Board of County Commissioners - Regular Meeting

One more blue sheet. Okay. Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us today for this September 2nd, 2026 meeting of the Deschutes County Board of Commissioners. We will now call the meeting to order and the first item on our agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance. Please join us.

Pledge of Allegiance.

Next, we will review and modify, if necessary, the agenda and then approve the agenda. Are there any requests for additions, subtractions, or other changes?

No changes. Move approval.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. Further discussion? Seeing none. Commissioner DeBone? Yes. Commissioner Adair? Yes. And Chair votes yes. All right. Now we are moving to citizen input. And I have three blue forms here. If there's anyone else in the room who would like to provide input during citizen input this morning, please fill out a blue form here. Or if you're online and would like to provide public comment, please raise your hand. your virtual hand online. First up, we have Sean Snyder. Good morning.

Go ahead and grab the microphone a little closer. There you go. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to be able to speak to you guys. Really appreciate it. I'm learning how to speak in front of people. It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, so I ask you guys to bear with me. I'll get there. I came in here last week and had some concerns about Smith Rock. Appreciate y'all listening. Went out there and everything is pretty much still the same. I also spoke about some problems we're having out at the Philz Trail, and that situation is still the same. I was going to go into some more detail and talk about those two situations, but unfortunately, there's another situation that has precedent. I'd let you all know last time I was here that I was pretty much done with the homeless situation and was moving on from it. I don't know if you all have heard, but Monday night, Tuesday morning, we had another death over at the Shepherd's House. The Lighthouse. It's also the Shepherd's House, but in the Bi-Mart parking lot. The body was there for quite some time. People had helped themselves to the body. And by the time the police came and did their what they call... crime scene in the area. I was quite disturbed at all the things that I filmed that were going on during the process of removing this dead body. We all have family. We have moms, dads, some of us have daughters, sons, brothers, sisters. And I'm sure this gentleman did as well. I've been over there filming for quite some time, as you guys know. I spend a lot of time over there filming. And the things that I see are unacceptable. And I go back to being at the Cleveland Commons and let you guys know about the two deaths that were there. They were quite disturbing. My neighbor died, woke up in a dead body going outside, put it in a white van. That same white van and the same two people came to pick up this dead body. I hope and wish that we can spend a little bit less time on all this zoning and expanding and all of this stuff that you all know is going on. I would never want to, you couldn't pay me a million dollars a day to be in your seat. So please understand, I respect and I'm very thankful for what you guys do. But something's got to be done. The waste, fraud, and abuse going on here with the homeless is outrageous. And it doesn't take rocket science. I'm Sean here. Didn't graduate high school. Didn't do nothing. And the amount of stuff that I'm investigating and finding is just off the charts. And so let's get it together. Let's do something. And let's try to... Yeah, that was unacceptable, the death Monday night and Tuesday morning. And the way the law enforcement, everybody there was just joking, laughing, and just act like it was just another day at the job. No mourning, no respect, no nothing. It was very, very saddening and absolutely unacceptable behavior for professionals that we have running Pischutz County. Thank you for your time again.

Thank you, Sean. I would say that if this disrespectful handling of a deceased person was happening inside the city of Bend, there's a good chance that it was Bend PD that was handling the situation. So I would encourage you to contact leaders from the city of Bend about that. We have, well, they do hold public comment for their meetings just like we do. So on

information i did not know that okay thank you um okay uh next oh i i do want to comment um sean i did call my contact at the state parks just to have him check in on uh smith rock what you were saying so i did call my person who um is i believe second in command of this oregon state parks just to have him check so thank you for um thank you for coming

And other county employees contacted the Forest Service about Phil's Trail after you visited us last time. Just so you know. Okay. Our next piece of citizen input is from Amy Sabadini.

good morning commissioners thank you chair i may not be able to come back this afternoon for the geothermal hearing you're having or may not come in time for public comments so i wanted to get it in now i hope that the county encourages geothermal exploration because we need renewable energy in fact we need many forms of energy right now we also could use help in grouping our grid and this could be economic development but i do worry the public around the country is saying no we don't trust big corporations right now and they're not helping our local areas so i would encourage whatever powers you do have in this contract that you encourage them to show they're willing to invest locally in the people here because otherwise the people here will reject even a good project. So it's not a very specific comment. It's just a concept that we have to make sure there is a local benefit to anything that gets approved in our area, or the public will shut down any project, whether it's good or not. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks, Cindy. We've gotten a lot of written public comment from people about the item on our agenda this afternoon related to Quaze Energy. that their application or their request to be considered for a rural renewable energy development zone tax abatement. And just so everyone knows, the county in this case only has authority over that potential tax abatement. We do not have land use authority in this case. This is a project happening on Forest Service land. So the federal and state governments are doing all of the siting evaluation. And just so nobody thinks that we've got lots of levers to pull, basically the only thing we get to decide is whether we wanted to provide a certain amount of tax abatement in exchange for other kinds of investments or community benefits or not. Thank you. Ron Boozell.

I am Ron Boozell. I've been a resident of Deschutes County for most of my life, almost 37 years. Today was a great day. Today's an awesome day. This week, a Republican, Thomas Massey, stood up and read some names. Today changes, this week changes everything. It's awesome that a Republican did it. Jess Daley, Leon Black, Les Wexner, David Copperfield. Lapo Elkman, excuse me, Elkin. Thomas Pritzker. Glenn Dubin. Frederick Fekay. Eduardo Tirdonani Fabri. John Luke Brunel. Daniel Siad. Ramsey Elkholy. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Leslie growth that's 14 people now that we know who they are now we can move forward at a high speed if we choose these are names off of the Epstein list and we all know who Jeffrey Epstein is we all know who Benjamin Netanyahu is we know that our president works for them and has been manipulated to do some awful things in this country this last period of time So now it is time for us to stand up and make sure that more names get released and actions happen. It's all just conversation until actions happen. That's what they're guilty of, actions. Thank you Deschutes County Commission for being two Republicans out of three. I think that you can do something. I think we all can do something. had the power to make this happen yes we are completed we made this happen the fact that that these people are not punished that have blocked our system of justice in this country uh the fact that it hasn't happened yet is because we have not demanded it there's no other reason thank you for your time thank you mr bruce thanks ron okay um

Is there anyone online with their hand raised? Okay. Then we can move on to commissioner announcements. Are there any commissioner announcements? We have at least one item that we decided to try to do under commissioner announcements today rather than schedule it for an agenda item in a couple of weeks. And that is an acknowledgement for the Cascades Futurity and Aged event. You know, I, I know that I know that some of my fellow commissioners are more, you know, more closely connected to this event.

It'd be me.

Would you would you like to make an announcement? Come on. Okay. Yeah.

Yes, please. No, it's really wonderful talking to you this morning that we actually have more horses on ground than last year. And I've always heard that there are some of the kindest people that come to Deschutes County and they're here for what, 10 days, two weeks?

Two and a half weeks.

Okay. Do you want to introduce yourself to the crowd then?

My name is Jody Gray and I'm with the Cascades Futurity and Aged event. This is our ninth year having this event in Deschutes County. It's an amazing county. It's an amazing facility and I'm going to say Jeff's done a great job. The place looks better than it's ever looked and we're we've taken over. I mean we've got more horses and as you said than we've had in the past. Each year we grow. We bring a lot of visitors to the county. Everyone loves it. Everyone leaves very, very happy. They love the facility. They love the show. They love the county. They love the city of Redmond also. So we really appreciate it. And we appreciate you commissioners that you acknowledge that we do bring something to your county and that we love it here.

Tell us a little bit about being able to be a spectator.

It's a great facility.

For the event itself, for someone who wants to show up and see some horses.

It's a really comfortable place to come. As a matter of fact, I had someone call me that's here on vacation from Indianapolis and they asked what it was like to bring their family. They have 7-year-olds to 77-year-olds. You go in the building and it's concrete and there's stadium seating. increased our cattle settling. So there's only 10 minute gap between each class. So it's not as you know, you don't sit and watch paint dry kind of joke about. There's a lot of shopping, there's food, there's vendors, it's actually a fun thing to do on a rainy day.

Around a rainy day. Wonderful. Yeah, but it's a great family based horse event that's open. It's wonderful.

Yeah, and everyone's super friendly about explaining what's going on. If you sit down and you don't know what's going on, the person next to you will tell you how it's judged. Yes, super friendly place, yeah.

Okay, so I guess should I read this in? It said, the Deschutes County Board of Commissioners acknowledges the Cascades Futurity and Aged event for showcasing agricultural and the thrilling ability of cowhorses and their riders, and for bringing many out-of-state visitors to Deschutes County every year since 2018 with significant economic impacts. And this was presented September 2 of 2026 by the Board of Commissioners. And also, I think it makes Mrs. Knight very happy because she is a sponsor. And I don't think the first interstate building has ever looked better than when the cutting is there. Take a moment and go by and see these horses. It's like a three-minute work where they work with cattle. It's unbelievable the communication between the horse and the rider. The horse actually has to love what they're doing.

thank you thank you very much well great and thank you for joining us i know uh you know i've seen a lot of activity up and down the highway so fuel prices are biting us all right now but it's still happening which is very exciting so uh but then you get uh how many miles per bale of hay onto the horses too so we always joke about that so but thank you and welcome very exciting see out there well i will a couple of you first yes are you on the 11th commissioner would you like to we can sign this and hand it out for you yeah but we should right we should find it we'll bring it to you yes thank you for coming in all right um other commissioner announcements

I'll mention a couple of things. First off, tonight at COCC, Pacific Power is going to do a little overview presentation on their project blueprint project, which is a 500kV transmission line that will, under either of the two route options that are that are being considered pass through eastern Deschutes County a little bit to the east of Pine Mountain. So if anyone is interested in transmission line sighting issues or questions, that might be a good thing to check out. I'll also mention that the Public Health Advisory Board met yesterday and the primary topic that they heard about was how to protect our community's health from smoke during wildfire season, during prescribed fire season. Lots of good information about basically what you can do in your home, where clean air shelters are in our community. So if anyone is interested in that information, you can pull up the video of the Public Health Advisory Board meeting from yesterday and watch sort of the middle of it. That's all I've got.

And speaking of smoke, I did have a call from the neighborhood regarding the fire. In the vicinity of the safe parking in Bend, I said, please let me know if anything happens that shouldn't be happening in your neighborhood. So we will be, I'm sure, discussing that later.

Yeah, and just so everyone knows, that fire, the ignition source has been identified. It's one of the nearby businesses. So, you know, anyone... Early on, there was, I think, some speculation that that fire may have been started by unauthorized camping homeless people or something like that. But it was just regular business activity at one of the nearby businesses that sparked that fire, just to be clear. Okay. With that, let's move on to the consent agenda.

So move. And I will second it.

It's been moved and seconded. Any further discussion?

A little bit of information. Item number two, approval of a lease with Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council on behalf of Core 3. So I'm on that core three board. The director, Beini, is going to be signing this document, just acknowledging that we're all kind of involved with these things at multiple angles. Also, yesterday, I was able to go to the managed camp that's on the ground out there. And this is going to empower a left turn because, of course, I took that left turn in a high-speed situation yesterday. And it's going to be exciting seeing that happen. COIC is having a board meeting on Thursday. So that'll be the other side of this document also. And then just for other information, I learned that there's a couple little sites going to be put in a pad and a yurt or a structure. And it looks like there's going to be nonprofit support for putting some of that stuff together. So I offered to come out and help when that happens at that managed camp, separate than the Core 3 project.

Little updates? Yeah, I would like to ask a question or two. if that's okay for us to do during consent agenda item discussion. Okay. So as we all know, the original intent with Core 3 was for this piece of county property to be transferred to COIC to manage and develop for the Core 3 facility. And that hasn't happened yet. And that's part of the reason we're working on this agreement right now or this lease in MOE right now. One thing I'm curious about is whether the county is continuing to carry costs because the land transfer hasn't happened yet. It seems like we are pretty involved in things happening at COIC, at Core 3, at the Core 3 site. You know, cleanup, you know, preparations, things like that. And I just, you know, I'm curious, if we had completed the transfer already, would we be utilizing the staff time that we are utilizing in order to help the Core 3 project move forward?

So during the last couple of months, COSD and the county staff have been working together and basically what we've outlined is county staff is taking care of kind of the boots on the ground and helping people get into the camp. And there's been a clean up of the filmmaker footprint. And then in Right.

So the cleanup costs will be covered by COIC with course refunding. But the staff time, the expenditures, is that being reimbursed as well? Or...

the costs.

Thank you. Yeah, I mean, and that's not grounds to vote against this MOU and lease, but it is just an ongoing concern of mine is as long as this piece of property is technically in our ownership, even though it's intended for Core 3, we are expending precious staff time and resources to advance a very important project. Yeah, just something to keep an eye on for the future.

Understood. And then transfer-wise, there's the APEX report and the solid waste, World War II solid waste cells on there, environmental management of the old Rod and Gun Club. So there's like this gray area of why would I take it if these aren't mitigated? But, I mean, this is the action to be done. So it is kind of priming the pump for forward progress here, and this is the step, and I'm excited to get here. Okay.

Yeah, no, I just wanted to kind of take a microscope to a moment for, you know, what the county has invested and is continuing to invest to advance the Core 3 project.

Not only did we donate the land, but we're cleaning it up.

Yeah.

And the cleanup is being performed by a contractor, by BioSolutions. And the loss gets reimbursed or will be reimbursed.

That works. Thank you. If there's no other questions, we can proceed to approving the consent agenda. So it was moved by you. Okay. Calling for the vote, Commissioner DeBone.

Yes. I actually made the motion.

Oh, there you go. I didn't even know.

I'm sorry.

I wrote it down.

Okay. Calling for the vote, Commissioner Adair.

Yes.

And Commissioner DeBone. Yes. Chair votes yes. Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioners.

Okay, moving from our consent agenda to regular action items, item number five is a proclamation for Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. We have some county staff here to lead us on this proclamation. Thanks for joining us today.

Good morning, Commissioners. Thank you for having us today. Thank you to the Board of County Commissioners and to the folks who are watching for having us present today and just have a little space in your agenda to talk a little bit about September being National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. My name is Caroline Suter. I work for Deschutes County Public Health and Suicide Prevention Program. And Bethany's here as well.

Yeah. Hi, my name is Bethany Kushel and I work alongside Caroline in Deschutes County Suicide Prevention Program.

Yeah, and we're mainly here today just to cover briefly a little bit of data related to suicide and locally, state and national levels, but also talking a little bit about resources that are available to the community as well as events that are happening in Deschutes County as well as regionally across this next month or current month. Suicide Prevention Awareness Month matters because it helps remind us that suicide is preventable and there is help available. It gives us space to have compassionate, open conversations about suicide, which in turn helps lower stigma and also helps us connect people to the supports they need, which all in turn saves lives. So, before we hop into some data, just some key things to kind of keep in mind related to this health issue is that it is a public health issue that does affect many individuals and systems. Not only locally, but nationally and globally. It's often a multi-factorial health issue. There's multiple things that go on in people's lives as to why they may be struggling with suicide. And it is preventable. It's a shared community responsibility and we all can help. And one way that we can help is just knowing the warning signs that people might have showing that they might be struggling with suicide, knowing the resources and being able to share those resources openly. So the next few slides will cover some data just briefly, but every single slide will have a resource and we're encouraging anyone who's watching to have their phone out to save these resources because it is really important for us to know them in case we ourselves are struggling at any point in the future, but also anyone who's around us who might need some supports. So our most recent year of data that's available to us is from 2024. So this is just a quick snapshot of suicide statistics from 2024. And what we do know is that over 48,000 people died by suicide in the United States. In the state of Oregon, we had 941 people die by suicide. And within Deschutes County that year of 2024, we lost 42 people by suicide. Again, less than 23. We had 42 people die by suicide in Deschutes County in 2024. No, but how many died in 23?

Oh, in 2023? I mean, I just wondered, because I think, you know, we have a wonderful program available. And I just was wondering, are the numbers going down at all?

