Sure, there was still a speech. But the city of Bend turned its ‘State of the City’ into a party in the park
For those who couldn't make it, we have Mayor Melanie Kebler's remarks
BEND, Ore. (KTVZ) -- Rather than some stuffy, all-business, reserved-seating luncheon, Bend city officials held a warm, sunny fall Friday evening community party at Alpenglow Park to not just discuss the State of the City and its tough issues, but have a chance to meet residents on their turf and provide information about issues and services.
Oh but there was a speech, of course, in a different sort of setting. For those who couldn't make it, here's the prepared remarks by Mayor Melanie Kebler.
INTRO
Welcome everyone to this year’s State of the City event. I’m so excited to hold this event on the east side of Bend, and to have a party in the park instead of a Powerpoint. Thank you for coming!
I’m your Mayor, Melanie Kebler. And what better time to welcome you to this new version of the State of the City than during Welcoming Week, an annual event that celebrates our city’s core value of being a place for everyone. This is our sixth year celebrating Welcoming Week, as part of a movement across the country to show we believe everyone belongs in our community. Bend is built from the contributions of everyone: people who were born here, people who moved here, immigrants and refugees, people of color, tribal members, youth and elders, and many more with varied backgrounds, viewpoints, and life experiences. We value how everyone here is bringing new ideas, serving in civic roles, working in critical industries, seeking to collaborate on our challenges, and contributing to diversity in our community.
GROWTH
Having grown up in Bend myself, I have seen first hand how Bend has grown and continues to grow. When I graduated from Bend High, our City population was about half the size it is now – about 50,000 people. We are now a city of over 100,000 people. And over the next 20 years, so by 2043, we are expected to gain about 40,000 new residents. As the saying goes, the only constant in life is change, and here in Bend we know that fact to be very true. It’s simply not possible to pull up the drawbridge and keep people from moving here. So it’s vital that we plan for a sustainable future, one where everyone in Bend has the chance to thrive, with a place to live that they can afford, a job that pays the bills, and a community where they feel welcome and safe.
Tonight I want to talk to you about how the City of Bend and your City Council are stepping up to meet the challenges of growth and plan for Bend’s future.
HOUSING
First, as we grow, we need enough housing to support our entire community, and we are required by state law to plan for enough housing to meet the needs of those 40,000 new residents arriving by 2043. When I talk to people about housing in Bend, we talk about two things, availability and cost. For years, Oregon has underbuilt the amount of homes we need for the people who live here. We need more housing, and we need housing that people can afford.
The City is working on this issue from every angle and exploring every tool we have available to address the housing crisis – from those who need shelter, to those who are building housing, to those who are hoping to buy their first home. We’re doing our part and doing it while investing in exciting central neighborhoods like the Bend Central District, where redevelopment can bring thousands of new homes.
I’m also proud to report that from 2021-2023, the City supported the creation of nearly 1,000 deed-restricted affordable homes, where the rental and purchase price is held down to an amount someone making less than the area median income can afford. We changed codes and policies to make building an ADU in your backyard easier, and to make it easier to build multi-family homes in lots across the city. In fact, we now have pre-approved ADU plans available – meaning you don’t have to wait for someone to review your building plans and can get that ADU built more quickly.
One of the very visible heart breaking consequences of a housing market where rent and mortgages are unaffordable to so many is the fact that more people are experiencing homelessness in our community. Since I first took office as a Councilor in 2021, and now as your Mayor, addressing homelessness has been a top priority. Homelessness has increased every year in our community for the past decade. In 2023, our local service providers reported that over 1600 individuals in Central Oregon are experiencing homelessness. That is according to the annual one-night count of those experiencing homelessness in Central Oregon. Since the beginning of the 2022 school year, 676 students were identified as homeless and it continues to grow according to our Bend-La Pine, Sisters, and Redmond School District Homeless Liaisons. These numbers are increasing similarly across the state. This is not acceptable. It’s the reason Governor Kotek has declared a homelessness emergency. Collaboration is key to solving homelessness, but as a City we cannot sit back and wait for others to provide solutions for us.
Bend has led the way in Central Oregon, changing our code to make it easier and faster to create safe parking sites, outdoor shelters, and emergency shelters; investing in a Navigation Center; converting motels into places for elders and families with kids to stabilize, and enacting a reasonable camping code to provide clarity and safety on publicly owned streets. We have raised this conversation to the State level, creating a Coordinated Houseless Response Office with bipartisan support in Salem. We have leveraged state and federal COVID- relief and recovery funds to acquire, renovate and operate a variety of emergency shelter options ranging tiny home villages to overnight shelters. We also continue to double down on deed-restricted affordable housing and middle housing investments. And our efforts are working to help people out of homelessness.
