Opinion Pieces

Next week the Board of County Commissioners will hold a public hearing and may vote on whether to limit development of additional destination resorts in Deschutes County. The Board should approve the proposed amendment to the County’s Destination Resort Combining Zone to restrict the development of additional destination resorts because destination resorts have fulfilled their economic development purpose here, because the impacts to our quality of life and environment are so high, and because destination resorts do little to address our desperate need for workforce housing.

Oregon state lawmakers originally authorized destination resorts to bring economic activity and people to rural economically distressed areas with good tourism potential. While the timber industry was collapsing in Deschutes County in the 1980s and 1990s, we fit the bill. But after the population growth and economic expansion and diversification of the last 25 years, it’s hard to argue that we need additional destination resorts now. The Oregon Statewide Planning Goal that authorizes destination resorts anticipates that communities might outgrow destination resorts and Goal 8 includes provisions that prohibit new destination resorts within 24 miles of cities over 100,000 people. The City of Bend’s population has passed that threshold and it’s time to put the destination resort tool back in the tool box.

New destination resorts would have outsized impacts on our quality of life and environment. Reviewing a map of the properties which would no longer be eligible for destination resorts under the proposed zone amendment helps to illustrate this: https://weblink.deschutes.org/CDD/DocView.aspx?dbid=0&repo=LFCDD&id=1149561&cr=1 .

Developing new destination resorts with hundreds of houses and tourism amenities like golf courses in these areas would impact nearby rural residences, fragment and degrade wildlife habitat, diminish open space and scenic vistas, and consume excessive amounts of water. Since destination resorts are not complete communities offering jobs, schools, groceries, and other necessities, residents would need to drive far and frequently to meet their basic needs, increasing traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions throughout our community.

Advocates for more destination resorts say we need the additional homes. While we absolutely need more homes in our community, we need homes that are attainable for our local workforce. Destination resort homes are priced out of reach for our middle and lower income workers and a high percentage of homes in existing destination resorts are second homes, not owned or rented by local workers. So building another home in a new destination resort does much less for our local workforce than building another home in one of our incorporated cities.

Some homebuyers may have their heart set on a home in a resort community. For those homebuyers who prefer a home in a resort community over all others, there are several thousand already built within Deschutes County with a healthy number in circulation in local real estate listings. For those who want to build their own home, there were 725 vacant lots in 2020 within existing destination resorts - Caldera Springs, Eagle Crest, Pronghorn, Tetherow – and 157 vacant lots still available within the historic resort communities of Black Butte Ranch, Inn of the 7th Mountain/Widgi Creek, and Sunriver. Add in the 1290 units already approved in Thornburgh and Caldera Phase II and there is no shortage of destination resort home opportunity here.

In Deschutes County we need more homes. But destination resort homes are less affordable and have greater impacts on our quality of life and environment than homes in existing communities. There are plenty of destination resort home opportunities for homebuyers who prefer them. This is an economic development policy tool that has played its role here and no longer fits our community. County Commissioners should honor the recommendation of the Planning Commission and the preference of the 220+ constituents who submitted written comments in support and should vote to amend the zone restricting the development of future destination resorts in Deschutes County.

Phil Chang has served as a Deschutes County Commissioner since January 2021. All views expressed in this guest column are his own.

Originally published in the Bend Bulletin

The smoke in the air isn’t the only reminder that we live in a high wildfire risk area these days. Home and business owners are reporting dramatic increases in insurance policy premiums, cancelled policies, and an alarming decline in insurers willing to provide coverage in our community. Friends in Sisters just told me that their new homeowner insurance policy will cost them almost $6000 per year for a fairly typical Sisters house.

As anxious insurance policy seekers ask who is responsible for this predicament and what can be done about it, some have pointed unfairly at the state Department of Forestry and Oregon State University. These state agencies have worked for more than a year to develop maps identifying areas of high fire risk as directed by the comprehensive wildfire legislative package (Senate Bill 762) of 2021. In at least one instance, insurers have falsely told policy holders that the state’s hazard maps are the reason for policy cancellations or premium increases.

To be clear, the insurance industry has its own risk models and maps, populated with decades of claim and loss data from actual fires, and they don’t need the state to tell them where areas of high risk are. It may provide convenient political cover to blame the state mapping effort while insurance companies move forward with the premium increases and coverage reductions suggested by their models. But instead of seeing the state wildfire maps as the problem, we should see them as roadmaps to potential solutions in our community.

The first step in solving a problem is acknowledging that you have a problem. Maps that help us understand where wildfires are most probable and where fires will likely be intense help us acknowledge, in a site specific way, that we have a problem. Good quality maps can help us pinpoint where we need to increase fuels reduction and home hardening measures - and where state and federal investment could be focused - so that we can reduce actual risk and insurers can offer more affordable coverage.