That's a hard, complicated question to answer. Year by year it doesn't indicate that there are necessarily trends. When we look at multiple years, there are some positive things that we're seeing in downward trends. But a general overview of nationally, Just for all ages, we're kind of on an upward trend for Deschutes County. We're kind of have peaks and valleys. So, yeah. Just had to listen. So, I'm sorry I didn't look through it all. Yeah, no that's okay. We will talk about a few of the trends that we are seeing in the next slide. But in order to save lives and help reduce our suicide rates, we encourage people to save Deschutes County Stabilization Center into their phones. It's located at 63311 Northeast Jamieson Street in Bend. It's available to anyone who is struggling with their mental health and in a mental health crisis.

So did you say Northeast Jamieson? So that Northeast isn't here on this little memo.

Yeah, thanks for noticing that. Yes, it's kind of by the DMV over. Yeah, Empire. Mm hmm. Yep. Yeah, it's this. But anyway, maybe... It's a great resource for our community. Yeah, and it's available 24-7, 365 days a week. Anyone can walk in. They don't need an appointment. Right by the bus stop. Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah, so great resource to keep in mind and share out. For youth suicide trends, when we're looking at the state of Oregon in our most recent years, we are seeing a decrease in suicide for ages 24 and under. When we look at our local trends, We are seeing a downward trend for youth ages 17 and under for our most recent years, but an increasing trend for 18 to 24-year-olds. So a really important youth-based resource to save in our phones and know is YouthLine. It's a peer-based support line. Any youth can call 877-968-8491 or text teen to teen at 839-863. Peers answer texts and phone calls from 4 to 10 pm every day and outside of that 988 our local 988 Oregon call center answers those phone calls and texts which we'll talk about here shortly.

And Caroline, you would point people to this 877 number before the 988 because it's a youth specific line.

Sometimes having like cultural groups and cultural identities connect with the population that's struggling is helpful in kind of stabilizing people's mental health. And so sometimes it's helpful for youth to talk to other youth. um and and get that support that they need so if that aligns better for someone a young person's ability to get the support they need we would encourage them to use youth line but 988 is available for all ages and anyone who might be needing some extra support yeah thank you yeah thanks And then our last data slide is around lethal means in Deschutes County. What we do know is being able to reduce access to lethal means temporarily, if we're struggling, can really help save lives. When we look at our Deschutes County suicide by firearm rates for ages 19 and under, We continue to still be higher than the state and the nation. With that in mind, we have our regional coalition that came together to create this local resource. So we encourage people to save this in their phones, which is safefirearmsstorage.com. Our Spanish and English speaking firearm owners came together with our coalition to help create this project, which is called Safe in English or Seguro in Spanish. And there's a variety of educational materials and resources on that website around how to reduce access to lethal means when someone's struggling.

Thank you, Caroline. So now we would just like to cover some of the work that we are doing here before we get into trainings and events and ways to get involved. So since 2003, the Deschutes County Suicide Prevention Program has trained over 2,700 community members. and evidence-based suicide prevention trainings. These trainings focus on suicide prevention as a public health approach in order to reduce stigma, increase skills, increase confidence, and educate participants in suicide prevention and intervention methods, such as how to ask directly if someone is thinking about suicide, how to temporarily store lethal means, and how to connect individuals to resources that make sense for them. Our program also works directly with Deschutes County Schools. And in the 2024-2025 school year, we trained around 1000 school staff. 97% of those school staff trained said they felt more confident asking directly about suicide. And these partnerships are just one piece of helping to build a suicide safe community. Our program is also the backbone of Central Oregon Suicide Prevention Alliance. And this is a regional effort that has 20 Central Oregon organizations involved at a leadership level to prevent suicide through multiple avenues, including projects and events. A brief overview. Suicide, as Caroline mentioned, is a complex public health issue. And there's rarely one single cause can be influenced by many factors. But as community members, we can remain vigilant. Suicide prevention is not limited to one month or one program. It requires sustained attention, coordination and willingness to respond when community members may be struggling. One death by suicide is too many, for every death has a profound and lasting effect on our families, friends, coworkers, schools, first responders, and Deschutes County community as a whole. And we can all play a part in prevention. A simple action can make a difference. Asking someone directly about suicide does not put the idea in their head, but it can help connect them to the support that they need. And for this is just a reminder of a resource for everyone is 988, which is available 24-7, 365 to call, text, or chat in English or Spanish. It's also available by translation in other languages. It's a great resource to use for really any reason you would access mental health support. No reason is too small. So now just wrapping up, we would like to highlight some of the events that are occurring in the region to kind of turn that awareness into action. So first we have some suicide prevention trainings occurring. These are evidence-based suicide prevention and intervention trainings that go over local data, how to safely speak about suicide, as well as train participants in recognizing warning signs that someone may be at risk for suicide. how to ask directly, and how to support a person to community resources. More information can be found by going to preventsuicideco.org. We also have 988 day. So September 8th is 988 day and we have a few opportunities to celebrate. The first is that there will be a Hope in the Park in Madras that has lots of activities going on as well as suicide prevention resources. But we also just highlight this day as a day of action for sharing information to reduce stigma about this invaluable resource. In Deschutes County, if you call 988, it can connect you to local resources as well. So it's a great one-stop shop to get some support. And we, Deschutes County Suicide Prevention Program, has materials such as 988 posters, magnets, and stickers to share with the community so we can help spread word. So please reach out if you would like any of these to share out. And then we just want to take a moment to highlight the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Out of Darkness Walk that's taking place on Saturday, September 12th in Alpenglow Park. This is a fundraiser to help support AFSP's ongoing suicide prevention efforts across the country. It brings together suicide loss survivors, suicide attempt survivors, and those passionate about suicide prevention. prevention to walk together and raise funds as well as to promote awareness and healing in the community. And while there are more events going on, this is our last one we're going to highlight and that is the 11th Annual Candlelight Vigil for Suicide Loss. This event is brought by the Central Oregon Suicide Prevention Alliance Outreach Volunteers. But this beautiful event will take place on Thursday, September 24th and has music, poetry, a healing sound bath, and a candlelight ceremony at sunset to honor those we have lost to suicide. All are welcome to join. As we wrap up today, we want to mention the gratitude that we have for all of our community partners involved in suicide prevention. We feel honored to be able to work with such champions. While our volunteers could not be here with us today in person, we want to take a moment to shine light on the COSPA outreach group who are instrumental in fueling many of the events this month. And we could not have these events or bring awareness to suicide prevention without this group of wonderful tenacious people. And thank you commissioners for your willingness to highlight this important health matter in our Community, we thank you our contact information is available if anyone would like to reach out about any other events or resources.

Thank you. I just want to say thank you to our team here at Deschutes County and to all the members of the Central Oregon Suicide Prevention Alliance for the work you're doing every day to fight this epidemic in our nation and in our community. It is Without those resources, without the compassion and support, without the education and awareness, I'm sure that this problem would be even worse. So thank you for all the lives that you've helped to save. Are there any questions, comments before we look at this proclamation?

I have to say something. I've heard, because I know people that live out on the north end of our county line, that people are still jumping from there. And I know we have a small sign that says, please don't jump, please call. But maybe that needs to be looked at again. I just... I just have heard a couple of really sad stories from there.

Thanks, Patti. Lethal means is often a piece to our program is looking at different ways related to how people pass. Because that is an effective way for us to be able to prevent suicide is to have some preventative measures around that. So take that in.

It was just really sad when I heard my latest story from there. So we can do something more. Yeah, thanks. Thank you. Thank you for what you do, though.

Okay.

Well, if we're ready to proceed to the proclamation, how about Commissioner Adair, would you like to read the first portion and the first three whereases and Commissioner Dubon, the second three, and then I'll wrap it up.

Before the Board of Commissioners of Deschutes County, Oregon Proclamation recognizing September as Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. Whereas in 2024, more than 48,000 people in the United States die by suicide. Whereas in Deschutes County, approximately three people die by suicide each month. In Oregon, suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth ages 5 to 24. And each suicide death leaves a lasting impact on families, friends, loved ones, and the broader community. Whereas in Deschutes County, roughly 57% of all suicide deaths are by firearm. For young people ages 24 and under, firearms were the leading method in 61% of the suicide deaths. Both of these trends are higher than the state and national averages.

Whereas many of the people who have died by suicide never receive effective behavioral health services for many reasons, including the stigma of using behavioral health treatment and the stigma associated with losing a loved one to suicide. Whereas far too many Deschutes County residents die by suicide each year. whereas Deschutes County is dedicated to partnering across community sectors to reduce suicide attempts, deaths, and the pain experienced by those affected. This is witnessed by recognizing suicide as a significant public health issue in Deschutes County and declaring suicide prevention a countywide priority, supporting accessible behavioral health services for all in our county, helping to destigmatize help-seeking behaviors, acknowledging that everyone plays a role in helping to prevent suicide, and encouraging initiatives known to be effective in preventing suicide attempts and death, such as securely storing firearms.

Now therefore be it resolved that the Deschutes County Board of Commissioners do hereby designate the month of September and each year thereafter as Suicide Prevention Awareness Month in Deschutes County and urge the community to learn how they can help prevent suicide. Dated the second day of September 2026 by the Deschutes County Board of Commissioners.

So moved approval.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. Any further discussion?

So Carolyn and Bethany, thank you very much. And it is a community outreach umbrella discussion for everybody. So it's good to take a moment here at a public meeting, but it's welcoming anybody and everybody in our community to take a moment and think about this.

Yeah. Yes. Thank you, commissioners. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay. Calling for the vote. Commissioner DeBone? Yes. Commissioner Adair? Yes. And Chair votes yes. Thank you so much. We'll look forward to seeing you at some of those events.

Oh, photo opportunity. There we go.

All right, ready, three, two, one.

I just lost somebody recently. And I didn't, I totally missed the warning sign.

I mean,

I mean, there was something really going on.

Okay. At this time, we will move on to item number six, a public hearing for the Ajaros Plan Amendment and Zone Change of 64 acres at 68589 Highway 20 in your sisters to rezone the property from exclusive farm use to multiple use agricultural.

You.

You script from this one. Okay.

You just, I just flipped it over. I'll switch. Okay. I had left, you know, so I'll, oh, it's all good.

Right. This is the time and place set for a hearing regarding file numbers 247-26-000120-PA and 121-ZC. This is a hearing on a Deschutes County Comprehensive Plan amendment and zone change request. Staff will outline the hearing procedures that will be followed now.

Good morning, for the record, my name is Caroline House and I'm a senior planner with the Deschutes County Planning Division. Today the Board of County Commissioners will be taking testimony and receiving written evidence involving an application to change the comprehensive plan designation of a 64 acre property and rezone the property from exclusive farm use to multiple use agricultural. So today's hearing will proceed as follows. So first I will go over how the hearing format will work and how to testify. I will then provide a brief staff report. We'll then move on to the testimony portion of the hearing. The applicant will present first and will have 30 minutes. Next person in support will have three minutes and then anyone in opposition will testify last and also have three minutes. Afterwards the applicant will have 10 minutes for rebuttal testimony and lastly staff may have closing comments. And I do want to note that the board can eliminate or modify the time limits described at any time at your discretion. So today's hearing is a hybrid hearing where both in-person and remote participation is allowed. Before starting your testimony, please provide your first and last name as well as your mailing address. And I just want to pause and deviate from this script for just a second and note that There was a form or some type of call to action email system that was used by parties and some of those emails masked the actual email for recipients. So we weren't able to get a deliverable email address. So please make sure you're providing your actual email and your comments and your mailing address if you're testifying today to make sure you can be added to future notices associated with this review. So continuing on, so for our in person participants, if you wish to testify, please fill out a blue sign up sheet and submit it to the board's executive assistant Brenda to the left of the dais. Chair Chang will call up in person participants for their testimony. After your name is called, please come to the tables at the front of the room to make sure your your audio is picked up on the microphone for anyone to hear in the room and remotely. For our remote participants, please note you must be attending using Zoom. Chair Ching, again, will request anyone wishing to testify to, in this case, use the raise hand feature to notify the board that you would like to testify. To do this, you'll need to press the raise hand button or dial star 9 if you have called in. When it's your turn to provide testimony, you will be promoted from an attendee to a panelist. You may experience a brief pause as your status changes. Once you have joined as a panelist, you'll be able to turn on your camera if you'd like to do so. In addition to oral testimony today, anyone can submit written testimony. If you're in person, please hand that to me before or after your testimony. And if you're attending remotely, you will need to email me your written testimony. My email's on the screen, but it's caroline.house at deschutes.org. And Chair Chang and staff are responsible for an orderly and respectful hearing. Anyone being disruptive may be asked to leave. So, Chair Chang, I will now return to the script and note that commissioners must disclose any ex parte contacts, prior hearing observations, biases, or conflicts of interest.

Okay.

Does any commissioner have anything to disclose? And if so, please state the nature of same and whether you can proceed.

So for this specific application, I have no connections to the applicant. Obviously, I've been a city commissioner, city commissioner for a while and seen the big picture over time. But nothing to disclose and no conflicts of interest.

I have nothing to disclose and I also drive by this property probably almost every day.

I have nothing to disclose and I can proceed. At this time, does any party wish to challenge any commissioner based on ex-party contacts, biases, or conflicts? This is probably more relevant for the next hearing, but I would like to raise the question or concern of campaign contributions connected with parties to land use applications and quasi judicial processes. You all may recall that In the last couple of years, I was asked to recuse myself from a quasi-judicial proceeding based on campaign contributions I had received from one of the parties. And I think it does make sense if someone contributes some thousands of dollars to you to run for office that you may have a bias. in that proceeding. In that case, while I believed I would be capable of proceeding without bias, out of an abundance of caution, I did recuse myself from that hearing and that process.

Point of clarity. You started off saying you were asked to recuse yourself and then you finished with you chose to recuse yourself. Which was it?

Both. I was asked and then I made the choice to do so. I just want to raise that as an example. When I had received a campaign contribution from a party in a quasi-judicial process, I did recuse myself to avoid any appearance of bias. And I think that it's appropriate for all of us to consider the same. We can discuss that further at a later point. I'll put that out there now. And like I said, this may be more relevant in later hearing processes today. But otherwise, as no challenges are presented prior to opening the hearing, does anyone have any procedural objections to the public hearing? Seeing none, the hearing is now open. Staff will proceed with a brief staff report.