For example, the Lighthouse Navigation Center, run by our fantastic partner Shepherd’s House, has not only operated 24/7, keeping people out of the elements year round, but they also in their first year moved 230 people out of homelessness. All this while they almost constantly operate at or over capacity, serving over 100,000 meals and helping 400 individuals per month. Similarly we are seeing our other solutions I mentioned that have been created since 2021 regularly helping participants not only to get off the street, but also find their next housing step.
The theme of our safe parking program, Stepping Stone shelter, and Lighthouse Navigation Center is stabilization and access to services. Without stabilizing in a safe living situation, people have difficultly accessing the services they need, whether it’s financial help, veteran’s benefits access, addiction services, or mental and behavioral health help. Bend is making a difference with these solutions by providing a stable place for people to access services provided the County and other social service nonprofits. We will continue to advocate for the coordination and increased mental health and addiction treatment services needed at the County, State, and Federal level to keep helping people off the street and into stable homes.
PUBLIC SAFETY - FIRE
Next, as we grow, we must build a public safety system that is ready to take care of our community and our environment. In recognition of this, four months ago voters passed our local Fire levy. THANK YOU. This funding will allow our fire and rescue department to keep up with growth and keep response times low.
I hope no one here ever has to call 911 for a medical emergency. But when and if you do, you can know you’ll receive top notch care. This is the fifth year in a row that Bend Fire and Rescue has received an American Heart Association award for their treatment of patients who experience heart attacks. One of our goals we continue to meet - and will continue to meet, thanks to the levy funding – is responding to emergency calls within six minutes. These fast response times literally save lives, something our hardworking firefighters strive to do every day.
Now, we can’t stand outside in September without talking about wildfires. We know it can happen here, and we must plan and be prepared. Not only does our fire department do an excellent job fighting fire within Bend and the surrounding rural area, they are an excellent partner for homeowners and neighborhoods when it comes to making YOUR plan on how to be fire safe and fire wise. Our fire department will happily come out and talk to you about how to own your zone by clearing your property of fuels, and how to protect your home from fire risk. They will also talk to you about signing up for Deschutes County alerts in case of emergency or evacuation. Okay everyone – get out your phone right now, go and sign yourself up for these alerts. Our County Emergency team thanks you for doing so – this is the best way to receive information in an emergency. We have also built out our own City Department of Emergency Management to develop even more planning resources and a community preparedness program, so stay tuned for more resources soon.
PUBLIC SAFETY - POLICE
Unfortunately, I’m now going to talk about a different kind of emergency that our community went through a little over a year ago, one that we all hoped would never happen here – the horrific shooting at our East Side Safeway. We continue to mourn the loss of the victims, Glenn Edward Bennett and Donald Ray Surrett, Jr. We are grateful for the swift and brave response from our Bend Police offers who ran into an active shooter situation in order to stop the violence. We continue to support our police department with training and technology they need to do their jobs.
It is a cruel reality that Bend is not immune to the epidemic of gun violence that plagues this country on a daily basis. This summer, 33 year old Taylor Wyss was shot and killed on a downtown sidewalk. And we continue to remember Barry Washington Jr, also shot and killed near Wall Street. We know that in Deschutes County we also continue to have an unacceptably high rate of suicide by gun.
I want to take a moment to say thank you to all those in our community who have held each other up, comforted one another, encouraged people to seek help, and worked together to heal from the tragedies that have occurred. We are a strong community. We cannot become numb to these losses of life. Gun violence is not inevitable, it is preventable, and your City Council will continue to advocate for policies to end the epidemic of shootings so everyone can feel safe.
We also want to empower our residents and businesses to get accurate and up to date information on crime statistics or other relevant public safety data. We have recently launched a comprehensive data dashboard that can detail calls for service, crime trends and other critical data mapped for your street, your neighborhood, and a citywide level. One example: the information at policedata.bendoregon.gov shows that our case reports per year remain lower overall than they were in 2019.
TRANSPORTATION
To touch on another aspect of safety, as we grow we know we need to create more and better options for people to move around Bend safely. The City of Bend manages almost 900 lane miles of roadways around the City. And during the summer, it sure feels like we’re doing construction on ALL of those miles, right? I live in this corner of town so I’ve felt the pain of closures on Wilson, and Pettigrew, and Ferguson, and Neff – thank you everyone for your patience. We are constantly working to maintain and improve our transportation system, and these construction projects are helping us create smoother roads, better water and sewer delivery, and safer intersections.