Wildfire resiliency happens both at home and in the forests and rangelands surrounding our communities. We need thinning, brush mowing, and prescribed fire on the Deschutes National Forest, Prineville BLM District and large private forest land ownerships around our homes. But we also learned during the 2020 Labor Day fires that homes themselves are often the fuel that carry catastrophic fire through subdivisions. Your home is far more likely to be ignited by the home burning next door than by a fire in the forest on the edge of town. So fuels management is as much about what your home is built from and how much defensible space you have as it is about managing local forests or woodlands. All of these measures also help to keep fire fighters safe as they protect our homes and businesses.

Developing good quality wildfire hazard maps and then working to reduce fuels and increase resiliency in high risk areas is the right way to invite insurers to provide reasonably priced policies in our community. In fact, Oregon Senate Bill 82 passed in May 2023 requires insurers to recognize and account for efforts by homeowners to increase the resiliency of their homes and landscapes. New drafts of the state maps will be out this fall. Our community should work with the state to ensure the maps accurately document where fires are likely and potentially intense and then we should welcome the maps as a pathway to more affordable and available insurance policies.

If the insurance industry is not able to recognize meaningful resiliency and fuels reduction work in their internal models in order to provide affordable coverage in wildfire prone areas, the federal government can consider establishing a wildfire-equivalent to the National Flood Insurance Program. The National Association of County Organizations just passed a resolution asking Congress and the administration to explore that possibility last month.

Phil Chang is a Deschutes County Commissioner. Previously, he managed Oregon’s Federal Forest Restoration Program, served as a natural resource policy advisor for Senator Jeff Merkley, helped to build and coordinate the Deschutes Collaborative Forest Project, and held a red card as a qualified fire fighter.

Originally published in the Bend Bulletin

Community members contact me every week about land use applications that could expand low density residential development in our rural high desert landscape. One of the major reasons people give for opposing these applications is the increased demand that new development will place on our local aquifers and rivers.

At first glance, adding demand on local water supplies during a drought may seem silly. But when we look at water usage in the upper Deschutes Basin, the key opportunities to improve drought resiliency and ensure that we have enough water for our rivers and creeks, our farms, and our homes lie within agriculture, not through shutting down residential development. In addition, Oregon land use law provides limited tools to deny development in the upper Deschutes Basin based on water supply considerations.

All of the current municipal, domestic, and residential use of water in the upper Deschutes Basin adds up to about 45,000 acre feet per year. By contrast, in an average year, total water use for agriculture is close to 725,000 acre feet. Agriculture withdraws 16 times more water from our rivers and aquifers than all the homes in the basin and there are massive opportunities to conserve water within agriculture in order to restore flow in our rivers and creeks and to improve supply reliability for farmers with marginal (less senior) water rights.

Standing at any major irrigation canal diversion point on the Deschutes between Lava Island Falls and the Riverhouse you will see enough water entering that canal to supply tens of thousands of homes. With investments in canal piping and on-farm efficiency, we could save hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water per year. For example, Central Oregon Irrigation District recently completed piping 7.9 miles of the Pilot Butte Canal near Smith Rock. This infrastructure upgrade will save 10,000 acre feet per year – at least a third of total annual residential water supply use in Deschutes County. Completing on-farm efficiency projects on farms served by that segment of the Pilot Butte Canal could save another 10,000 acre feet of water per year, all while keeping the water received by farmers’ crops effectively the same.

To be clear, I don’t think anyone should be wasting water and new development can have localized groundwater impacts. We should grow and develop in ways that are more water smart, including minimizing irrigated lawns and landscaping. But instead of focusing on the water supply impacts of low density development, I believe we should be pressing for water conservation in agriculture and using other conservation arguments to oppose sprawl-like growth.

Low density development in the rural County can reduce the quality and connectivity of wildlife habitat, spoil the scenic vistas that we cherish, crowd existing rural residences, and diminish the capacity of our high desert landscape to sequester carbon. Poorly planned growth also snarls our roads with more traffic and produces more climate change inducing emissions. These are the reasons we should fight sprawl and support the kind of conservation-oriented, transportation-smart growth that Oregon’s state land use system already encourages.

What should we do to guard against sprawl in Deschutes County? Scrutinize applications for Comprehensive Plan amendments and Zone changes that move land out of agricultural use to residential. Ask the state to add a High Desert Goal to the land use planning system so we don’t have to try to preserve sage steppe lands under agricultural goals. Revise the County’s Destination Resort overlay map, identifying where new destination resorts are and are not allowed. Adopt new wildlife inventories providing new protections to key habitat areas for deer, elk, and eagles. Engage in our Comprehensive Plan update to tell the County how to grow well. You can learn more about any of these policy efforts by speaking with the County Community Development Department or Planning Commission. Tell your County Commissioners what you think.