All right. So just for some location information about where we're talking about, the address for this property is 68589 Highway 20 in Sisters. The property is about 64 acres in size and the owner and applicant are Derek Jaros, LLC. As noted a couple times now, the applicant has requested a comprehensive plan map amendment to change the designation of the property from agricultural to rural residential exception area, and also a corresponding zone change from exclusive farm use to multiple use agricultural. And I will also note that the applicant has not requested any exception to any of the statewide planning goals. The hearings officer identified three main goals in his analysis, so I'm going to focus on these for my staff report. The first is the compliance with goal three, which is the statewide planning goal tied to agricultural lands. In response to this goal, the applicant submitted an order one soil study, as well as a lot of other detailed information related to the property not being agricultural lands. And the hearings officer's recommendation to the board found that the property is not any of the following. So it's not defined as agricultural land under the applicable OAR. It's not suitable for farm use. And it's not necessary to permit farm practices to be taken on adjacent or nearby agricultural land. And the property is not part of a farm unit. The other goal that the hearings officer focused his recommendation on was compliance with goal five. The board's pretty familiar with this one now, but this has to do with protection of scenic resources. The image at the bottom of the screen is just a Google Earth image. It's a little dated. I think it's 2018, but the other one I think had smoke in it, so you couldn't really get a good view of the property. But this property is partially within the landscape management, or I should say the scenic Goal 5 inventory resource. So that's the picture on the bottom right, that blue hatched area is the portion of the property within the Goal 5 inventory resource. And to demonstrate compliance with this goal, the applicant submitted a site-specific EC analysis. And that EC analysis concludes that the landscape management combining zone protects the resource and no additional measures are needed. And the hearings officer found that that information demonstrates compliance with goal five. The other goal that the hearings officer's recommendation focused on is whether the application complies with goal 14, which is specific to urbanization. So the county must determine if the applicant's request would allow for urban uses on rural land. And there's been several matters before LUBA for similar requests, these types of EFU to MUA 10 zone changes, where LUBA has found that the county must address whether residential density is allowed in the MUA 10 zone are consistent with the county's comprehensive plan policy 3.3.1. And in considering those two main points I've noted, the hearings officer did not find the applicant had met their burden and recommended the board deny the applicant's request based on the information that was in the record at that time. So the applicant has provided additional information addressing goal 14 as well as other information as well for the board's consideration. Moving on to public comments. At the work session, we were talking a little bit about the number of comments and how many were in support. So I actually went back and went through the comments and listened to the hearings officers' public hearing. The comments in support came in from Greg Willits. He testified at the hearing. And then comments in opposition, mainly Central Oregon Land Watch. And then there was a type of call to action form that were predominantly all the other comments in opposition. In total, between the hearings officer's recommendation review and now the board's process, there's been over 400 comments submitted. And there were other comments that came in during post-hearing periods as well. So a lot of comments submitted. Everything I've talked about is published at the website shown on the screen. I do want to note this morning at 8am I received a 36 page letter from Landwatch for the board to consider as well as several emails with additional attachments. So I've not had a chance to upload that into the record yet. But that is new material that's come in and I think that covers it. So I guess I'll just give a real quick next step. So at the conclusion of today's hearing, the board will need to do one of the following. So you could choose to continue the hearing to a date and time certain. The board could choose to close the or portion of the hearing and leave the written record open to a date and time certain. The board could close the hearing and schedule deliberations for a date and time certain or the board could close the hearing and commence deliberations. I am available for any questions. I did submit a staff memo into the record yesterday for the board's consideration in light of some of the questions that kind of came up at a high level at the work session. But if there's any other questions, I'm happy to answer those now.

Do you have a question? The right hand corner way down here, this RR 10 land, when was that zoned that way? I will have to look at that and get back to you. Okay, because I know we've got this huge area up here that I drive by, but then I'm going, there's a lot of homes right down here, and I'm going, when did that happen? You know, it's out there.

I will check and confirm. Most of the RR10 zones areas are platted subdivision lots. On the next hearing, you'll notice just on the very edge of their one mile kind of radius that, you know, we decided to be the lookup area, there is an MUA 10 zone property. It's not on this map, but it will be your next map that's before you. But I'm just noting it's just outside of the one that's shown there. And that property was rezoned in the 1980s to MUA 10. But there's really not a lot of MUA 10 properties now within that one mile area. Whether or not that's relevant, I'm not taking a position on that. Just acknowledge. Thanks, Carolyn.

So just a little bit of procedure. I did get your memo yesterday for this and was able to review that. The water attachment, I didn't go into detail on that, but I see what that is. And then also the emails. So as I say, I've been in that spot where it's kind of like this window of input coming as we open up these public hearings. There's a point in time where I've got all those emails and I brought my laptop if there's something that I have referenced to you that I just need to get electronically. So just being more prepared to have the latest information. And this is a public hearing open record. So as I say, after all this happens, there'll be time in my office to be able to focus on the full package. So just letting people know how I'm proceeding with these land use matters.

Thank you for responding to my request for a bigger area map. With zoning, I am not seeing the... I'm not seeing information on the city irrigated property that I asked about. Is there...

let me put my memo it's an attachment in there um i think it's attachment two um to that memo so there should be the first attachment was the zoning map the second attachment was the city of sisters response to how that area is being um how water is being land applied and there's also information about future uses There's kind of four different uses that it's currently being used for. And then they have plans to create kind of a wetland complex, maybe something similar to what the city of Redmond has done. But it's in that packet, but there's a lot of material there. At the very end, attachment three is the Oregon Water Resources Department response to exempt well use for small scale commercial farming or agricultural uses.

yeah no i saw that i just uh somehow i missed the city piece um okay thank you yeah thank you for providing all that all that information in response to my questions um are there any other questions or general comments before we begin

a couple notes uh you know so our minutes from june 1st which was on our agenda today we talk about our comprehensive plan and the pre-2000 and post-2000 uh exception lands so there you know it's just interesting that we have a couple paragraphs on that referring to the comprehensive plan so it's the bigger picture But also getting really grounded on the fact that the Destiny Court case said two acre minimum is urbanization. And then the BCL case, which is the solar panels east of Bend, is the case that defines the 10 acre comprehensive plan 3.3.1. So just getting real clear on these things that are referenced. And then also doing a little bit of homework on cluster and plan unit development, acknowledging that it is in our code. Deschutes County Code. And it has been acknowledged by LCDC, DLCD, both of them, whatever. And there was a little bit of history there. And it was from the early 80s that is the first time that this even came around back in the beginning of the land use system implementation of Senate Bill 100, the first zoning of all the parcels. So just this is the kind of homework I've been doing in preparation for this.

All right. If there are no further comments or questions from commissioners, we can begin to take testimony. And the order will be applicant, persons in support, persons in opposition, applicant rebuttal, and then staff closing comments.

Did we ask him if there's anyone online that protested?

I did not. Sorry. uh kim so there was a question when i when i asked about whether um there were biases or conflicts or things like that you know i asked people in the room but okay thank you all right um so let us proceed with testimony from the applicant

Bear with me for just a moment.

There's a lot to these cases, a lot of paper to get sorted out and organized on the desk.

Good morning. Thank you. My name is Tia Lewis. I'm an attorney for the applicant Derek Jaros. We have the applicant here with me at the table as well as our planning consultant Daniel Robinson. Procedurally, I would like to start with a take a look at the documents that were provided to you at the beginning of the hearing. The applicant has not seen any of the documents that were handed to you at the beginning of the hearing and I would like to just look at it so that I know what it is. referring to this map whatever documents they are i don't know what they are thank you okay thank you that's all i want i just wanted to know what you're looking at so that we we're all on the same page here

And just for anyone watching, basically, we're looking at a map that shows the zoning for properties in the vicinity of the subject property of this application.

Which was discussed at our work session, a request for this map. So that's how that came about. And you can turn on zoning and dial and see that same information.

Excellent. Thank you. It's just when you're provided with documents that we don't see, it's important that we know what you're looking at. We haven't also seen the staff memo that was provided to you. So we will be addressing that separately, but not today. Thank you. So we do have a PowerPoint and I will go through it. briefly, and then we have some issues to talk about with regard to the hearings officer's decision. So, just skip right to the next slide. As staff indicated, the property is on Highway 20. It is adjacent to the City of Sisters UGB. It is adjacent to the City of Sisters wastewater treatment plant. That's what you see down on the eastern boundary in dark blue. It is adjacent to the south to Forest Service land and it is adjacent to the east and to the southeast, or excuse me, to the west and southwest. Oh, sorry, wrong directional thing. To the east and southeast with 233 acres, 231 acres of publicly owned land by the City of Sisters, which is used as a part of their wastewater effluent. We did submit the city's wastewater treatment plan into the record and it is extensive and it's in our record as Exhibit DD.

Let's go to the next slide.

As indicated, the property was once a part of the Lazy Z Ranch. It was a 1400 acre ranch that was subdivided over the years well prior to the applicant's ownership. And we have an extensive history of the ranch operations. The ranch manager that ran that ranch for many years is still living in Deschutes County and provided us with detailed testimony about why the ranch was split up and that is in Exhibit U in the applicant's original information and the testimony is by a gentleman named Jackie Herring. The property has no water rights. The water rights were transferred from the property in 2010, again prior to the applicant's ownership. And the water rights were placed in stream to help save Whitechess Creek. That water rights transfer is in our record as exhibit T. There is currently no development proposed with the current application other than eventually the applicant intends to build a dwelling, which he already has approval for, and we have the approval application or approval decision in the record as Exhibit F. We can move to the next slide, please. As staff indicated, the soils report was conducted on the subject property and it confirmed that there were 64 percent class 7 and 8 soils. I will go into a little bit of detail about the soils report in a few minutes. The soils examiner also did a forest land productivity analysis. That's in our record as exhibit Y to confirm the property is not forest land. The property owner, the applicant, spent several years trying to farm this property and an extensive amount of money. He's going to testify about this, but we do have the expert that he used submit a testimony into the record, the Sisters Cattle Company, and that is in our record as Exhibit U. that gentleman is a renowned expert in rotational grazing and he his cv is also in the record at as exhibit ph5 we did the transportation analysis to determine it will not significantly impact a transportation facility that is in the record as exhibit k and again the ec analysis to establish compliance with goal 5 is in the record as exhibit g next slide please Before I address the hearings, or well, before I go into the reasons that the hearings officer issued a denial, I want to talk about the Goal 3 issues. The hearings officer found that we met all of Goal 3, including all of the, in addition to the soils analysis, all the suitability factors, the necessary analysis, and the farm unit analysis. And I do want to talk about the evidence that we have in the record in support of this. I've done, prior to this application, I've done five of these plan amendment zone changes applications. And this application has the most extensive evidence in the record of the attempts to farm this property of any of the five that I've done. Again, starting with Exhibit U, there is testimony from Jackie Herring, the Lazy Z Ranch Manager, as to why the subject property was subdivided and split off and not continued to use as As a horse ranch. They started splitting it off in 1999 and it was split off up until 2011 when the applicant purchased the 64 acre piece of property. Mr. Herring testifies that it cost over $200,000 a year to operate that ranch and $65,000 of that was just power alone. They did transfer the water in 2009 because the soils would not hold water and they transferred it in stream to save Wychus Creek. They split it over the course of 1999 through 2011 in an attempt to create smaller parcels and home sites. There was a farm dwelling approved on the subject property in 2002 during the course of this time when the ranch was still a 1480 acre ranch at the time that that farm dwelling was approved. The client purchased the property in 2011. He spent three to four years working with Hobbs Marguerite at the Sisters Cattle Company to try to rotationally graze the property. Mr. Marguerite specializes in rotational grazing designed to maximize limited forage opportunities. And he concluded that there was insufficient soils to support even limited agriculture. And that the returns were insufficient based on the amount of investment that would need to be made to make this property farmable. In addition to the testimony of Hobbs Marguerite and the Lazy Zee ranch manager, we have a water rights cost analysis to acquire water rights and irrigation infrastructure would be over one and a half million dollars. We have a soil amendment cost analysis. That's in the record as Exhibit CC and that water rights cost analysis is in the record as Exhibit BB. The soil amendment cost analysis would result in several million dollars to amend the soils. We have the Sisters Wastewater Treatment Plan in the record as Exhibit DD and the county Lux that they issued in the record as Exhibit PH2. That Lux distraught... Can you change the slide? Or are you just showing... No, there's no slides associated with this. I'm just going through the evidence because the hearings officer ruled in our favor on Goal 3. And this is all the evidence that he considered when he issued that ruling. You, on the other hand, can just look at the things that he... issued as a denial and adopt his recommendation if you choose. But you don't have to and I want to point you to this 1500 plus page record as to where this evidence is if you would prefer to look at it yourself. Thank you. So I'm just going over the exhibits that we submitted to establish that this property meets Goal 3. Again, the LUX that the county issued as a part of the Sisters Wastewater Treatment Plan describes the use of the 230 acres to our east and southeast as treated municipal wastewater effluent. And the city of Sisters has a plan to continue to use that property. They're currently using 45 acres of it, and they have a plan to continue to use that property and expand it to apply wastewater effluent to it.

Land Use Compatibility Statement from Deschutes County to Sisters. Correct. For their wastewater operations.

Yes. Okay. Yes. And those are in the record Exhibit DD and Exhibit PH2. We also have the soil assessment in the record as Exhibit I. Again, he conducted test pits on the 64 acre property. He dug 43 test pits and additional soils analysis to conclude that the property is 64% class 7 and 8 soils. He did an additional forest productivity analysis in the record as Exhibit Y. He did a supplemental analysis based on the BCL decision, which I'll talk about a little bit more, to establish that the land, even if irrigated, would not be agricultural land. And that is in the record as BOCC Exhibit 3. And then we have confirmation that this property is not within an irrigation district. And that is in the record at Exhibit BOCC. And then we also have an extensive farm use analysis conducted by Rand Campbell who did an on-site evaluation and who is a local farmer and rancher and that is in the record as exhibit PH11. Mr. Campbell concluded that the property is unable to produce enough forage for one cow-calf pair for a year or four cow-calf pairs for three and a half months. that is all the evidence that the hearings officer relied on when he concluded that we met goal three and so please feel free to review it yourselves um so let's i'm gonna go back to the slide now um the two things that the hearings officer ruled that we did not meet and recommended denial was based on goal 14 and the consistency with the comprehensive plan policy 3.3.1 This is because the BCL decision came out during the pendency of the time period when the hearings officer had our decision under consideration. So our record was closed. We couldn't address the findings in the BCL decision. And so he concluded based on the findings in the BCL decision, the Luba decision, that he needed to recommend denial. And the BCL decision was wrong about a couple things, and I'll talk about it in a minute, but I want to talk about the two things that our hearings officer focused on so that you can issue a decision. Both of these issues, consistency with Comprehensive Plan Policy 3.3.1 and Statewide Planning Goal 14 are related to future subdivision applications that could possibly be made on the subject property, but which The applicant has never indicated an intention to do and there is no evidence in the record that any subdivision application will ever be filed or if so that it would be any sort of application to utilize the cluster or plan development subdivision opportunities for density increases. So let's turn to the next page. With regard to the Deschutes County Comprehensive Plan, what the BCL decision said is that the county needs to reconcile the provisions in its zoning code which allow density bonuses and which allow smaller than 10 acre lots with this Comprehensive Plan Policy 3.3.1. In our case, that Comprehensive Plan Policy applies to our application because it was in effect when we filed our application back in March. I know that today you are going to amend under remand the Comprehensive Plan to adopt the housing policies and it essentially renumbers 3.3.1 and changes the language and yes.

Oh just pardon me I didn't want to interrupt you I just have go ahead and finish your thought and then I'll.

i know you're going to amend that later today and go through the second reading and so when we if we if we ever applied for a subdivision application in the future the new comprehensive plan policy assuming that it survives appeal would be applicable but today for purposes of the plan amendment which does not have any development associated with it comprehensive plan policy 3.3.1 applies to our application And so we need to address what the LUBA-BCL decision said about that comprehensive plan policy.

So then 3.3.1 in 2011, when it was adopted in the comprehensive plan, was just the words, the minimum parcel size for a new rural residential lot shall be 10 acres. And it was post that acknowledgment that the west side transect zone effort came in. And it was a partnership by the property owners. It was the transect stepping out on the west side of end. So I was just acknowledging that it evolved, even since the acknowledgment of the original comprehensive plan version in 2011, to add that first half of that statement. Correct.

