The Local Lens – Episode 2 – Jamie Collins Interview
EDITOR'S NOTE: In this episode of The Local Lens, Spencer Sacks interviews Jamie Collins, who is running for Seat 1. All candidate episodes will be out this week.
Spencer Sacks: Well, thank you, Mr. Collins, for joining us on the local lens, we greatly appreciate it hopping right in what is the biggest problem facing our county to you?
Jamie Collins: Biggest problem here is our affordability crisis. The people who work here and keep this community going, our teachers, our nurses, our firefighters, our sheriff's deputies, and the people who are actually building our homes, they cannot actually afford to live here, and I am here to fight for those folks, to bring my 22 years of public service, working focused on solutions in a in a non partisan way, to meet those challenges.
Spencer Sacks: So how do we actually build more homes? Because when we build them, it's just still expensive. You know, we're seeing homes is for as you know, cheap as five, 600,000 to most being around 750, to 800,000
Jamie Collins: great question. So the county's role is kind of as a land broker between our cities, where I believe our growth should be happening near where our infrastructure actually exists, right? And where your average home uses less water in our cities here, and so we are building the 1000s of homes that we need in our community, but living within our means the county, as that land broker can put conditions on that and say, Hey, Redmond bend sisters, la pine, we want to help you grow. We know we need to grow as this community. Growth is a huge opportunity here, but we need to say, hey, some percentage of those homes needs to be set aside for the people who actually work here and make an income that is not the highest income in the state. We live in the wealthiest County in Oregon, now, fastest growing for a while. We now live in the wealthiest County in Oregon, and we need to be fighting for the people who aren't at the top end of that bracket, so that they can have homes here too.
Spencer Sacks: So how do we actually handle that growth? I mean, you know, we're talking about taxing systems. You know, we're already talking about a new county dump. We're talking about sewers, we're talking about water. How do we how do we handle that on a county level?
Jamie Collins: Yeah, so growth is a planning process. As I said, growth is a huge opportunity, right? We have the ability to shape our future here, but this is also coming, as you alluded to, with huge challenges. These include, we do not have enough water here in our county to go around. We are it's the term is over allocated, kind of a wonky sounding term, but what that means is, essentially, there is more water spoken for than there is water. And so. We need to be planning our growth around the constraints that we have. The county commission, as it stands now, under the leadership of Commissioner debone, has not done that. Has not planned within our means for growth at the same time not building enough power lines, the basic kind of things that we should all expect when you and I go to work, we should expect our county government is doing that planning so that we can all go to work and not have to worry about it.
Spencer Sacks: Some of the hallmarks of your campaign has been to increase renewable energy. What does that look like? Does that mean the county will buy up land and put solar panels around town? Does that mean the county will work with a power company to build more in town? What's that look like?
Jamie Collins: Sure. Well, there's two things on renewable energy here the first as I said, we do not have enough power lines and substations coming into Central Oregon just to meet our power demand as it is, one of the benefits of building out all those power lines and substations that we need to do, and that the current commission has neglected to do, we will be able to tap the incredible solar energy and geothermal energy potential we have here. Deschutes County is home to the flagship project in the entire United States for geothermal energy. Just outside of La Pine outside of the Newberry volcanic National Monument, there is enough energy there to power 225 to 250,000 homes. We if they turned on that project today, though, we wouldn't be able to get that power out to the homes here. The second thing on solar, we, the county commission here, actually opted out of a program that allows counties to approve solar projects up to almost 2000 acres in size, for a reason that I have no idea. Counties to our south and our East are taking advantage of this state program. These are counties where the leadership there sees it as an economic development tool to build solar and we are not doing that here in Deschutes County. We can do that. We can start green lighting those projects as soon as the developers are ready to meet us there.
Spencer Sacks: So part of this land use conversation is about, how do we continue that building? Does it look like apartment buildings? Does it look like houses in your ideal world? What does that growth look like?
Jamie Collins: So I believe that the growth should be happening in our cities, where the infrastructure already exists, where our roads exist, where there is enough water to go around. In our cities, the growth should not be happening out in our rural county, deep in the wildland urban interface that is the most dangerous place to build a home. And under the current county Commission's leadership, 4000 acres of luxury rural destination resort development have been approved in the rural county in the wildfire hazard zone. This is a zone that the county defined for itself as a development tool to say, hey, maybe we shouldn't build there. And the current commission went ahead and green lit those projects and is building there anyway that is increasing our risk. I have talked to insurers and the reinsurers, so those are the companies that back up the insurance companies, and they have said, Look here in Deschutes County, this is a pattern of growth that is increasing our risk, and they are taking a very hard look at our insurance situation here in the county, and they're saying, Hey, this is a place we don't think we want to do business, and that's very dangerous for everybody and for our real estate market here.