Phil Chang is one of three Deschutes County Commissioners and one of the tri-Chairs of the Deschutes Basin Water Collaborative. All views expressed in this guest column are his own.

Originally published in the Bend Bulletin

Deschutes County is not the only mountain destination community in the western U.S. that struggles with the availability and affordability of housing for our workforce. I had the opportunity to learn about what some of our sibling communities are doing to maintain and expand workforce housing in February when I met with County Commissioners and community leaders from Eagle and Pitkin Counties (Colorado), Mono and Nevada Counties (California), Summit County (Utah) and Teton County (Wyoming). These communities are pursuing ambitious and innovative strategies to ensure there is a place for working people to live in their busy tourist destination towns.

These ‘gateway’ communities don’t have as large populations or as diversified economies as we have here in Deschutes County, but we share many conditions that make workforce housing a challenge. Our remarkable outdoor amenities inspire people from across the nation to seek to relocate here. Since many of those people bring jobs or assets from other places our local housing prices have become decoupled from local salaries and wages. Communities with large leisure and hospitality sectors need lots of lower wage service sector workers. A lot of our housing stock is currently second homes and short term rentals. Becoming a “Zoom Town” during COVID compounded these issues. So the strategies other mountain destination communities are using to address workforce housing needs may be useful here.

We’re already doing some of the things that that our sibling mountain communities are doing: facilitating the development of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), providing county and city property for affordable housing, and supporting housing preservation programs that keep older and more modest homes from being demolished to construct expensive new homes. The City of Bend is already providing density bonuses for workforce and affordable housing, charging a construction excise fee to generate funds for affordable housing, providing fee exemptions (for infrastructure and other costs), providing property tax exemptions for certain projects, moving away from exclusive single family zoning, and streamlining permitting processes for priority projects.

Our sibling Western mountain communities are also doing some things that we currently aren’t: providing local workers with down payment and rental deposit assistance; offering low interest loans for ADU construction; paying landlords to maintain units as long term rentals; meaningfully restricting the number of short term rentals in their jurisdiction; and actively acquiring land for affordable and workforce housing projects. One community offers home sellers a cash payment in exchange for reducing the sale price and placing a deed restriction on the property so it becomes permanently affordable.

Almost all of these new strategies come with costs. So I was particularly interested to learn how these mountain destination communities raised the funds to pay for their programs. Some make substantial allocations out of their general fund (property tax revenue). Others have implemented local real estate transfer taxes, sales taxes, short term rental fees, or “vacant home” taxes or fees.

Dedicating millions of County or City general fund dollars or creating new taxes and fees in order to invest in workforce and affordable housing are drastic measures. But it’s a crisis when there aren’t enough workers to operate local businesses and community services and that worker shortage is due in large part to a lack of attainable housing. Some would argue that Oregon’s land use planning system is the reason for our housing challenges. But my six example counties in four other Western states don’t have land use planning systems like Oregon and have few growth management restrictions yet they have the same workforce housing affordability and availability issues we do. So land use reform is likely not a silver bullet. To make more progress on workforce housing we need to recognize which tools and investments are going to make a difference and have the political will to implement them. Let’s explore some of these innovative strategies from our fellow Western mountain destination communities.

Phil Chang is a member of the Deschutes County Board of Commissioners

Originally published in the Bend Bulletin

Wildfire season is upon us. With Deschutes County in severe drought and hot temperatures forecasted, large and severe fires like the Milli (2017), Two Bulls (2014), Pole Creek (2012), and Rooster Rock (2010) are very possible this year. Fires like these threaten homes, disrupt tourist activity and recreation, impact mature forest habitat, and fill our air with smoke. Firefighters will do their best to contain wildfires this summer, their jobs made more dangerous by COVID-19. But the beginning of wildfire season is also a good time to ask what we did this past fall, winter, and spring to try to reduce the severity of this summer’s fires.

We can’t control winds, temperatures, humidity, or lightning, but we can manage the fuels that feed fires. The dry forest ecosystem of Deschutes County was once dominated by large, widely spaced, fire-resistant ponderosa pine trees with an understory of low bunch grasses. Today, our forests are densely packed with small trees and brush and the species mix has shifted towards low fire resistance grand fir and juniper. To restore the local forest ecosystem and reduce the risks of high severity wildfire we need to reduce the overall density of trees, grow up more large fire-resistant trees, and convert the understory from heavy shrub cover back to more grass.

Fuels reduction and active forest restoration is needed across millions of acres of Eastern and Central Oregon. Since roughly 75% of Deschutes County is managed by the Forest Service or BLM, we need to address fuels on the federal land to meaningfully reduce risk to our communities.