Yeah. And so, I want to talk about how we can resolve our application with regard to the BCL decision and Comp Plan Policy 3.3.1. And I'm going to do that right after I talk about the Statewide Planning Goal 14, because the resolution to both of those things is the same. So, move to the next slide, if you could. So, in addition to Comp Plan Policy 3.3.1, the hearings officer also ruled that we had not demonstrated compliance with Goal 14. And that was again because of the BCL decision and the issues under Goal 14 that are implicated in the present case are density and lot size, public services and utilities, and proximity to the UGB. Again, this is all related to whether or not this property is going to be subdivided in the future and what size it would be subdivided to and what regulates that subdivision. We do not have, I'll remind you, a subdivision application nor do we have any public intention of filing a subdivision application. So, if we can talk about density, let's click on that little box. So, under the MUA 10 zone, the minimum lot size is 10 acres. Let's not talk for a minute about planned developments or cluster subdivisions, right? The minimum lot size is 10 acres. Under the City of Sisters, the minimum lot size is 3,000 square feet. So, for Deschutes County, 10 acres is 4,335 and 600 square feet. So you could fit 145 of sister's lots in one of the one that's allowed on our property if we didn't do any clusters or planned developments. 145 3,000 square foot lots would fit into 10 acres. So that's 145 times the density, right, in the City of Sisters that you would approve if we didn't do any planned or clusters. Same thing if you look at the density, the density one unit per 10 acres versus three units per acre up to eight units per acre. Again, it's 100 times the density. So let's move to the next slide. Here's where BCL got it wrong. Luba at BCL. BCL decision did two things. It says that this county needs to rule on DCP 3.3.1 in the first instance. And the county hadn't in that decision, and so it just ruled for you, but it wanted you to do it first. And it says that you need to reconcile how you can get plan developments and cluster developments at two acres when your comp plan says 10's the minimum, right? You need to interpret that. That's what the BCL decision said. And it also said that you need to do that now at the plan amendment zone change stage instead of waiting until an applicant may actually apply for these things. Because, according to LUBA, there was nothing in that record that showed them that there was going to be a time period when you had to actually make that evaluation prior to a subdivision application. Well, that's wrong, right? I don't know what was in the BCL record, but what's in the county code and what LUBA should have looked at and been pointed to is that the county code requires consistency with comprehensive plan and it requires that you demonstrate it at the subdivision stage. These provisions show you right here how it requires that. So the zoning ordinance says subdivisions are subject to title 17 and title 17 says before you can get a subdivision approved you have to establish consistency with the comprehensive plan. So the time period within which you need to make a decision as to whether or not a two acre parcel or a ten acre parcel or whatever size parcel is consistent with the comprehensive plan is at the time when somebody's applying for that. Not when they're just applying for the zone, the MUA 10 zone, because there's a lot of uses in the MUA 10 zone that somebody could come in and apply for and never apply for a subdivision. Again, I've processed five of these plan amendment zone change applications, all to conclusion, all to final decision, and not one of those properties has come in for a plan or cluster development. Not one of them has even come in for a subdivision. So we're going through this exercise now and submitting to you hundreds and thousands of pages of evidence for something that may never happen and something that's prematurely being decided. An applicant shouldn't be prevented from applying and receiving MUA 10 zoning because there's some conflict in the subdivision. code with the comprehensive plan because the applicant hasn't applied for a subdivision and the applicant has indicated no intention of applying for a subdivision. So let's move to the next stage. So because we, our application is caught in the middle of the comp plan being remanded and getting readopted and the code getting revised to clarify the minimum lot size for planned developments and subdivisions and when you're supposed to make this determination, we would like to agree that we are not going to subdivide this property below 10 acres until or unless it comes inside the UGB. so that we can eliminate the possibility that these comp plan amendments will come up and down and get remanded and go back and get remanded again. As I've indicated, my client has no intention of seeking approval for a cluster or plan development. He may not even apply for a subdivision. His intention is to hold the property for eventual urbanization. And that's what a lot of these plan amendment zone changes on the edges of UGBs, that's their intention. It does not adversely impact a UGB boundary. It does not diminish the effectiveness of a UGB boundary. In fact, what it does is it allows a municipality to expand its UGB more readily And these applicants are doing the work for the municipalities to establish that this property is urbanizable property and it shouldn't be held in a zoning category that it no longer is equivalent or that it no longer applies to. So our solution for the hearings officer's recommendation for denial is to restrict the future subdivision of this property to a 10-acre minimum and to adopt findings establishing how the 10-acre minimums are in compliance with Goal 14 and have been acknowledged under the county's existing and currently effective comprehensive plan. So I do have um my client is here to testify and he would like to do that and I do have um additional information we would like to address on rebuttal and I would also like to talk about how long the county is going to leave the record open in this case. One of the things I want to remind you of is that we already have public discourse about these applications about the fate of these applications at a new board. And we already have timing issues with regard to this. This application was filed in March of last year. The hearings officer issued the decision in July. We just received 37 pages of Land Watch today. 37 pages additional evidence from Land Watch today despite the fact that the hearings officers decision has been out since early July. I do not want to see a long record period remain open because we have 1500 plus pages of evidence and testimony in the record already. How much more can we My client's going to testify about the 300 public comments that were received as a response to this action alert. And we do have the action alert that was put into the record. I'll have to find the exhibit number for that. But I want you guys to look at that and I want you to hear what my client's testimony is about that particular action alert. And I will give you that exhibit number for it before we leave today.

Could you be clear about the record period? Because we just dropped right into 777. Are you proposing something different?

given that i haven't seen the staff memo um i would i would like i would like to keep a short record period um i would like to have no further um new evidence i would like to see rebuttal evidence only okay well we'll talk we can talk about the timing of that i'm not i'm not hung up on the timing i'm just we can keep submitting new evidence until the cows come home

I'm going to turn this over. There will be one cow and one calf.

Cow-calf pairs.

Thank you.

Good morning. I'm Derek Jarus. I am a resident of Sisters, Oregon, residing at 543 South Pine Meadow. I've made no campaign conditions to live here or anywhere else in the past. Our family has owned the 68 parcel being reviewed for zone change for over 15 years. My wife's daughter currently resides at the 96-year-old farmhouse on the parcel.

Oh. Just touch it and see if it's hot. Maybe it's not, yeah. Maybe wiggle the... Yeah.

Shall we start from the beginning?

There's plenty of cord. Yeah, plenty of cord. You can bring it close.

There we go. Okay, I will start from the beginning. I'm Derek Jarus, a resident of Sisters, Oregon, residing at 543 South Pine Meadow Street in Sisters. I've made no campaign contributions to any politicians here nor anywhere else. Our family has owned this 68 parcel being reviewed for zone change for over 15 years. My wife's daughter currently resides at the 96-year-old farmhouse on the parcel that we are considering. The house served for many decades as a rental home on the previously much larger Lazy Z Ranch. This home sat vacant and in disrepair for several years prior to her ownership. We've renovated the historic home back to good working condition, and we hope to keep it that way. We currently have an approved conditional use permit granted by Deschutes County that will allow us to construct a single new residence on the parcel in a new location. If and when that is built, the historic residence will need to be decommissioned as only one home is allowed currently under the Ag zoning. We have no plans for any future development on the parcel. We've leased our properties to several ranches during our ownership for cattle grazing. We do not have water rights, we are not a patron of the Three Sisters Water District, and we rely on a single residential well as our sole water source. We've tried to make productive ag use of the property, but grazing efforts have failed with no lessee ever wanting to continue long term as forage is very, very low quality and only available for a very short period in the spring. Bringing in outside water and hay has proved to be a cost-prohibited proposition that a reasonable farmer and rancher is not willing to attempt after seeing the on-site results. We went to great efforts with one lessee to rehab and improve our soils. Hobbs Margaret, formerly the owner of Tiltingham Cattle Company and Seattle and Sisters Cattle Company, leased our land between 2019 and 2021. Hobbs is an expert at regenerative farming. farm soil rehab, and ranching productivity. He currently works consulting for one of the largest ag companies in Australia and is a renowned author on regenerative farming techniques. In the summer of 2019, we went to great expense to have Hobbs use a no-till seed drilling process to plant a custom seed mix on nearly all of our property that he thought was best suited to begin the process of re-establishing effective nutrient and carbon cycling in our soils. given the site conditions and soil probability index of 5 and 6 that was shown at that time on the USGS soil maps for our parcel. Well, to our surprise, in the spring of 2020, we had nearly a zero germination rate. Our custom seed mix did not come up at all on 95% of our parcel. And we had extremely spotty germination at best on the remaining 5% of our parcel that was nearest to Highway 20. We jointly decided in 2020 not to attempt another round of regenerative seed planting as our initial cover crop survival rate was drastically lower than expected and needed to warrant additional attempts to rehab our soil. HOBS has submitted a statement of agricultural feasibility that is included as part of our zone change request stating why our parcel is unsuitable for commercially viable agricultural production. We have suspected for some time that the USGS soil mapping of our parcel was inaccurate, so last year we hired Gary Kitzrow of Growing Soils Environmental Associates to analyze 54 soil pits dug on our parcel to confirm exactly what soil conditions were present. Gary has analyzed soil conditions on over a million acres in his career and is highly respected in his field. Gary's Order 1 soil survey with its detailed soil mapping showed that contrary to the previous USGS mapping noting us as 5 and 6 ag soils, we actually had a preponderance 64% of class 7 and 8 non-ag rated soils. Our actual soil types were shown to have extremely low water holding capability, making our parcel a very hostile and growing environment suited for very limited crop production, irrigated or not. Gary's detailed soil analysis confirmed why our previous efforts to make the property more productive failed. We firmly believe that the requested zone change more accurately reflects our parcel's characteristics and capabilities and that no reasonable farmer or rancher would attempt ag use in our parcel given its physical limitations. I wanted to make a note about Land Watch and their 300 letters of opposition. First of all, their action alert is shown as Exhibit PH 9. Landwatch Deschutes members were alerted to oppose our request. That request and alert was filled with inaccuracies and was quite misleading. They provided a photo with the iconic metal horses and surrounding land that, in fact, was not our land. We are the parcel of land immediately adjacent to the City of Sisters in the UGB, to the west of the photo. We are adjacent to the city's affluent plant and Five Pines Resort. The photo shown The photo shown is actually protected land owned by the City of Sisters for almost a mile on the south side of the freeway, highway. It's covered under the city's Lazy Z master plan as part of an ongoing and future open space slash wetlands slash sewage treatment disposal area. It remains protected, and we're proposing nothing on the land in the picture shown.

Land Watch wrongly noted... Mr. Gnarros. Yes. We're a minute over. You're kind of allotted 30 minutes, so if you can please wrap it up.

Quickly. Okay. Land Watch wrongly noted that we have irrigated farmland, which we do not. We have no water rights and are not a part of the Three Sisters Water District. Landwatch further called us out for doing spot zoning. That is something that has been used in the past to describe zoning changes done almost in the middle of nowhere and away from the city and away from the UGB. We are in fact the opposite of that. We are right on the city. We are right on the UGB. This is not spot zoning. I was formerly a member of Land Watch Lane County when I lived in Western Oregon. They provide an important voice to balancing development and land preservation. However, the notice and photograph regarding our parcel was inaccurate, untruthful, and designed to elicit a strong emotional response. Given this, the 300 robo-generated opposition comments need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Thank you.

Thank you. At this time, are there any questions for the applicant? I have a few, but you all proceed first.

No questions.

Okay. Thank you for your testimony. I do have a few questions. I'm trying to get a better sense of what your intended use and development of the land will be. I heard a couple of things. I might have heard a proposed condition for an approval. I also heard no intention to subdivide the property. But then I heard no intentions to subdivide the property beyond, you know, making it into 10-acre lots. So I wanted to get clear on that. But can you just kind of give us a sense of what the intended use of this property is? And, you know, kind of the timing and sequence of land use processes that would... follow from that intended use kind of vision?

Yeah, you're asking me.

i want i want to let the client you might need it in legalese yeah i want to let the client testify about this but i do want to clear up any um inconsistencies that i may have been responsible for in the sense that um there is we do we do propose the condition that the lot size be limited to 10 acres and that is not necessarily because we are proposing a subdivision that is because the bcl decision requires us to look at the eventual density of the property now. And that, like I said, I think that BCL decision is wrong, but it's currently controlling, right? And so we need to propose a minimum lot size regardless of whether we plan to subdivide it in the future or not in order to address the BCL decision. And so we have proposed 10 acres because we do not intend to create a plan or a cluster development. The client may subdivide it at some point in the future if he has to hold it for 20 years. Who knows how long it will take for the city to urbanize. But I proposed the 10-acre minimum in order to satisfy the BCL decision and the findings in that. But I'll let him talk about his future development plans.

Thank you. Yes, we do not have any plans right now to divide. At this point, we may pair off if given the 10-year, 10-acre minimum, pair off so that we can preserve the right for the historical farmhouse to stay on the property if we go ahead and pull a permit to build a new house on a new location. We can't do that right now. We're dead in the water.

Well, it would require farm use of the property, but you are in a farm worker dwelling is allowable in addition to the primary dwelling on an EFU zone property. So, I mean, there's no pathway. It would require farming, which you're arguing is not feasible on the property.

Yeah, it would be very limited. So that's the only thing in the near future that I would ever consider. As far as what might happen in the distant future, if it's urbanized, you know, that's going to be decided by the City of Sisters and other people as far as what is appropriate at that time. That's not something I'm considering.

Putting a couple of the things that you've said together, would you be open to some kind of a condition that said basically one more dwelling you know in in the in the time frame between when this uh when this rezone occurs and when uh the city of sisters is interested in in absorbing this land into the urban growth boundary i'll just acknowledge that's one commissioner's idea here there is a three-person board that that's right it's only it's only my it's only my condition idea and um

No, we want to have it rezoned to what the property actually looks like, what it's capable of doing in the future. We don't want to hamstring it with a special limitation that doesn't apply to any other similar property that might be rezoned MUA 10. That's not very reasonable.

Well, I guess I would say that given the pattern of land use decisions of this board of commissioners over the last x years, it may not seem very reasonable. But when the composition of the board of commissioners changes, that may be a very reasonable condition for people to be considering. OK. I do want to get into some questions about the potential farm use of the property. I really appreciate your work with regenerative ranchers, regenerative farmers who are interested in building soil. We do have the challenge locally that in a lot of areas the soil is shallow and doesn't have very much water retention. you know capacity naturally uh that doesn't mean that soil can't be amended um and you did attempt uh you know to to seed the the area with um you know best suited type uh you know uh type forage crops for um it sounds like dry land grazing because if i'm tracking correctly the attempts at regenerative farming occurred after the water rights for the property had been extinguished correct well after okay so we don't really know what uh we don't really know what regenerative farming efforts on the property with water might look like. That hasn't been tested. Which I think is pretty significant because to accomplish a lot of the things that other people in other parts of Central Oregon are accomplishing with improving soil, it seems water is very helpful. The basic answer to soil that's too shallow and won't retain water is to make the soil deeper and to add water retaining amendments to it. But, you know, we have no idea how that would work in the absence of water rights.

We do though, because we have expert testimony into the record as to what that would cost. And our soil scientist has testified that even with irrigation, the subject property would not be capable of supporting agriculture. And that's in the record at BOCC Exhibit 3. But the cost to amend the soil and to apply water is over four million dollars. Both farmer and rancher testimony saying that that's cost prohibitive in terms of trying to make.

I do want to question those estimates. You may be aware that there are, actually it's already passed, There has been legislation passed to allow farmers to explore split duty. So essentially, if you have four acre feet of water per acre of land, in the future, you would be able to... without without extinguishing without sorry without without following that that acre of land you would be able to use only two acre feet and lease the other two acre feet um for various purposes so um there i think it's very possible we will see scenarios in the future where um farmers are farmers have an allotment, they conserve water, and then they're able to apply water to other acres of land. So my next question was, what is the... Do you have a sense of the pattern of water rights ownership in the near vicinity to this property?

We're not in the irrigation district. And I don't believe that there's water rights on the properties anywhere to the south of the highway.

On the north side of the highway? Do you know how the ranch there is watering? Because they had their sprinklers on. I believe I saw them today.

I do not. But I do believe there are some water rights on the north side of the highway.

But then you have the three sisters which is you've got the junior rights there and some of the people in that water have no more water and yet I'm seeing some sprinklers still running.

We have submitted extensive evidence into the record as to all of the patrons of the district are currently out of water.

Okay then they're running them with wells then?

They were running them with irrigation water when the district was delivering water, but they currently aren't delivering water, so I don't know what they're running them with now. It's wells.

With a drought declaration, you are allowed to seek urgency pumping authority in an extreme drought year like we're experiencing this year. But there has been tremendous investments in and improvements in agricultural water use efficiency in the Three Sisters Irrigation District over the last 15 years, making it feasible for people to get water you know, this is a year where conceivably people would have gotten zero water and they have had a portion of a season, even in an extreme drought year. So it's This year is not necessarily a predictor of future year's water availability for agriculture. The reason I was asking about nearby lands and potential water availability was just to try to get a sense of whether an estimate of $1.5 million to acquire water for the property was realistic or not. I think that there are other pathways. I'll just leave it at that.

