards, we're gonna have staff who are subject matter experts for each strategy. They're there in person or online. In case you have deeper dive questions, so out of the 10 strategies that you see on the screen right now, and four seem to be a match with council goals. One seem to be a maybe and five are not in the current Council goals. The four that are a match, you'll see the yes next to the strategy, core area engagement and investment complete communities in our neighborhoods, and climate friendly and equitable communities citywide bikeways and Pathways Network Drake to Juniper pedestrian network, the one that seems to be a maybe is item number 10 at the bottom thriving urban tree canopy. Tree code is already being developed in response to community concerns whether we develop a tree canopy program with replanting in an urban forester, etc. is not in the council goals or budget, but it could be an outcome of the tree code process. And then I'm going to share with you feedback from staff regarding the five envision bend strategies that are not currently in the council goals. So we'll start off with housing innovation and affordability coalition's number six. So staff supports including this in the council goals, and that's because the city's affordable housing advisory committee or AHEC is a lead as a lead as a perfect recommendation as this strategy strategy is essentially what AIPAC does. There is a request from staff that if you do include this in the council goals, that we add communication and engagement as an internal collaborative partner, and have this be a priority for them as well. We'd have to if we get to that point, we'd have to follow up with that department to find out what you know being a collaborative partner means is that additional staffing and what have you. And then staff also said that leveraging existing AHEC framework and inviting external collaborating partners to a couple of extra ad hoc meetings for prospective would allow for this item to be included without additional staffing, but anything outside of a hack framework would require additional housing staff with technical expertise and funding for staff and potential consultants. So the next four hours, actually for any of the strategies, the staff recommends that the city use the current envision bank data to include in the city's community input process use for consideration to include in the future, you know, fiscal year 2527 Council goal process as part of the community input process, but for each of these strategies, I'll share the ones where it's not in the council goals and staffs feedback. So we'll start with railroad safety and redevelopment. The gist of that strategy is relocating the railroad to outside of the UGB. The envision events strategy and fold to be included the in the biennium Council goals would not be realistic because the planning implementations and timelines you know, takes about five to 10 years if Council does wished, including Council goals. Staff feedback is to have the action be about starting a conversation to determine if collaborating partners have a shared priority vision timeline commitment to funding and resources instead of a suggested feasible feasibility study as that might sit on a shelf the collaborating partners that were identified our CO leads our Oregon congressional delegation, legislative body, BNSF bend, MPO, ODOT and Deschutes. County for the city of belonging. The gist of that strategic plan is about regional programs and events. That's not at the council goals, and equity or event production are not city core services, core services being police fire community development, housing, engineering, infrastructure, transportation, mobility utilities, and the role of the city's equity department provides strategies and actions to ensure that the city incorporates dia into our core services through our policies, programs and services. So there's also reference in there about welcoming week which is a national event not a city of Bend event, but we do sponsor it financially. We do find NASA, this national event and events organized by other various organizations in Central Oregon. Then we've jumped over to aid on Alliance on equity partners that just that that strategy is about regional coalition programs. Again, not in the council goals, not a equities, not a city core service. But similar to you know, regional houseless effort the city is not probably not best suited to lead a regional alliance on equity partnerships. So four, seven and eight. Staff recommends that maybe considering a different lead agency for this stretch, envision bend strategy, and the last one that's not in the council goal right now is adapting to climate change. This envision band strategy is related to drought, wildfire and public health and staff agree that this is best led by the county given their public health and emergency management responsibility. So like drought and welfare as it relates to climate change are in the hazard mitigation plan that's being spearheaded by the chutes county emergency management and the other item in this strategy is race to resilience campaign, which to be successful needs to be a whole of community participation. It's not limited to city. If you go to their websites, they talk about states, counties, businesses, whole of community participation as well. That concludes our presentation again staff with subject matter expertise or their Stephanie Betteridge for climate change related item Renee Brooks for city tree code. Andreas Portela for equity Lynn McConnell for housing, Russ Grayson David abbess Ryan asked her for growth and development strategies. And she like you'll have to forgive me. They might be in the might need to be promoted to panelists. And I'll leave this slide up until you say So otherwise, thanks.