Unfortunately, fuels reduction in National Forests has been slowed by political polarization for decades. At one extreme are groups who blame excessive environmental regulations and review processes, and at the other extreme are people who feed suspicions that fuels reduction is just a timber grab. Neither of these characterizations are accurate or helpful. Forest collaboratives, such as the Deschutes Collaborative Forest Project, have shown us how to navigate polarization by planning fuels reduction projects that effectively reduce hazardous fuels, protect and improve wildlife habitat, create jobs in the woods, and provide some wood fiber for forest products - all while proceeding smoothly through environmental review. Collaboration works. In 2017 we saw collaboratively planned fuels treatments protect homes and prevent evacuations near Sisters during the Milli Fire.

The real challenge is that thinning out lots of small trees and mowing and prescribed burning shrubs is expensive. The trees that everyone agrees are appropriate to thin from the forest don’t have a lot of commercial value. Implementing restoration and fuels reduction at the pace and scale needed to really affect wildfire behavior needs supplemental funding.

We need elected leaders who don’t feed political polarization and who help us secure the supplemental funding to invest in the future of our forests and the safety of our communities. Because Counties once received timber receipts from National Forests and still sometimes get County Payments in lieu of receipts, County Commissioners have the ears of our Congressional delegation. Commissioners should spend more time advocating for Hazardous Fuels funding and less time complaining about environmental review processes. In 2019, the Deschutes National Forest had over 125,000 acres of thinning and prescribed burning treatments through environmental review waiting for implementation funding. The State Legislature considered a proposal from the Governor’s Wildfire Committee to invest in fuels reduction in early 2020 and failed to act. As we watch the wildfires burn big and hot this summer, we need to remember our elected leaders who weren’t serious about funding fuel reduction. In November, we need to demand more.

Phil Chang is a candidate for Deschutes County Commissioner. He helped to found the Deschutes Collaborative Forest Project, was a natural resource advisor to US Senator Jeff Merkley from 2014-2017, and managed Oregon’s Federal Forest Restoration Program from 2017-2020.

Originally published in the Bend Bulletin

August and September may be the cruelest months of the 2021 drought. Arnold Irrigation District shut off water to its patrons on July 31st. North Unit Irrigation District recently ran out of stored water in Wickiup Reservoir. Farmers wonder whether carefully tended crops will make it to harvest before they dry up. Ranchers wonder whether they will find hay to sustain livestock through the fall and winter. Acres fallowed earlier this year to stretch water supplies are losing topsoil to Dust-bowl type winds.

Perfect Balance, a farm group concerned about agricultural water supplies in Central Oregon, organized a panel of water law experts last week to discuss how the Endangered Species Act and the Habitat Conservation Plan for the Upper Deschutes Basin are impacting water supplies for farmers this year. Many presenters and attendees expressed concern that allocating water for fish and wildlife habitat in the upper Deschutes basin was cutting off needed water supplies for farmers.

The Habitat Conservation Plan, which is designed to improve habitat for the Oregon spotted frog, steelhead, and bull trout, is causing changes in the allocation and storage of water in the basin. But the August 17th forum may have focused too heavily on endangered species protection as the reason farmers are facing water challenges this year.

During his comments, Arnold Irrigation District Board member Rob Rastovich reminded the audience that one of the realities of the upper Deschutes Basin is that some farmers and irrigation districts hold senior water rights - and a lot of them - and some farmers and irrigation districts hold junior water rights. Frog or no frog, when water supplies are limited junior water rights holders are the first to have supplies cut off. In a severe drought year like this when reservoirs didn’t fill and live flow in streams and rivers is meager, farmers with junior water rights will not get their full rights. Even though junior water rights holders install the most water efficient irrigation systems they are still vulnerable. Meanwhile, senior water rights holders do not need to implement water saving measures to have certainty that they will get substantial allocations. In the upper Deschutes basin, some senior rights holders hold three times the rights that junior rights holders do.

While drought parched farmers can direct some of their frustration at the Endangered Species Act, they should worry more about the 19th century state water laws that maintain this allocation of water – an allocation which does not necessarily make sense when we think of our water use priorities in the 21st century: food production and farm viability, fish and wildlife habitat in rivers, water-based recreation, and growing cities.

An army of attorneys will make sure that Oregon’s antiquated water law framework stays largely intact. But we can tinker around the edges of the system and we can deploy policy and funding to improve the efficiency of agriculture – particularly in the irrigation districts with large amounts of senior water rights – so that we can share the conserved water with the farmers with junior water rights and with the fish and wildlife that depend on the river. Important work to conserve and share water in the upper Deschutes basin is already in motion, with millions of dollars worth of canal piping and on-farm efficiency projects being implemented each year. The Habitat Conservation Plan is actually a key driver of much of this work.

Unfortunately, we haven’t completed enough of this conservation and sharing work yet to mitigate the brutal drought of 2021. The federal and state government should step in with drought disaster relief to help farmers make it to the more drought-resilient years to come.

Originally published in the Bend Bulletin