Well, one of the things that I want to remind the board of and it's really important is that in quasi-judicial land use applications such as the one before you, your obligation is to make your decision based on the evidence in the record. Not to prejudge those applications and decide what position you're going to take before you hear the evidence, but to make the decision based on the evidence that's in the record. Not necessarily what you know from information surrounding your life in Deschutes County, or in the press, or in the public in general. It's the evidence that's in the quasi-judicial record before you. I would love for you to look at the evidence for the irrigation.

Let me assure you that no one is prejudging applications. I take the responsibility to evaluate these applications very seriously. I appreciate that. And that is why I look at all evidence with a critical eye on all sides of any issue.

Have you looked at our irrigation estimate in the record?

I have, yeah. I'm sorry that I know something about water in the Deschutes Basin, but you can't unlearn that stuff.

No, I'm not asking you to unlearn things. I'm asking you to make your decision based on the evidence in the record.

Okay. Like I said, it is part of my job to evaluate evidence critically. I appreciate that. All right. Yeah, those were the key questions I had about agricultural suitability and about just kind of the vision for future land use. Thank you. OK. At this time, we will hear At this time, we will hear testimony from people in support of the application. Is there anyone in the room who would like to testify in support? Kim, are there any hands raised online? Okay. hi i'm neither in support nor position but we're going to take the opportunity to be neutral okay well we were right we were at the bridge between support statements and support and statements of opposition so neutral is a good time

uh good morning i'm john herman my family owns and operates lazy ranch directly across highway 20 68540 east highway 20. i don't think i fit neatly into support or opposition here i'm supportive of my neighbors as kind people i understand why the jarvis's want more opportunity for this property i also care about keeping ag land available about housing and about what happens to this landscape around sisters. What I'm struggling with is how we decide farmland has stopped being farmland. I think the hearings officer missed part of the picture by focusing so heavily on whether a reasonable profit-minded farmer would take these 64 acres as they exist today, restore them and make the numbers work. I probably couldn't, but that isn't quite the same question as what this land is. A couple weeks ago, two siblings in their 80s who lived in the Jarosz house as children in the 1950s came into our tasting room. They remembered really good agricultural ground and were commenting on how different it looks today. Another neighbor whose family owned this land later has submitted testimony describing a very different usable agricultural landscape as well. I'm obviously not asking you to substitute memories for soil studies. But the condition of land today is partly a history of what has happened to it. This isn't land that simply never supported ag. Land changes because people make decisions about it. Water rights have economic value, can be transferred away, irrigation stops, fences disappear, ground stops being managed, and every year that happens, restoring it becomes more expensive. Then eventually we calculate the cost of undoing all of those decisions and use that number as evidence that no reasonable farm would farm it. There's something circular about that. But I don't think Derek should have to spend a fortune putting it back together because the rest of us say we value farmland. If keeping this land available for agriculture matters to the community, then some responsibility belongs to the community too. Maybe we create better incentives. Maybe it stays intact until economics change. Maybe quickly changing new technology will make marginable ground more workable 20 years from now. I don't know, and that uncertainty is why I'm reluctant to let the economics of 2026 answer the question forever. And I think there's an even bigger economic problem underneath all this. The financial incentive in Central Oregon is overwhelmingly to take land out of agriculture. I'd rather ask, how do we make farming the land itself valuable? If we value local food, healthy soil habitat, open land and drought resilience, farmers shouldn't have to provide all of that for free and then be judged only on the margin from a bale of hay or a jar of honey. Parcel size matters too. 64 acres invites a different owner and a relationship with the land than a collection of 10 acre home sites. The smaller we make agricultural land, the more likely it becomes a home site or even a vacation home first. And if someday land on the edge of Cister should leave agriculture, I'm open to that conversation. But let's be honest about the trade. If we're giving up farmland for a real public need like housing, maybe meaningful density makes sense. And losing the agricultural option for a handful of expensive rural home sites seems like the worst of both worlds. Hard to farm profitability today and not farmland are different conclusions. Don't confuse that and codify it in an official decision, especially on the edge of an urban growth boundary. Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Herman, thank you so much for your encapsulation of the struggles of applying Oregon land use law to areas in Deschutes County that are close in to our cities. It's always helpful to be reminded of the big picture. Okay. At this time, we'll move on to testimony in opposition to this application. And I believe I have one blue form. One blue form from Rory Isbell.

written testimony this is your 36 page one that's right okay um it's this is for the next one oh i think

I'll double check if there's anyone else who submitted a blue form who wants to testify during this hearing, please step on up as well.

Okay.

Hey, good morning, Chair Chang, Commissioners Adair and DeBone. For the record, my name is Rory Isbell. I'm a staff attorney with Central Oregon Land Watch. Our address is 2843 Northwest Lolo Drive, Suite 200, Bend, Oregon, 97703. We do oppose the current application. Just a little background, which might be a little repetitive. I'll try to get through quickly. This property is 64 acres, and it's part of a historic 1,400-acre ranch called the Lazy Z Ranch. For over 100 years, that ranch has been in farm use. Legally, this property does have water rights. We know they've been transferred off, but the law says what it says, and it says that any property that once had water rights must be considered watered in a land use application today. It also has the same soil types as many nearby farm properties that are currently in farm use. About 20 years ago, this subject property, these 64 acres were approved by this county for a dwelling in conjunction with farm use, otherwise known as a farm dwelling. excuse me to gain that approval the county had to find and in fact did find that this six these 64 acres were in farm use and grossed significant farm income that was a necessary criteria for the county approving that application uh in that application the county found that uh this property raised and boarded horses and uh used that farm use for for a profit So it's not just conjecture. There's evidence in your record that this property has, in fact, produced farm income, which is, of course, one of the factors that you are tasked with considering today when considering rezoning this property. Other properties also in the historic Lazy Z Ranch footprint are currently in farm use. We've heard some about those. Those include the City of Sisters owned properties just to the east that grow hay and raise horses. I was perusing some of the information that you requested from staff on Monday, and it came from the city. And in that information, the city wrote that the crops that they grow on their property have the benefit of, quote, using more water, and they make better use of the nitrogen found in recycled water, leading to greater rates of growth for those crops. So it's a great synergistic use that the city is doing with its recycled wastewater in farm use on those properties. Other properties in the historic Lazy Z Ranch currently in farm use include the Lazy Z Ranch Wines property. And I didn't know the order today would go this way, but we just heard from its proprietor. Three years ago, the county approved a permit for that property called a commercial activity in conjunction with farm use. And in that decision, the county had to find that that property was in such a significant amount of farm use that it also qualified for commercial uses that would be incidental and accessory to that significant farm use. That property also has the same soils as water rights, just like the subject property today and part of the same historic farm unit. So the subject property here could resume its historic farm use, just as those other properties I've described have. I'm about out of time. I would touch on Goal 14 if you would like me to, but I'll respect your wishes on the timing there.

I would like to hear. So consider this a question for me. I would like to hear your points or concerns about Goal 14.

Thank you. So rezoning this property to the county's MUA zone would conflict with both goal 14, which prevents urbanizing rural lands, and with the related county comprehensive plan policy at 3.3.1, which limits new residential parcels to 10 acres. LUBA has held now four times in the past 14-ish months that when the county rezones farmland to its rural residential zones, those decisions conflict with goal 14 and policy 3.3.1. Those are Destiny Court, the Pohiku Farms decision, which is the shorthand that's been given by various parties to the Comprehensive Plan appeal case, the BCL decision, and most recently, the McKenzie Meadows Villages decisions. in that pohaku farms decision luba laid out the county's options for rectifying this conflict between the comprehensive plan and its zoning code they said the county must either conform the plan to the zone or conform the zone to the plan neither of those things have yet happened and this conflict still exists uh and and it would be erin in approving the current application with with that conflict between the plan and the zone This would also result in a conflict directly with Goal 14. Of course, what's before you today is a plan amendment decision. And LUBA has held many times over decades that every plan amendment decision has to comply with all the goals. And for Goal 14, that requires a site-specific, context-specific, location-specific analysis. Here, the property is adjacent to the city's urban growth boundary. Rezoning to MUA would allow a new residential neighborhood that would frustrate the purpose of that urban growth boundary by allowing new residential growth just outside the urban growth boundary, but which would functionally be an extension of a residential neighborhood that belongs inside the city. That was more or less one of the holdings of the BCL decision. Your policy at 3.3.1 is one of your comprehensive plan policies that implements goal 14. The goals only apply at the current plan amendment stage. They will not apply at any future subdivision, land development stage. Goal 14 compliance has to be shown now. And policy 3.3.1 compliance has to be shown now. But as I have attempted to explain, it cannot. We just heard from the applicant that their intent is to urbanize the subject property. Various phrasing gets used for that, a holding zone or wait until we see what the city's plans are. But Goal 14 exists to prevent exactly that sort of intent from being enough to satisfy Goal 14 and to justify these sorts of plan amendments. An intent to urbanize property is counter to Goal 14 by its text. Final point to make on the conflict between policy. 3.3.1 and your zoning code. The zoning code is a legislative decision. The uses allowed in the zoning code apply to all properties in that zone throughout the county. Case law tells us we can't change our legislation in quasi-judicial land use proceedings. I heard echoes of this from the applicant just now, actually. They don't want special limitations that only apply to their property. That's the point of a zoning code. It applies equally to properties in that zone across the county. So it's our position that any sort of limitations that can be proposed for a property like this to try to overcome this conflict between the plan and the zone aren't allowed. You can't legislate via a quasi-judicial land use decision. So Land Watch's position, go ahead, Commissioner DeBom.

Isn't a condition just curing a conflict that's being challenged? I mean, it's not legislative across the organization. It's curing a conflict that's being challenged by you, you know, parties. So you're trying to come up with the logic that we're changing the code or changing everything. It's really just curing something that's been brought up.

Again, echo some of what I heard from the applicant. That would fit what many planners characterize as spot zoning, giving special treatment to one property. It's our position that the law doesn't allow that. That if you have a zoning code, you have to equally apply it to all properties within that zone. Again, this is a plan amendment too. Conditions of approval make sense in development applications. This is amending the plan designation and zone of a property. So it's our position that this property is agricultural land. Rezoning it to MUA would violate Goal 14 and Comprehensive Plan Policy 3.3.1. Several other points in our written comments I've handed you today. Any other questions before I step down?

Based on what you just said, I was going to ask the question, what do you think about conditions to accomplish essentially preservation of land for future urbanization? I think I just heard the answer, but if you want to speak any further on that, go ahead.

I very much appreciate the intent of exploring conditions like that. Central Oregon Land Watch as an organization strongly supports smart growth of our urban areas through established processes. that includes uh planning tools like urban reserves so this is my answer to your question there are legislative processes in place in the state of oregon to accomplish the sort of a policy goal that i hear you asking about commissioner yeah and uh creation of urban reserves a joint planning process between a city and a county is how we do that yeah

And I have pushed for urban area reserves. They are cumbersome. I have also pushed for the county to consider some kind of an overlay in the near and vicinity around our cities. have not had we have not had uh critical massive support for um a policy like that on the board of commissioners up until now so um just trying to accomplish the goal uh however i can thank you for Thank you for your testimony.

One other note. You mentioned that the nitrogen in water being utilized by the city for crop growth. There's a clarity moment there because I did that for many years at a sewer pivot, southern Deschutes County, south of Sun River. There's non-detect for nitrates in the water. Maybe that's an assumption on your part, but it feels good to think, oh, good, there's probably some nutritional value in there. There usually isn't. I mean, the system works, the lagoon sits there for most of a year, the water goes out in the field, there's like nothing in it. So it was just an offhand statement you made, but I have firsthand experience knowing that, yeah, there was non-detect for nitrates, DEQ certified results. And we could ask, maybe sisters is different, but I'm just pointing out that It's a feel-good, but that might not be true.

Sure, I appreciate that. Nitrate contamination of water supplies is, of course, a very real problem in Deschutes County and elsewhere. I'm not a chemist. I was simply quoting what I read in some of the materials that the city submitted. I guess I would direct that question at the city and the folks that are... Yeah, I'm just pointing it out.

Let's not assume that that's what's happening there.

And I mean, just one more question about that. The city's wastewater supplies are, you know, their production of wastewater of treated wastewater. So, you know, the sisters the city of sisters is growing um where they're working on urban growth boundary expansion right now um i would expect that there would be a growth of their wastewater stream commensurate with that as is that um um does that match up with your understanding of the situation

Yeah, I think that's a valid assumption. I had the same thought. The city has a fast rate of growth. Again, I don't know the details or the numbers of what they've projected, but that appears to me to be a fair assumption. One other related comment just came to my mind. I've been involved in a planning process with the city of Metolius up in Jefferson County, our friends to the north. They also use their treated wastewater to irrigate farmlands adjacent to their wastewater treatment facility. So again, I'm not discounting any concerns and the monitoring and whatnot that might have to happen there. I just mentioned that to note that it's a pretty common practice that farmers I've talked to appreciate an extra source of water.

As did the city of Prineville until they moved to a constructed treatment wetland.

Yeah.

Okay.

thank you so much for the extra time as well thank you okay um so that was uh we've and there are there are no hands raised online kim oh there's one okay okay Ms. Kohler, whenever you're ready. Bye.

Three minutes. Good morning. Thank you for letting me speak today. My name is Therese Kohler. I live at 1190 Jansen Court in Sisters. I attended the hearings on May 21st as well as listening today. Various ideas and facts were put forth by the applicants, and this relates to both of the rezoning applications before you, were put forth by the applicants or their attorneys to paint the picture that this acreage is arid, of poor soil quality, and simply not of use agriculturally. They reported an individual or outfit, which we got details on today who had in the past tried regenerative methods for the period of time 2019 to 2021 and deemed the effort a failure and not worthwhile pursuing. Regenerative farming has come a long way in the last 50 years. I have a degree in plant science and way back when I was in college, it was already a hot topic and has just had amazing progress since then. The tide then was shifting to be more inclusive of approaches to farming and food production that went beyond petrochemical based environmentally and friendly mega farms with monoculture crops and over emphasis on production quantity and long shelf life of product over quality. In my opinion, the Willits and the Jaros properties could and ideally should be given the chance to actually be brought back to some sort of agricultural use before being rezoned at this point in time. I really appreciate the comments by the lazy Z proprietor, because I do also respect that people have put a lot of resources into trying to make this step with land that they own. It is land that they own. of course want to have self-determination about the outcome of how their land is used going forward however there are regulations in oregon that state that we have to have these considerations of the various goals and i do believe that if uh to the attorney's point that you need To only consider items in the record, I request that you leave the record open at least for seven more days and hopefully longer than that, because I do think that once land is put into more and more urbanization, it's not gonna have the opportunity to go back to being agricultural land. And Sisters is a special place and how beautiful it would be if that land could somehow be productive and an example of how we do things in sisters with this sense of the beauty and the historical usefulness of the land as lazy z is absolutely doing on the other side of highway 20. so i would hope that we don't rush into any conclusion about these two properties thank you very much thank you miss colder are there any questions

Okay. Kim, who else do we have online? Uh, Erica, um, we'll get the, the, the clock queued back up and then, um, whenever you're ready.