Sort of a connection to what Matt was saying earlier in that I think some of these items, particularly those that are seventh and eighth, I think really require some community building and we I think we've had some conversation with Envision band about it's a little premature to list a lead partner at this moment. So probably that is where there are some gaps and some work that needs to take place to identify how best to move through those. I think the city wants to be involved for sure. I don't think none of this says the message that the city is not interested. It's just we're really trying to get to that piece of where we're appropriate. Probably listed as a lead partner which to us, we take that very seriously. We want to make sure it's resourced and be successful. We don't want to, as an organization be listed as a lead partner and not be appropriately resourced or it's not within our core service to execute. We want to see and really support outcomes from this vision action plan and want to be successful.
Yeah, and to know, I mean, the action plan is through 2028. Right. So I'm actually very pleased to see a lot of the things that came out of the community are very aligned with things that are already in our goals, right? But we can't do everything and I can't pick the railroad up and move it even though I might want to. So I think tonight was just really about kind of lining up where we see ourselves being able to embrace that role and where it might be more work or might not be appropriate. If anyone has any questions about specific areas we can go into that but I think nothing in this. This is a this is a community plan. It's not a city work plan, right. this is I also take the comment of taking this into our next school setting as some input that the community has put together and one piece of input that we can consider as well when thinking about our next schools. Yeah, question, Councillor Campbell.
Thank you. Thank you so much. I've been I've had this been involved with a few of these presentations. And for me, it's very simple. I want to know what the community thinks and that's a really hard thing to do. And the more groups that are helping us reach out to the more people, the better I feel able to do my job. So thank you for your continued work, doing exactly that reaching out to the community, find out what the community thinks with regard to number seven. So one comment I had is that every single year, well, coming week gets better. There are more events and more participation. And it's just such a wonderful thing. And this year, I missed the entire thing because I was out of town and I was only out of town for that week. And it kind of brought up the thought in my own mind. Of well maybe if we shifted all and spread this out. You know we are already spending our resources as far as staff and events, but we put them all into a single week, and maybe the interim is somewhere in between a single welcoming week. And then the rest of the year is I won't say what it you know, where we want to be welcoming all year round. But without having to create the regional program, the creating a regional program. Is the bigger projects that we might take on in those future Council goals. So that's just a cop maybe argue
with you a little bit on that. I don't think that spreading out the welcoming Week events throughout the year is gonna create a city of belonging for anybody. No. I think it would be great. I love the idea of having events all year. Round, but But to get to the core of what that's trying to achieve. I don't think that's that's going to do that.
Oh, I didn't mean to say that would be any kind of an end point. I was just saying as an interim step, sending the message that for us. This is not a one week a year effort. We care about you know, again all year round, an interim step between creating the new regional program, in addition to the national wealth, gaining weight, so thank you very much. Just a thought and idea.
Can I Yeah, go ahead because I Yeah.
Yeah, I'm really struggling with this cultivating an inclusive community. And before I start, I'd like to just say I think that the neighborhood vitality and resiliency is also a city thing because it's the Bend area neighborhood associations and it says supporting neighborhood leadership lines so that I think that also sort of falls under General city of Bend as well. And so I'm struggling with the the, the evolution of this you can you talk about that this is a living document. This is still a printed, beautifully printed document that lists lead partners and supporting partners, that there's going to be an expectation that that this is who should be doing this work, even if this document does evolve. And I'm concerned on a you know, on a public level as the as the liaison to the human rights and equity commission on a private level as as the founder of one of the nonprofit's included as supporting partners. I want to see these things succeed. And I'm concerned with with the the way they're written and and how they're laid out. They cannot succeed without the massive influx of resources of time and money and community building. And I do not want one when when we say as a city, we are not there yet to do this. I do not want this to go on the backs of people of color of our community and say no, you do it. You put it together, you who as a nonprofit don't have enough money to pay a full time staffer. We want you to do this. So I just want to make sure that if we set this up for success Yeah. That's madness.