The transportation GO bond that you all voted to pass in 2020 has been critical to getting those safety improvements going. If you traveled on Wilson Ave to get here tonight you know that our new roundabouts allow you to actually get through the intersections at 9th and 15th without a long queue. We have also added a wide path for pedestrians and a protected bike lane, and we now have our very first roundabout with protection for people who cycle. I’m excited for the next phase of Wilson to be completed this fall, as we know we need those better east-west connections across our city.
Another exciting project coming our way due to the GO Bond is our Midtown Crossings project. Not only will we be improving the crossings at Franklin and Greenwood, we have been awarded $25 million in state and federal grants to design and fund the Hawthorne Overcrossing. This new bridge will be an iconic connector of east and west Bend. It will not only provide safety and connectivity for people who walk, bike, and roll, but it will also catalyze redevelopment of housing and jobs within the Bend Central District. It is a huge step forward for our transportation system and it wouldn’t have happened without voters supporting the transportation bond – so thank YOU again for investing in our transportation future.
Now as I said before, the City of Bend already maintains almost 900 miles of streets, doing everything from repaving and striping, to pothole repair, to sweeping and plowing. When the Transportation System Plan was created in 2021, the Bend community provided input about their priorities and ways to achieve the goal of not only maintaining our system but also enhancing it so everyone can move around town safely and efficiently. One goal that the City Council is working hard to achieve is finding new ways to sustain our transportation system. We legally can’t use GO Bond dollars for maintenance and operations, because they must be devoted to building new projects only. The City is in the process of changing how and what developers pay to build in Bend; those changes will help, in part, fund transportation – but only new projects, not operations, maintenance or transportation programs. A transportation fee, charged like the existing stormwater fee, is another way to help fill our funding gap. This fee was the top recommendation of the Community Group that oversaw the Transportation System Plan and we are working to implement it as equitably as possible. The City Council is continuing the process of getting feedback from community members through roundtable discussions and meetings with neighborhoods, and we would also love to talk with you about our transportation system – and how we pay for it – tonight. Please find one of us later.
WATER
As we grow, we continue to plan for how we care for and conserve our water supply. A question I hear often is whether we have enough water for people in Bend, now and in the future. And I’m happy to report that we do – and in fact our conservation efforts have helped us to actually slightly lower the amount of water we are using over the past years, even though our population has grown. In 2022 we reached the lowest amount of water used per person in 10 years. And get this - seven million gallons of water were saved over the past year just by the City’s sprinkler inspection program. Please folks, don’t water the sidewalks and fix those broken sprinklers ASAP.
Though Bend uses only 2% of the water in the Deschutes Basin, we must continue to plan and conserve our water. We recently updated our Water Management and Conservation Plan, and the City will continue to maintain and enhance our conservation efforts in the years to come. We’ve got to protect our award-winning drinking water, which continues to meet or surpass all State and Federal safe drinking water standards every year.
ENGAGEMENT
Now, out of all the things I just talked about, I’m sure you have some questions and ideas about at least one of them. Do you want to know exactly what kind of contaminants our City Utility Staff are looking for when they test our water? Talk to Julie at the Utilities Department Booth. Are you curious about what affordable housing is currently being developed? Talk to Melissa, Rachael, Amy or Brooke at the Housing booth. Do you want to learn how to sign up for that Wildfire assessment I talked about? Find the City of Bend firetruck. We are here to hear from you. That includes your City Councilors – please come find us at the City Council booth or over by the lawn games. We will grow better together, and if we understand your needs, we will be better advocates for you.
Sunday marks the beginning of Welcoming Week. We have a full calendar of events, brought to you by our community partners. I’m especially excited about the Vamanos Outside Latino FilmFest happening on Saturday the 16th at the Tower Theater downtown.
A Welcoming Week booth is hosted by our Equity and Inclusivity Director, Andres, and the folks over there would love to talk with you about the opportunities – all free and open! – to engage and learn this week. A full calendar of events is available at that booth or on our website.
CONCLUSION
If there’s one thing I know about Bend, it’s this – we are a community that has always adapted to meet the challenges of our times. From a mill town to a mountain town, we’ve shown our ability to collaborate, innovate, and plan for what’s next. And I hope that as we all walk into the future together, you’ll join your City Council and the City of Bend in owning that future and setting a course that our kids and grandkids can be proud of. I’m excited, and honored, to lead us there. Thank you.