Great, well, thank you. My name is Erica Mather. My mailing address is 694 North Larch Street, 1889 in Sisters, Oregon, 97759. Chair and members of the board, I just wanted to thank you for your time today. Our property is located directly across Highway 20 from the proposed project. And I'd just like to clarify and address some of the points mentioned by the applicant, specifically with respect to farming the land as well as irrigation. So our ranch is a part of the original historic Lazy Zee Ranch. We currently use our land for agricultural purposes, including grazing of several animal types, including alpacas, as well as cattle. To Chair Adair's question earlier to the applicant about adjacent properties' water rights, I did want to just address that we do have water rights, and as Central Oregon Land Watch mentioned, our water rights are a part of the original Lazy Z land. With respect to the applicant's use of the land and farming it, as well as the expert testimony that was mentioned, claiming that their land cannot be used for agricultural or grazing purposes, specifically cattle uses, I just wanted to share an anecdote that we have a professional cattle rancher who regularly comes to our property to check on our steers. And he often mentions how impressed he is by the condition of our pasture grass, as well as the health of our grazing cattle. we spend uh quite a bit of time maintaining the health of our pasture making sure that it is fertilized watered so i understand that work goes into it but that is the point of the agricultural lands and something that we very much value as owners of our ranch as well as the communities around our ranch that are also agricultural purposes Keeping our land and our neighboring land as agricultural is important to my husband and I. We don't want to see the approval of any applications that would permanently alter the long-term planning framework for this portion of Sisters agricultural areas and ultimately any approvals that would undermine the county's longstanding commitment to protecting agricultural lands that ourselves and I think our community deeply values. So I just wanted to thank you for your time, and that concludes my comments.

Great, thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Mather. Is there anyone else in the room or online who is interested in providing public comment on this application? Seeing none, we can circle back to the applicant for a rebuttal.

Thank you very much again, Tia Lewis, for the record. And I'll be brief. We will do most of our rebuttal in writing to address the evidence that has come into the record today and the staff memo that was prepared in response to your work session. But I will address briefly some of the rebuttal points. Again, the subject property's soil characteristics have been established by a soil scientist. So, when opponents or landowners testify that they have the exact same soils as the subject property, that's not based on evidence. That's based on their idea of what the USDA soil maps show. And our soil scientist shows that the mapping was incorrect on our property. With regard to the farm dwelling in 2002, as I indicated, that farm dwelling was established as a part of an overall ranch plan to divide the ranch and to establish home sites and sell them off. And Jackie Herring testified to that overall ranch plan and it occurred during the course of 1999 through 2011. And the 1400 acre ranch was permitted for 28 home sites. either through farm dwelling applications, non-farm dwelling applications, or farm help dwelling applications. And his testimony is Exhibit U into the record. At the time that that farm dwelling was issued in 2002, the ranch was a 1400 acre ranch and the 64 acres that the farm dwelling was issued for was surrounded by an additional 1400 acres being operated as a horse ranch. So the property today as Mr. Herman testified is very different than the property as it existed in 2002. It's not appropriate to describe the city's use of the surrounding property as a farm use. The city asked the county for a description of what the city was doing on the property and the county issued a land use compatibility statement that the property is a municipal wastewater treatment facility. The fact that they grow grasses as a part of treating the effluent does not transform this municipal wastewater treatment facility into a farm use, as that term is used and defined in the state planning goals and statutes. Lastly, with regard to goal 14, we do believe that a condition limiting the minimum lot size to 10 acres on this property is appropriate given the fluctuating nature of the comprehensive plan and the county's zoning ordinances regarding minimum lot sizes in the subdivision. And we have asked for that condition of approval and we are willing to accept it and record in the deed records a condition that would establish a 10-acre minimum lot size for this property until it gets annexed into the UGB.

Lastly, the

the gentleman that came to work on our property and to try to do regenerative farming again i encourage you to look at his cv at exhibit ph five uh... he is a world-renowned expert and he spent three years on this property and he is an objective person in this case despite the fact that he came and did onsite work he's not involved in the political or the statewide uh... sort of i guess angst that people feel over farmland in deschutes county and whether or not it should be changed and whether or not the county's following the rules for that or not this man is not involved in that at all he doesn't even live in america anymore but what he wrote to us when he testified in this case and he wrote about his experience on this piece of property is pretty instructive and i want to read it to you He said, in this context, continued agricultural zoning of the subject property conflicts with the comprehensive plan's core objectives. Maintaining agricultural zoning under these conditions does not preserve meaningful farm productivity, and it does not advance county-wide agricultural resilience goals. Instead, it creates regulatory friction, financial inefficiency, and misalignment between policy intent and land performance. These property owners that hold properties that do not meet the definition of agricultural land should not have to foot the bill for a community desire to protect agricultural land. This applicant has spent the money to show you that this property doesn't meet the definition of agricultural land, and we ask that you approve the applications to change it. Again, we can talk about the time period within which the record could remain open, and I would like to participate in that discussion. Thank you.

Ms. Lewis, the arguments that we've heard that if the community wants agricultural land, they shouldn't put the cost burden on the property owner, I think is a real and meaningful concern and question to raise in the context of these resale applications. I do want to ask, One of the other ways to think about this is whether the community should bear the costs of enhanced property values when a property owner has their land rezoned. The applicant purchased this land as exclusive farm use zoned land. It was exclusive farm use zoned when it was purchased, eyes wide open. And now with this rezone application, I would presume that if this land is converted to MUA 10 or RR 10, that the value would increase substantially. That is kind of the inverse argument to what we've heard that I think is a real concern. A property owner should not have to bear the costs to maintain agricultural land that the community wants. And on the flip side, the community maybe shouldn't have to bear the cost. of losing agricultural land, given the benefit that will accrue to the property owner. These rezone processes, essentially what we are doing, we are granting new property rights to a landowner based on arguments about about the agricultural value and etc. I think it is relevant to consider the inverse argument here and the costs to the community of loss of open space, loss of scenic resources. Neither the picture that staff showed us, it was just from Google Earth, nor the picture that Landwatch put up in their blanket appeal reflect for the community the actual scenic resource that we're talking about, which is if you're driving down Highway 20, and you look over this property for a big chunk of that area, you're seeing a beautiful open space with the three sisters in the background. So there's the loss of open space, potential loss of open space, scenic resources, habitat for wildlife. There's a long discussion now about whether this is potentially agricultural land or not. I'd say there's a lot of arguments on all sides of that. The other implication for agriculture, and I think this is particularly important when we ask questions about whether a certain piece of EFU-zoned land is necessary for farming on nearby farmland. or the impacts on agricultural land nearby, is that when that rezone happens and that land increases dramatically in value, we are basically laying down breadcrumbs for other exclusive farm use zone property owners saying you can buy a piece of EFU zoned land at EFU prices and then shortly after that you can turn around and get the land rezoned and dramatically increase the value of your property. And in so doing, we are impacting the cost of EFU zoned land in our community. Potentially making EFU zoned land out of reach for people who do want to do agriculture, people who do want to take on a piece of land that would be a labor of love and would require substantial investment. And that is of great concern to me as we have these discussions about loss of EFU-zoned land. even if it is marginal EFU zoned land in the eyes of soil scientists and ranching experts and things like that.

So I don't have a specific answer to your question and I believe that these sort of policy sort of considerations maybe aren't necessarily appropriate in our quasi-judicial record. But what I will say is this. what Mr. Hobbs referred to in terms of keeping these properties zoned agricultural when they don't produce products, agricultural products, and they don't meet the does not promote agriculture in our community. And here's what happens. The county has farm tax deferral for all these properties that are in agricultural zoning, that aren't being used for agricultural purposes. And so, the county is collecting a lot less taxes on all EFU zoned property, including the ones that are actually producing commercial agriculture. So, just a minute. When this property comes out of EFU zoning, the county will collect different taxes, much higher taxes.

If I'm not mistaken, if the land is not being farmed, it does not receive EFU farm tax deferral.

Correct. But if you look at Deschutes County, almost all of the property in EFU zoning is receiving farm tax deferral, despite the fact that it's not being farmed. And that's because it's being watered. Irrigation water is being put on properties that don't grow crops in order to protect the water rights and in order to protect farm tax deferral. So if we as a community want to really protect farmland, what we should look at is letting real agricultural land not pay taxes at all and forcing agricultural land that's not being farmed to actually pay the same taxes that the rest of us pay. in the county, right? We have so much land in farm tax deferral and that it's staying in farm tax deferral and they're continuing to apply water to rocks so that they can protect water rights that aren't being used for agriculture and protect farm tax deferral. That's where we as a community have fallen down and that's where we as a community need to fix it.

I appreciate your concerns about water being inefficiently applied to farmland. And I would also say that there are processes for people to challenge the tax rate or the taxation of properties that aren't being farmed. We're having a wide-ranging discussion. As you said, maybe stuff that should not be in the record for a quasi-judicial land use application.

So this is not in farm tax deferral? This has not been in that?

It is in farm tax deferral.

It is in farm tax deferral. That's correct.

So you're doing some dry land grazing or something like that. Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. Are there any other questions for this rebuttal period? OK, with that, then we will now move to staff closing comments and discussion about continuing the hearing or moving to deliberations.

Before we do that, I just would like to make a comment in regards to Commissioner Chang's concerns over campaign contributions. And I do want to acknowledge unsolicited that Mr. Willits did give me a campaign contribution in the primary. So I just want to put that in the record. And yes, do I believe that I can be fair and impartial? Yes.

Okay. Well, we can get to that in a few minutes.

Wonderful.

Staff.

Thank you. Just a few things. Just to clarify, this application was received by the county this year on March 2nd. I think it was quoted as being received last year, but it was actually this year. And regarding what was handed to the commissioners, in case anyone's listening, this is attached as exhibit, or sorry, attachment A to the staff memo that was uploaded into the record yesterday. It was the end of the day. I do want to acknowledge that. Commissioner Dare, to your question about the RR10 zone property to the south. Right, that little corner. So that's been zoned RR10 since at least the early 1980s. I was thinking 70s or something, yeah. And it is a platted subdivision so that might reflect its zoning designation. And then just a couple of things. So just making sure, Chair Ching, again, the city assisters information about how they're applying their treated wastewater that's attachment to in my staff memorandum. And then I also want to acknowledge that I was looking at the Dial Interactive Map, and it shows that the subject property is in the Three Sisters Irrigation District. And I don't know if that's incorrect information, but obviously we'd want to get that corrected. Because I think I heard that this property is not in an irrigation district. So just kind of getting clarification on that may be helpful.

Irrigation district confirmed. It's within the geography of the irrigation. You know, it's within the district boundaries of the irrigation district. Not within the district boundaries. It's in the record. Not within...

Not in the, you said it's not in Three Sisters, correct? Correct.

Yeah.

But it was historically within, so the water rights that you had before, were those from the Three Sisters or the squawk, whatever it was called, irrigation district, or were they not?

They were. Okay.

Okay.

That's all I had for closing comments. Staff doesn't have a preference on the open record period, but obviously the parties have presented different requests. So I'm just here to help facilitate any questions as discussion happens.

Thank you, Caroline. Now to the discussion of... Now to the discussion of... how long we want to keep the record open and when we want to proceed to deliberations. Are there any requests or suggestions? were initial thoughts from commissioners. We heard a request from the applicant to keep the record open only for rebuttal testimony. We heard from Ms. Collarer that she would like the standard 777. Are there any additional thoughts from commissioners?

Is there a path for going to rebuttal and final argument instead of open record? Is that.. I mean procedurally I don't want to be challenged.

Procedurally I've confirmed that that would be allowed. But we would want clarification from the applicant on whether you want final legal argument in addition to rebuttal or just rebuttal and waive your final.

Yeah, I think we could do rebuttal and final during the same Well, it depends on what comes in rebuttal. So, I think we should preserve a period, but then we could waive it at the end, if much rebuttal. It depends on what comes in. But, ideally, what we would like to do... We're not trying to shorten the period. We're just trying to stop the parade of new evidence when... I did mention it was March when we submitted it. I didn't mean to intend it was last year, but it was March. And so, you know... We don't really need any more new evidence. We've all looked at this pretty hard. So I would be willing to do rebuttal evidence only. I think that would cover Land Watch being able to respond to anything we submit. And we could respond to what they've submitted. And we could do that in 14 days and then have a seven day final argument period.

it would still be a 21 day open record oh so okay so you're proposing just no new evidence after we close a record here okay so that first 14 day period bottle making sure we're clear still be three week period 14 days and then seven for final argument not much evidence that would come in that wouldn't be a rebuttal given the breadth of every information that's in the record

I mean, I would say that this property and the property that's the subject of the next application are highly visible public places that I think that there's probably still people in our community who are just waking up to the fact that there is an application in um to um to rezone this or to do something with the land use of this property so i i'm hesitant to close the uh close the close up close this hearing off to new testimony just yet but that's just my my perspective It sounds like between the time when we heard that there was 300 submissions of testimony and today, there's been 100 more. And I'm inclined to give people opportunity to engage in these land use processes, which are the business of everyone in Deschutes County. So I would prefer we did a standard 777. But that's just my opinion.

I'm fine with that 777. So where does that put us?

That's where we're going then.

So where does it put us day-wise? Do we know that, Carolyn?

So this isn't subject to the 150-day clock. So we don't have to worry about that necessarily. But penciling this out, that would close the record. I'll pull up a slide here in just a second. So it would be my original slide deck here to figure out which dates we needed to pull up here. But Kim, I think, has that handy. okay so just the 777 being the choice um so new evidence and testimony um can be submitted by any participant um that deadline would be september 9th at 4 p.m so that's a wednesday and then rebuttal evidence and testimony would be september 16th at 4 p.m and then final arguments by the applicant only their deadline will be september 23rd at 4 p.m And I do want to note just some kind of housekeeping on submittals. All materials should be submitted to my attention. I will add them to the record for the board's consideration. That should either be emailed to me, which is my email is caroline.house at deschutes.org, or you can mail them or drop them off at our office. And please note that we do not retrieve any information from cloud storage systems, so everything needs to be actually submitted to the record, no website links, etc., And make sure everything's submitted again before that 4 p.m. deadline. It actually has to be received by the county server to be accepted.

That's it.

Good. Is there anything else for this hearing? We can proceed to the next one then. Thank you. Thank you very much.

We take a five-minute break to stand up.

Sure. Let's go ahead and do that and allow the staff, the next applicants, and everyone else a five-minute break. So please be back here at 10 to noon.

How sweet. Yeah.

On to item number seven. This is the time and place set for a hearing regarding file numbers 247-25-000537-PA and 538-ZC. This is a hearing on a Deschutes County Comprehensive Plan amendment and zone change request. At this time, staff will outline the hearing procedures that will be followed.

Thank you, Chair Chang. Again, for the record, my name is Caroline House. I'm a senior planner with the Deschutes County Planning Division. Today, the Board of County Commissioners, again, will take testimony and receive written evidence involving an application to change the comprehensive plan designation, in this case of a 20-acre property, and to rezone this property from exclusive farm use to multiple-use agricultural. And I have a slide deck that will be up here in just a second. I will begin today by explaining how the hearing will be conducted and how to testify. I will then provide a brief staff report. We'll then move on to the testimony portion of the hearing. The applicant, again, will have 30 minutes in this case. Those persons in support will have three minutes. If there's anyone neutral, they can go, I guess, in between. And I'll also have three minutes. And anyone in opposition will have three minutes at the end. Afterwards, the applicant will have 10 minutes for rebuttal testimony and staff may make closing comments at the end. So today's hearing, again, is a hybrid hearing with both in-person and remote participation allowed. Before starting your testimony, please provide your first and last name as well as your mailing address. And because this is a second separate hearing, I'm just going to acknowledge that you need to provide an accurate email address or mailing address if you want to receive subsequent notices related to this review. For our in-person participants, please make sure you have filled out a blue sign-up sheet. They're sitting on the table to my right. That needs to be handed to the board's executive assistant, Brenda, to the left of the dais. Chair Chang will use the sheets to call up in-person participants for their testimony. And after your name is called, please come up to one of the tables at the front of the room so the mic picks up. For our remote participants, you must be logged into Zoom in order to testify, or you could also call in using the dial-in option via Zoom. When Chair Chang asks if anyone would like to testify, you will need to use the raise hand feature on your computer or smart device. And if you've called in, you'll need to dial star 9. Please note you may experience a brief pause as your status changes from an attendee to a panelist. And once you've joined as a panelist, you can turn on your camera if you'd like to do so. In addition to oral testimony, anybody can submit written testimony today. You'll need to hand that to me either before or after your testimony. And if you're attending remotely, please email me any documents you'd like to submit into the record. My email is caroline.house at deschutes.org.

Oops, sorry, I didn't mean to skip that slide.