If I if I might follow up on a different, different theme. Thank you for being here and thank you for presenting this work. The complete communities and our neighborhoods goal has the the city of Bend as a recommended lead partner. And I think that we've seen a couple of times I was sort of expecting in the supporting partner or maybe even in the lead that we would see some private developers there because the developers are the ones that actually do the work and the city. You know, we can try to create the conditions for complete communities, but the city's not the one actually doing the work. And what we've seen and struggled with, I think is when we, for example, designate some area as commercial as part of a master plan that we approve. Sometimes developers struggle with that. And we've seen even this week polishes announcing that they're selling off a portion of the land that they own that is zoned commercial and they're not going to be the lead on that anymore. You know, who said they're a aspire to be a long term steward in their neighborhoods, but I guess they can't do it. So do you have any thoughts on how to, you know, fill that in? Because I would have thought that developers might have been identified here or I just I'm, I struggle with what tools The city has, you know, we can provide incentives. And I'm just wondering if that is what you have in mind or what, what, what more might we do in this area?
Yeah, I can speak briefly to that. Thanks for the question. And I'm happy to respond to their comments too. Yeah, I think overall, we had developers a part of the vision action team process and wanted to understand from them where they're coming from some of the barriers and I think the work that we can really do is trying to hold that conversation and bring people in to the decision making table. I to pin one developer in this I think the goal was overall to understand sort of who in the community can play a role. So to have a great answer on that regard, but I think it's trying to channel and communicate community wishes at a broad level and help developers understand that that's also going to be economically viable for them in the long run, and hoping to overcome barriers and bring them to the table as well, but I don't have much better have an answer right now.
Communication. Yeah, yeah.
Any would you respond to counsel?
Yeah, no, I would, I would be happy to and I think it's a really key point. It's something that we've discussed as an organization before I've joined. I know the the City Stewardship Committee played a large role in pushing our organization to make sure Okay, did you talk to renters? Did you talk to go back out there and so I appreciate that leadership and push. I agree in talking with many groups that deal with equity inclusion issues in the community, there's immense lack of capacity and I don't want to be pollyannish or naive with these strategies. I think our goal with all these strategies is to add value, but also push us to what could be possible, you know, it's sort of a range of aspiration. And to me, one of the largest gaps that's emerged is there's a lack of capacity to do really needed work in equity and inclusion. And I agree, I don't want this to fall on to one group, I think, tried to use the terms like recommended partners and folks so that as we check in with organizations, they can say, hey, it's not right. You know, we don't want to be we don't want to have this pinned on us at all. And it's not a benefit. Can we roll out of this? Sure. You know, we're happy to and then as new groups come in, our hope is really that this can be sort of a mash or a framework that lays over the whole community that organizations can cross stitch into, you know, and strengthen their own efforts and amplify their own efforts and linking to other organizations. But I agree that and I think, also want to be aware of tokenization and things where it's, you know, saying that, well, this group can handle it and they really can't it's I think, it's one of our largest gaps and something that Andreas Portela and I talked yesterday, briefly about and I think every opportunity and narrative need
other questions? Can you explain a little bit more about the railroad? Just yeah. give that some context.