Spencer Sacks: So shifting gears a little bit, homelessness has continued to go on the rise as of last year's point in time, number that number was 2108 people were considered homeless. How do we stop that growth from continuing that we've seen over the last seven to eight years?
Jamie Collins: This is a deeply personal problem and an issue for me. There are 83 homeless veterans here in the county, and as a veteran, someone who has served his country alongside others, has seen firsthand the consequences of PTSD, other other psychological conditions that you get from from the trauma associated with some folks, service dependency, all these things that, to me, is a moral failing of our community that we have, that many folks homeless, we should be aiming for, for zero people in our community who don't have a home over their roof, over their heads and aren't able to fully participate, we do that with an all hands on deck approach. Services all over the map, building enough housing that is truly affordable, doing things like permanent supportive housing, which we are finally starting to do up in Redmond, and helping the people for whom a roof is not enough to help them stay housed. Right? There are folks in our community, including many of those including many of those veterans, who need a level of service from the county, and we can do that by making more efficient use of the resources that we already have here.
Spencer Sacks: What does that look like?
Jamie Collins: There was a great project up in Skagit County Washington called North Star, and I encourage your viewers to to check this out. North store, North Star, skagit.org I believe, is a website. They basically brought the sheriff's office, their county commission there, all the cities and their local service providers. So like the 40s, I think we have more than 40 nonprofits that have some piece of this pie here in the sheep's County. Brought them all together and got them to pool resources and a. Eliminate a lot of the inefficiencies and the overlap that was going on there. And they came up with actually get this extra money that was left over that they were able to put into fully funding their stabilization center. So this is for people in deep psychological crisis, and we're able to channel some of that money back into services, outreach to the homeless population there. So it is about creative solutions, getting people together around a table. That's the work that I've done for from my 22 year career in public service.
Spencer Sacks: So shifting gears a little bit. One of the big conversations right now we're voting on in November is this county map. Not only do I want to know where you stand on it, but what do you think about districting as a whole?
Jamie Collins: Sure. So I want to say this, I grew up in an incredibly small rural community where the decisions that affected my daily life were made in big cities far away, and so I acutely feel the tension that is between can exist between a growing urban center like we have here in Bend in Redmond, and then rural county here, We're almost exactly split rural and urban. Here in Deschutes County, we need to bridge that gap. I have spent my life listening to all sorts of voices in uniform. You know, once a month I take this, my clothes off, my civilian clothes, I put my uniform on, and I go and I serve alongside people who have very, probably very different political beliefs than I do. So it's about dialog. And we get things done, we focus on the mission. I do not support the maps as they are drawn on the November ballot because of the process that we went through. There is a way to bridge those voices and bring the rural voices and the urban voices together at the table, but it is not a one size fits all five geographic districts drawn by a committee that was given a very narrow set of directions to produce a certain outcome. We need to go back to the drawing board. We there are plenty of models out there, ideas of mixture of districts and at large seats. There are ways of really getting at representation in a way that this process did not
Spencer Sacks: so when it comes to wildfires, you know, there's a lot of concern about, how do our county commissioners work together on that? You know, right now we have three, we're going up to five. We might have as many as four new county commissioners on the next county council or next Board of Commissioners. Rather, how would you work with other commissioners to make sure that Deschutes County is prepared for those wildfires when they happen?
Jamie Collins: Sure? Well, first say, I've done this work. I'm a type one incident commander, so it's the highest certification that we have nationally for responding to actual disasters like wildfires. I have led teams in hazmat suits going into Oregon communities after wildfires have ripped through and cleaning up the toxic stew that is left over after fire burns through a development that should never have been put where it is in the first place. So this is deeply personal. Me. I've done that work. The way that we get this done is as a team. I have spent my career, including right here in Deschutes County and Central Oregon, as a disaster responder, bringing teams of anywhere from 50 to 400 people together to respond to things like wildfires, train derailments, oil spills, other natural disasters. And it really is about bringing a team together, identifying the problem, and being honest about what that problem is, and then lining up the resources, setting a vision as a leader, as a commission, and empowering people to get things done. And that's what I want to do here. I will add our insurance crisis here. Looming insurance crisis is incredibly serious. The first thing that I intend to do as county commissioner, with the other Commissioners is stand up a wildfire crisis Task Force, bringing in our home builders, our insurers, most importantly, our firefighters and our fire chiefs and and the people who live here, and getting them together the city leaders as well our environmental organizations, getting a handle on the problem and then laying down a road map to to lead us out of this crisis and get some stability to it.
Spencer Sacks: Well, that's all time we have. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it.