The chair and staff are responsible for conducting an orderly hearing. Any testimony or behavior which is inappropriate will be addressed and may result in that member of the public being removed from the hearing. Chair Chang, I will now return to the script and note that commissioners must disclose any ex parte contacts prior hearing observations, biases or conflicts of interest.

Does any commissioner have anything to disclose? And if so, please state the nature of same and whether you can proceed.

So I had set myself a reminder post-it note on this whole little file here. So I do have relationship I've met with and I know Mr. Willits, but in the 16 years I've been a commissioner, we've only seen each other maybe six times. I'm a known quantity, especially in this, you know, land use quasi-judicial world for the last 16 years. So I know that I can be, you know, fair and honest independent thinking on this, and I do not see there's a conflict. I know you've mentioned that already.

I didn't use the word conflict. Bias, I used the word.

Oh, thank you for correcting me. I'm sorry. I might have used the wrong word. But I feel I can proceed.

Yes, as I mentioned earlier, I do live in the Sisters community, and I did receive an unsolicited contribution for my primary campaign from Mr. Willits. I do see him once in a while when I'm out having dinner in Sisters, and I do believe that I can be fair and impartial in this matter.

I have nothing to disclose. I can proceed. Does any party wish to challenge any commissioner, a member of this hearing's body, based on ex parte contacts, biases, or conflicts? I will restate that I believe that substantial campaign contributions present the potential for bias in quasi-judicial land use hearings and processes. I will remind my colleagues that Someone requested that I recuse myself from a recent quasi-judicial land use process based on campaign contributions to myself. And while I did not have to do that, and I could have made a strong argument that I could proceed without bias to be on the safe side, I recused myself from that process. I think it's important for my fellow commissioners to consider the same and consider what kind of a message it sends to our community if you don't. I will kind of just one other piece of recent history. I will reflect back to quasi-judicial processes where we were hearing the Asseti rezone applications near the Deschutes Market Road junction. And at the time, I did not raise it as a potential bias or concern that Mr. Asseti was displaying billboard-size campaign signs for my fellow commissioners. And I have regretted ever since then that I did not, because I believe that that also presents the potential for bias or partial treatment as opposed to impartial treatment.

so i'll just you know there's i'll just i'll put that forward right now and and you are free to respond to that well i just calculated what the contribution over my overall raising money is and it's point zero one so um i you know if you want to talk about

Do you want to tell us what that amount was?

It was $3,500, but I raised, you know, I raised over half a million. So it's minuscule.

It's all public information and again with our Orstar system. So it's not like there's anything. You look up my name, look up Orstar, you get all the information real fast, all the history from the last 16 years. So, I mean, let's proceed.

Okay.

As no challenges are presented prior to opening the hearing, does anyone have any procedural objections to the public hearing? Seeing none, the hearing is now open. Staff will proceed with a brief staff report.

I'm just waiting for my PowerPoint to pull up. So I'll start with the location of the subject property. This property is adjacent to the property that the previous hearing was for, but it's assigned to address 68621 Highway 20 Sisters. This property is 20 acres in size and the owner and applicant is Willits, LLC. So the applicant has requested a comprehensive plan amendment to redesignate the map designation from agricultural to rural residential exception area and a corresponding zone change from exclusive farm use to multiple use agricultural. And again, no exceptions to any of the statewide planning goals have been requested. Choice, sorry, thank you. So again related to goal three the hearings officer found based on the applicants extensive evidence and order order one soil study that the subject property is not defined as agricultural lands under the applicable OAR it's not suitable for farm use it's not necessary to permit farm practices on adjacent or nearby lands and it's not currently currently part of a farm unit which are all requirements to demonstrate compliance with goal three. Related to Goal 5, this property is entirely within the inventoried scenic resource. And again, the applicant submitted an EC analysis that concluded that the landscape management scenic protections protect the scenic resource along Highway 20 and ensures compliance with Goal 5. And again, the hearings officer agreed with that information. And moving on to compliance with goal 14. Again, the county must determine if this application will allow urban use of rural land. And there's that conflict between the residential density allowances and the MUA 10 zone, or potential inconsistency. And then Deschutes County comprehensive plan policy 3.3.1, which sets a 10 acre minimum. And, um, based on, um, those two factors, um, under goal 14, the hearings officer found that, um, the applicant had met their burden and did not recommend approval. Um, it did not recommend the board approve the application. Um, so in this particular review, um, there were comments in support from Hawk Hawks Haven reserve LLC, which is a wildlife sanctuary just to the north of this property, as well as, um, Derek Jarosz, um, testified at the hearing in support and, um, comments in opposition were received from central Oregon land watch as well as, um, there being an additional 400 public comments, um, um, generally through that act call to action form that I've referenced before. So all materials, um, except for comments that we received this morning from land watch, um, as well as a number of additional attachments, um, have been uploaded into the record. I don't believe anything else has come in since, um, I've been sitting here besides that, um, for this particular review and, um, I think just for next steps, at the conclusion of today's hearing, the board will need to do one of the following. So continue the hearing to a date and time certain, close the oral portion of the record and leave the written record open to a date and time certain, close the hearing and schedule deliberations, excuse me, for a date and time certain, or close the hearing and you could start deliberations today if that was the board's choice. And I'm available for any questions. I do want to acknowledge that I did give the board a printed copy of attachment A to the staff memorandum that was entered into the record yesterday, which is just a one mile zoning radius from the subject property that was requested at the work session, as well as other attachments are also in the record. But that's what's been printed and handed to the board.

OK. With that, are there any questions or comments before we proceed to testimony? Seeing none, the applicant may approach now and provide us with their testimony.

Good afternoon, Chair Chang, Commissioner DeBone, Commissioner Adair, Chris Kobach, Buchanan Schmidt-Kobach, 937 Northwest Newport, Suite 220-97703. I'm here on behalf of the applicant, Willits, LLC. Its member, Bill Willits, is seated next to me to the left. and i'm going to go in a little bit of reverse order i'm going to start with a procedural issue and that's the open record period i assume we'll get the same one i just want clarity that that the that the applicant can rebut what came in this morning in our second fort seven day period because it really would be rebuttal and not new evidence And I say that because this is the second hearing in two weeks where we come in after have submitted our material. We submitted it on August 21st. Ms. Lewis submitted hers before that. And our opponent comes in the morning of the hearing at 8 o'clock and presents 34 pages of material. now if we are forced to respond to that in the first seven day then they have another period to rebut our initial material and anything else we put in so i think out of fairness i would request that if we have the same open record period that ms lewis client and my client get to rebut the new information that came in this morning in our second period which should truly be rebuttal

Thanks for that clarity. As I say, I wasn't seeing it like that. But yeah, if you take time to rebut, and then there'll just be something going back and forth in that first period.

I think it disadvantages us, and I think it's intentional. Now, last Wednesday, we had a hearing, same type of hearing, and Landwatch came in, did the exact same thing. And remember, they apologized. They said, we wish we had got it in earlier, and we'll do better next time. Well, this is next time, and they did the exact same thing. So I would make that request, and I know you'll give it due consideration. Into the merits of the application, at the hearing officer level, we did the reverse order. Both applications went because we're next door to one another. It makes sense. And I got to go first, and Ms. Lewis went second. I get the advantage of going second, so I can be a little more brief because the records are substantially the same. As you might expect, we coordinated on stuff to make sure that information that they had in their record that was relevant was in our record and vice versa. And so since we have substantially the same record, I think I can be a little more brief and I don't have to, you know, replow the same earth to the same depth as they did. And so just to recap, this property is adjacent to the Jaros property. It's a 20-acre parcel. It's butts up against Five Pines Resort, which is owned by my client as well. It's got a five-acre home. It's not a dwelling anymore, but it's the historic building and it's used for meetings and stuff like that. And there's another old structure that historically we understand was used as a livery stable at one point in time. And then actually when cars started coming over the hill, Mr. Willits heard that it was used as a automobile repair shop. the soil test uh our soil study that we had done was similar to the jaros ours was done by the same person a little bit earlier than that it confirmed that the soils are 70 percent class seven and eight um the property um does not have irrigation rights it as we we've pointed out in our our uh expert craig jacobs report it has a well right But in his opinion, you couldn't use it to irrigate. And even if you could, he pointed out significant problems with trying to draw that much water for agricultural use. And so that's kind of a lay of the land of the property. It's a very small property. It's butts up against the highway. There's no farm structures. There's no fencing. No recent history anyway of any farm activities on it. It was part of the lazy Z at one point in time. And I agree with everything Ms. Lewis said about the history. It started getting broke up in late 1990s. Some of the properties, and I would agree with this, what Mr. Herman said on the north side of the property, there are some of the properties that were in the lazy Z that are still being operated for agricultural uses. And I would agree with Ms. Lewis's comment that until you do a site specific soil test, you cannot say that the soils are the same as ours. My observation just from looking at them is They likely have better soil and they likely have better water. That's why they're being used the way they are.

Question.

Yes.

I had to jump in there. So your letter talks about 543 gallons per week, and this was mentioned at a work session. Yes. Can you, was that a typo or what does that, what does that refer to? 543 gallons per week in the middle of your letter.

Yeah. Because 543 gallons a week is actually not that much.

Yeah. That's a family's day use. So, I mean, yeah, we're wondering.

Maybe I miswrote that. It's from Mr. Jacobs. uh report which i have right here his testimony but yeah just putting it in context because it didn't make any sense He was saying a household would use 2,100 gallons per week, but if you irrigated, you'd use 543 gallons. I think what he was trying to point out is if you tried to use that well for irrigation, you'd use a lot more water than if you were just using it for a dwelling that well. But 2,000 something is more than 543. Oh, yeah. I may have wrote that wrong. That's probably on me. But in any event, it's not an irrigation well is, I guess, the main point we're making. And he had concerns that if you tried to use it for that, you would overdraw it. It's expensive to do that. So on the hearings officer's report, we get substantially the same one. We had all of the evidence that Ms. Lewis just went through on suitability for farming, the soil quality, lack of water. And the hearings officer agreed with us on the OAR that this does not meet the definition of farmland or agricultural land. And the hearings officer looked at all of our evidence that went to not only Can it be used alone for agricultural purposes? But is it suitable with other properties? And that was a big factor in his decision. And he looked at whether it's necessary, which the definition says is indispensable to allow farming on adjacent or nearby properties. His big factor was nothing on the south side can be used for agricultural, south side of the highway. And we'll get to that more with the city water and Mr. Jarosz's property. But on the north side, there's this separation. of the highway and so he's his opinion as a farm expert is there would be no impact from the mua uses on this property on the properties across the the highway so we the hearings officer agreed with all of that evidence and it was substantial evidence if you read the luba cases that have come out of deschutes county recently on farm use suitability etc lube has been pretty deferential when there is this amount of evidence and i think in most of the cases leading up to this the evidence has not been this extensive. I would agree again with Ms. Lewis. I think both parties here have been, we've recognized the changing landscape, and this came up in our last hearing last week, is with these LUBA decisions, there is a little bit more on some issues, a little bit more taxing burden on the applicants. It's part of the process and we've stepped up to it and we've gotten in this five or six page farm report. I don't think five years ago we would have ever submitted something like this. So the evidence has become much better and applicants have stepped up and in this case these two applicants have really stepped up. Now the hearings officer did find this inconsistency and I wanted to talk about that because I agree that the BCL case, I don't understand. I have some insight into where Luba went because I was there. I was at the hearing and I heard the question asked by one of the referees that I think is telling. So what we argued to LUBA is exactly what Ms. Lewis said. There is no inconsistency in a rezoning application unless you ask for parcels less than 10 acres. And we didn't. In Destiny Court, there was some evidence of a plan to cluster. And once that information was out, it was kind of hard to close the barn door. So I think that influenced the decision. And what we argued is under Luba's holding in that Milwaukee, City of Milwaukee case, Baker versus City of Milwaukee, the comp plan controls. That's the controlling law. And then we argued that if somebody went in with a future application to create less than 10-acre parcels, they would have to amend that comp plan. And any comp plan requires consistency with Goal 14. So we actually addressed that to Luba and said, your Goal 14 concern is addressed in the existing county process. One of the referees asked me a pointed question. How can you assure that notwithstanding that, somebody at Deschutes County wouldn't approve an application without undergoing that analysis? That was the question. And of course, one of my answers was, well, in Deschutes County, with the vigilance of Central Oregon Land Watch, that will never happen. And I said, you have to have confidence that the decision makers in Deschutes County will apply the law. But that's the context in which Luba's decision came out. And so we're taking the belt and suspenders approach as well to this and saying put a condition on 1816030. I think in your code allows you to put conditions on rezoning. There's authority for it. We're agreeing to it. As long as the current law exists, this is our condition. We'll live with 10 acre parcels. That will be the only parcel size allowed on this property. And I think that condition not only satisfies the consistency with the policy 3.31, but it also satisfies goal 14. And here's the argument we made in goal 14, which is a little different than what you just heard. If the limitation on the property is 10 acres and nothing smaller, the Curry County case, our Supreme Court said that 10 acre density is presumed to be rural and therefore it's presumed to be consistent. with Goal 14. And so unless somebody came in in an application and showed for some reason that these 10-acre parcels were different, then we would qualify for that presumption that the Supreme Court announced. And then, because our condition doesn't allow future cluster or smaller parcels unless and until the recent amendments are acknowledged, The recent amendments as I read them require any cluster or personalization smaller than two or even two acres or between ten and two acres. You have to go through a quasi judicial application in which you have to meet goal fourteen in one or two ways. That's what ten point three and ten point four say or ten point one point three and ten point one point four. If you're in exception land, you have to go under that OAR that Luba said did not apply to non-resource land. If you're non-resource land, then you have to do that factor test under Curry County, look at proximity to the UGB, look at the public services that will be required. So our condition that we think satisfies both the policy inconsistency and Goal 14, and it's consistent with what you all are doing with your amendments. Just to circle back on some of the farm stuff, I wanted to point out that In addition to what Mr. Kittsrow said about the soils and the lack of fertility and the lack of water holding capacity, Mr. Jacobs went out there and he operates a farm. You've got his credentials. He's a farmer. And he actually dug a bunch of pits himself. And how he described this property is river rock below a shallow surface. And he said that consistency of that soil operates like a French drain. which is designed to rapidly remove water from an area and so his he actually addressed i think what uh chair chang was talking about about amending it's more than amending and it's more than putting water on it to take these little this 14 acres which would have limited potential anyway due to its size you would have to remove that rock which would be very expensive and time consuming. Then you'd have to do the amendments and Mr. Jacobs got into specifics. You know, it's very expensive to amend it too, but in his experience, it's an ongoing process. There would have to be years of amendment before you could get the soils to have some water holding capacity. And then he pointed out that without reliable irrigation, all of that might be You're still not going to produce a good viable pasture. And he talked about all of the different farm uses that need pasturing. He's done it. He's raised those animals, those hooved animals. He's done farming and he understands that you need a good pasture. And so he did look at it through the eyes of the reasonable profit motivated farmer and that's the legal test. um and i know there may be philosophical differences of how that applies specifically and how it could be deemed by some people to be inconsistent with where we want to go with farmland but that is the law and that's what miss that's the lens through which mr jacobs looked at all of this evidence And his conclusion was very consistent with the expert on the other property. And by the way, that Hobbs Margarite, that was a joint effort. We have that in the record. That effort he did on the regenerative farming was a collaborative effort between my client and and mr jaros and it failed miserably and it didn't even last as long on our property as it did on mr jaros's property it was immediately abandoned because nothing grew and that's in the record from greg willits so everything that you heard about the utility of farming on the jaros property is equally true here and we have that other element that i just mentioned this is 14 acres of unused land that that's there well not even that with the little with the old home there No reasonable farmer would put in all that money with all those limitations trying to make any kind of profit on this property. The other issue I wanted to talk about is this one that has recently come to the forefront a little bit more. Is it necessary to maintain this land as farmland? I get the concept that you talked about, that there would be the potential for this to impact the price of EFU land. I don't think there's anything I can say to dispute that. That is a potential. But I would echo what Ms. Lewis said is there is also the fact that when you have this land coming out of EFU into other uses, the owners are paying their share through increased taxes. And so there's these social offsets. Nothing's perfect. But I don't think it's just a one-way street. I don't think it's always just a negative that you're potentially increasing the cost of farmland. And I remind you that these rezones are only allowed on farmland that is not agricultural land. It's not as if this is going to perpetuate taking class 1 and 2 farmland and converting it into other residential uses. This is only class 7 and 8 soils. So I think it's a lesser concern. And I do think that this deferral thing is an issue. We talked about this Wednesday about how people irrigate on bad land just to keep their irrigation rights and to keep the deferral. And there was an article in the paper several years ago about how much money the county has lost through this process, this deferral process. So I agree with what Mr. Herman said and others. There are big issues here that need to be resolved at a different level. But I think, to echo Ms. Lewis again, when you're looking at these quasi-judicial applications, you have to stick to what's in the record and the criteria. And when you apply the record and the criteria here, this is land that should not necessarily maintain the agricultural zoning because it's not agricultural land. and and one other thing i wanted to say about the impact on farming there was that case that for the commercial use in conjunction with farm use on the lazy z ranch well if you read that decision one of the big things that the board looked at was how would approving that impact the properties in the area. And so I guess the way I reasoned was, well, if you can approve a commercial use on a farm without impacting the ongoing farm use or the adjacent properties, how could a MUA use across the highway, which would probably be similar intensity, how would that produce any more significant negative impacts? So, I think that decision is really helpful on that last prong. Now, on goal five, finally, we did the same study, ESEE, I guess it's called, and we started doing that after Destiny Court, and it's thorough. A hearings officer found nobody raised any objections or problems with the actual study. Two issues that came up. One is, how do you implement it? And I agree, the LM zone already implements it. And we put in the record actually examples. So there are RR10 and MUA10 properties already in existence in the same scenic corridor. and we put in applications and decisions from the county approving uses that are allowed in those zones on those properties applying the lm overlay to find consistency and it is all about consistency it's not about prohibition i was at a hearing one where your planning director mr groves clarified that the lm zone is designed to get consistency and the applications we put in show you that it works one of those applications is the house that's on this property Mr. Willett's house was approved on the same property through the LM process, and there were conditions put on the construction of that house to make it compatible. And so that's how we think it should continue to go. You have a good track record of protecting these resources through using that tool, and it can be done. And then the only other question that came up is in, I think it was the, not the BCL case, one other case where Luba said, the problem is how do you adopt it? So I would ask that the board carefully adopt as part of this comprehensive plan, if you approve it, adopt that ESEE as the site specific goal five. program along with the lm zone for this property because luba had a concern and i think their quote was we're going to leave it to the county to grapple with how you adopt it because we don't there is no rule but we think it has to be adopted so i would ask that you give some consideration to how you adopt this goal 5 es ee for this site-specific zone change um and so unless there are any questions i i think like i said i think we can be a little more abbreviated with the stuff the information you just heard oh i did want to put one thing clarify one thing on the city property that they're using for effluent i put this in the record i put in the city's application and it had some information that i think in two respects are very very important One is the city had this management plan as part of their application. And the management plan, I read it to say, you can't do any farm use on that property. You can't graze animals. They can't even spray if there's school children in the area. So it's very restrictive on what they can and can't do because of the nature of the affluent. So that's the one thing I want to point out. I agree with the comments before. It's not farm use. It's a municipal use. And the second thing in the application is the city announced its intent when they expand and they are going to expand that they plan to bring that property into the UGB and zone at PF. which is what they did on their main plant. So that's their expressed intent in their application material to this city. And so, or to the county for that spraying, or I guess it was to the DEQ. So if that's true, and there's gonna be city property all around these two properties, it seems that eventually that's where this property is going. And I think that's also consistent with rezoning it from agricultural land. It's gonna be sandwiched between city properties. So unless there are questions, I think those are the points I wanted to make.