Yeah. So this strategy emerged from a community need to provide safety around the railroad transportation concerns, and then also the idea of let's move the railroad out of the UGB in the first meeting, and James trophies or passport chair was in that group. The first meeting, you know, the discussion was, well, we can move that to east of town. But really, then it's a future Ben problem. So it's not really moving the railroad, it's moving the switching yards outside of the core area of town. And there's some areas of town that have eight nine, James tracks the
two major six yards in Townsend over nine tracks wide. easements were established a century ago, and they're never going to be used for railroad under the next 50 years of what's going on. Then. The idea is to free up that land for all sorts of purposes. And when it was presented to the various different groups that were involved in decision, some of them immediately jumped on Parks and Rec was like, they would love to do rails with trails. So that's where you have a railway
game. So let me jump in just on the mic just to make sure people can get it but yeah, so nine, nine tracks deep thanks for the context. No, it's all good. Thank you for that. And yeah, we did hear from Ben Parks and Rec to you know, they've identified in their master planning that it could be a good rail with trail to open up connectivity. So it's really reducing the amount of tracks still having one track there, but reducing congestion and using that land, to the purposes of our community today, as a as a more diverse economy. Thank you,
any other we're at no time, so I just want to make sure
I make some more comments and questions. urban tree canopy does seem to me that it's some of what's recommended in here is going to evolve out of the tree code discussion. So it seems like maybe we just need to do some kind of check in and once that's completed, but it does seem you know, from a canopy Inventory Monitoring, how do we, if we're gonna get into I'm getting into the details here, but if we're gonna get into something where we're talking about in lieu of fees and replacement and you know, and how we're using those funds across the community, this seems to fit into all that. So while I get that we may not be quite ready to take it on as a lead. It does seem like it flows as sort of a part of Phase Two once the the system is established.
Yeah. And I just want to close out I know we are running short on time, so I'm not hearing any sort of major shifts from what staff is recommending on this. Just at the focus of those efficient action items. I do agree with Councillor Perkins, I think there is some maybe miscommunication of when something gets printed. It's like oh, well, that's finalized. And I think there needs to be some sort of launch with some collateral but there is probably more work to do to fine tune this and probably a better way to communicate that through a website, right, where it's more dynamic where you can, these projects are going to probably evolve a little bit from what they are shown and in printed form. So and I think we do want to commit to using this as great work that has taken place over the last few years to help inform future Council goal setting. So that's what we've kind of identified here. Here are the ones that there's some alignment, this just helps maybe to amplify and there's some opportunities for partnership there and some others that we need some more time to kind of shape and resource because we're not there yet. And we just want to set expectations of staff. I would hate to have something in a plan and then why aren't you doing it? Well? No, it's not resourced and I just wanna make sure councils on board with that too much as a communication tool about setting expectations appropriately.
Yeah, no, I haven't heard directly from the human rights and equity commission. And, you know, some of the other groups mentioned in here so I think that's the challenge is knowing like, well, how much do they are they owning this stuff, right and agree, even with what's in here, one I do think that there's a capacity building issue in terms of especially the Alliance on equity partners piece, as in my private work, that's an it's been identified in the community, but the need for that, but it really is about I think, engaging with the philanthropic world and how do we do this in our community, assuming that some of the other partners in here are actually on board? With the need for that and you know, that may be an example of the kind of thing that envision Ben needs to do going forward as part of this work. But following the lead of the people, and fully engaging the folks who are talked about in here, they see it's important. It's gonna take real resources, as Councillor Perkins said, and, you know, so far it's not very, very, it's not forthcoming from those kinds of sources. Yeah, but this may be a way to help spur some of that happening in our community, assuming there's full buy. Yeah.
Okay. Well, great. Thank you for being here. Thanks for the plan, and we'll be in touch I'm sure yeah.
Thank you all. Thanks for having us.
All right. Nobody moves. I read this. We are going to go into Executive Session. This time we will hold an executive session pursuant to Rs 1926602 e to conduct deliberations with persons designed designated to negotiate real property transactions and I to review and evaluate the employment related performance of the Chief Executive Officer of any public body, a public officer, employee or staff member who does not request an open hearing. The session is closed to all members of the public except the representatives of news media representatives in the news media are specifically directed not to report on any of the deliberations during Executive Session, except to state the general subject session as previously announced, no decision may be made an executive session at the end of the executive session we'll return to regular session and we'll be back for the business meeting right around 7pm All right. Thanks.