Mr. Kobach, that last comment, are you saying that you think that this piece of property would be acquired by the city?

No, I think that the point I was trying to make is the city has announced, and I don't know if it'll happen, but in their application material, the city said their plan for their property is eventually becoming PF. And to become PF, a city zone has to come into the city. and they did do that for the current pf property that's next to mr jaros i read that decision that was that was brought into the city ugb to facilitate that and so it sounds to me like the city's plan is to bring all of this into the city as part of their pf zoning and then these two properties would be kind of between the city and the city so And I think that just foretells that, you know, eventually in the near future, this is property that is primed to come into the city. And it's next to that. And you're probably going to ask what the intention is. Mr. Willits is here to confirm this. But. The intention is to do nothing with it right now, but a better zoning on it is definitely going to be advantageous in the future for the Five Pine Resort because it's a very vibrant part of the community. It has future needs, and the long-term plan would be this would be come into the city and allow some expansion of the resort and and we did look at uh this is just my testimony today i don't know if we put this in the record but there is a city economic opportunities study that they had done some years ago and i think they did recognize uh the the eventual need for additional commercial properties on highway 20. so that's what this property brings and so we think long term there's there's some advantages for the city and the five pines resort if this has a non-resource zoning on it bill got anything you want to say Yes, I do. Mr. Willis has got a couple comments.

So I think, you know, what I pick up from my neighbor, this whole land use, farm use is such a tightrope. But I believe we have an interesting nuance. And I encourage you to look up TripAdvisor because for the first time in the history of Oregon, The number one hotel in America is Five Pine Lodge. The number five hotel in the world is Five Pine Lodge. And you can just verify that by looking up. And that's the greatest amalgamation site because it's a user response. We have an opportunity to continue to feed a vibrant community because we bring in a guest, they go to the coffee company, they go to the art galleries, they go to the restaurants, and together, over the last 20 years, we've moved Sisters Oregon from an ice cream stop to a destination. And I am so proud of that. And what we're asking to do is expand our launch. And we're suggesting to you, you put constraints on it so that, you know, seven years down the road when Bill Willits isn't here, somebody can't take that land and convert it to residential or a Safeway or whatever else might happen, that it would be restrained exclusively for the expansion of hospitality, which I believe is the single most beneficial thing we can do for our community. And to that end, you know, we live on that land. And from my unprofessional view, nothing grows on it. Period. End of sentence. And you can do a quick drive-by and verify that. So that's me.

We actually had our county commissioners retreat at Five Pines two years in a row. And the commissioners from all over the state always compliment your resort. So thank you so much.

Mr. Willits, the vision that you just shared with us, would you be willing to put that into conditions for an approval of this property?

100%.

Okay. some basically something the effect of you know when no development until this is brought into the city and then when that happens you know this is this is what we're looking at exclusive to lodging and the only thing else i would say is old house

And the old barn built in 1906, it's our thing to make that into a park dedicated to the city, whatever constraint you wanted to put on it. But old house has an incredible story to tell. You know, it burned down and was rebuilt in 1936 and the barn, You know, Jackie Herring was a historian. I mean, that barn flowed with the time. It first was a livery. It was a mechanic shop. It was a butcher shop. It's got a rich story to tell. We've been able to prop it back up. We hope to keep it there for the next 50 years. So we can constrain that as well and do something that's right as a legacy to the sisters community.

Thank you.

I have an appointment I can't miss, so I'm going to speak and dash if that's okay. But if there's any questions, I'm prepared to answer.

I have one more question, but do either of you have any questions? Mr. Kobach, you brought up the lazy Z commercial use in conjunction with farm use. you know, as an example of, well, you know, if that kind of commercial use is consistent with agriculture, then, you know, why wouldn't something else be consistent with agriculture? And before I heard the intent or the vision for what you were thinking of doing with this property, eventually, I had a lot of questions about that because, you know, we are talking about rezoning land to MUA 10. that would allow, you know, two 20-acre parcels, each of which could have a residence and... Two 10-acre parcels. Isn't that what he just said?

You said two 20-acre.

Sorry, two 10-acre parcels, each of which could have a primary residence and probably also an ADU. And... I don't see that that is as reinforcing to local agriculture as the commercial use of meadery that basically does value-added production off of uh the agricultural you know produce of say the the the current lazy z ranch i mean i i i just wanted to to see if i was missing anything i mean do you uh do do you see the a connection between you know the potential mua use for for residential development and um and and you know strengthening or supporting surrounding agricultural uses

Well, the test is not whether an MUA use would support farming on nearby or adjacent land. The test is whether keeping the zone on it is necessary to allow farm practices. and luba has agreed that the test is very exacting it has to be indispensable to allow that my point was i don't believe one new house and it's not going to happen because you heard mr willis he doesn't want to do that but if you take the worst case scenario here there's already a house on it that would have to be on one parcel so there's one more potential house on this worst case if even if you didn't adopt the condition that mr willis is offering one additional residence on the other side of the highway i don't believe you could anybody could substantiate a case that that would make it impossible to conduct farming on properties across the highway

Okay, thank you. But I just wanted to take issue with, you know, this is no more impactful than the commercial use, because the commercial use is actually very reinforcing to the agriculture.

I agree, it's a good use, but I'm talking about impacts. One of the impacts that Landwatch came in on Dickey Road said is, well, traffic, increased traffic. The commercial use on that property brings more traffic than if it were just a farm. And so I don't think the increased traffic from one new dwelling is going to be more than the traffic that's coming from that business. Because when you go by on a weekend, it's doing a great job. There's people there all the time.

Well, I mean, in the prior hearing, you heard all my questions and concerns about agricultural viability, water availability, and things like that. I don't think I have to repeat any of those.

And we've talked about a number of hearings and there are big issues. And I agree with rezoning MUA 10 on the border. We've talked about that. There are big issues here. I've talked to you about the urban reserves and the problems you've had getting them implemented. And I think there's a process and a forum to resolve those and work on those. it's the legislative process um and and i i would hope that the county and the cities would get together and continue to do that but i have to agree with my colleague that we're here to decide whether this application meets the relevant criteria and based on the evidence and like i said i'm really proud of the application that everybody put through i think mr jaros and his team did a wonderful job on that that's the most extensive rezoning application i've ever seen and and we followed their lead and and we exchanged information to make sure our records were equally compelling and that's that's really what i'd like to close with is look at these records okay thank you thank you thank you next we'll hear testimony from uh persons in support of the application

All right, is there anyone in the room? Is there anyone? Are there any hands raised online? We have a request from Mr. Herman to give a neutral statement.

Just can't decide.

It's very complex.

um again john herman lazy z ranch 68540 east highway 20. um real quick since our land use decision did come up i want to clarify uh the county did not approve our tasting room instead of farming it approved a commercial activity in conjunction with farming the board found the property engaged in farm use found the metery supports our bee practices our grazing our cattle our goats creates a market for honey and helps us maintain and improve that ranch That distinction is exactly my point. Not only does the commercial activity exist to help make the farming work financially, the commercial activity is farming. And I think we sometimes evaluate farmland through every lens except the farmers. And this is a conversation about commercial viability of farming. We ask whether a reasonable, profit-minded farmer would farm this ground. We also talk about views, history, open space and regenerative agriculture. We practice agriculture regeneratively at the ranch within our means, and it's not magic. It's not perfect. In fact, it challenges our very definitions of perfection. It can work. It takes years, money, risk, and sometimes doing what's best for the land makes you less profitable in the short term. And interestingly enough, its primary goal is not profit. The Willits' property didn't arrive simply in its current condition. It was once part of a larger agricultural operation. Agriculture stopped, infrastructure disappeared. I'm not blaming anybody, but we should be careful about a system where losing agricultural capacity makes the argument for leaving agriculture stronger. There's a blind spot on the preservation side too. I've had probably a hundred people say to me, can you believe they want to take away your view? It's the view I look at while I do dishes. I haven't had one person ask, what would it take to actually keep this ground farmed? And how could I help? Opposition on behalf of farmland is not the same thing as supporting farming. Sentiment is also not support. If we value agriculture, participate in it. Buy from local farmers, create markets for what we produce, support the businesses that make farms viable. support commercial activity on farms, finance infrastructure, invest in soil, water stewardship. A partial has not been saved as farmland just because the zoning map still says EFU. Farmland is saved when someone can keep farming it. Rezoning has consequences for farm that remain too. Every new residential property creates another neighbor whose relationship to our landscape is primarily residential. Farming has noise, dust, manure, smells, machinery, early mornings. People often love the view of a farm more than they love everything required to actually farm it. Complaints about farm practices are a recognized compatibility concern around non-farm uses. So if this land should leave ag, I'm opening that conversation on behalf of real public benefit. If we want to turn it into farmland, then our goal should be bigger than preventing development. We should be trying to make farming more valuable, not farmland less valuable. Farmland preservation shouldn't depend on keeping land cheap enough for struggling farmers by restricting everything else. It should mean making farming valuable enough that on agricultural land in Central Oregon, farming is the reasonable economic choice. That requires community support for farming every bit as much as opposition to development. Thanks.

Thank you.

Are there any other neutral statements? Kim, do you see any hands raised? Now to people giving testimony in opposition. I have one blue form from Carol McBath.

Good morning, Chair Chang and Commissioners. My name is Carol Macbeth. I'm here on behalf of Central Oregon Land Watch where I'm a senior staff attorney. Our address is 2843 Northwest Lolo Drive here in Bend at 97703. On behalf of Land Watch, I would like to add my congratulations to the applicant because that is certainly a distinction to be voted in such a popular resort. And he is really doing a service for the entire community, the county and the City of Sisters by having that resort. Nevertheless, his policy arguments should have been directed to Hector McPherson and Tom McCall 50 years ago because they established the land use planning system with the Oregon legislature. And farmers all over the state and land use hearings were held all over the state for over a year. And every citizen in Oregon had a chance to weigh into that system 50 years ago. And what the system does is protect farmland for farm use. And the land that the applicant bought was zoned for farm use. It is undevelopable under the Goal 5 guidelines because it's 100% within the Scenic View corridor. There are farmlands across this county that are not in that Scenic View corridor. This one is, and the applicant knew it when he bought it. He's an experienced developer. the land has never been developable and as we've remarked to the hearings officer this parcel is substandard it is not lawfully created the the irrigated land parcel size is you know many many more acres than this might be 60 i'm not sure i might be more than that but it's not 20. so having bought a 20 acre parcel the applicant simply cannot be heard to complain that their parcel is too small to farm it's it they bought it and now it's zoned for farmland Moreover, I would say that there's a lot of back and forth. Is this farmland? Is this not farmland? I don't know if the commissioners can see. I would be happy to bring it closer. This is showing, I would just, if I can just come up closer, I'll hold this up to you.

This is a photograph of that in 1916. And this is the property.

You can see the crop, the harvesting of the crops along it. We don't have just one photograph like this. This whole thing is the lazy C. Look at how it's all in crop use. This is the property. It was in irrigated farm use, and this continued for decades. It was in farm use, and the photographs show that Carol is that photo in the record. Yeah, there's so okay.

I just wanted to make sure if it wasn't you could send it to us to get it in the method.

And I think it's extremely important, again, because I think photographs are worth a thousand words.

This land has been used for irrigated agriculture. It has been used for crop production. It was used over the course of decades, as many people have testified. And you can see now by just looking at it. Your law, DCC 18.136020, requires there to have been a change. Something has to have changed before you will be allowed to change the zone. And the applicant has not shown that there was a change. This means that this was used for irrigated agriculture. What changed in the interim? The applicant thinks that his soil experts calling it by a different name is a change. That's not a change. That's a different name. The NRCS calls it one thing. He calls it something else. But the question is, what is the land? The land is used for agriculture. It has been used for irrigated agriculture. And the only way to change the land, if you picture this land along the side of the road going into cisterns, the only way to change it would be a flood. or like a volcano, which is how the soil was formed. It comes from the volcano from Mount Mazama. That hasn't happened. Nothing has changed the soil. The soil, the land is still the same. The difference is that this applicant doesn't want to farm it, and that is not a change. So you lack the authority to approve it because you have to show that there's some reason in the public interest, not the private interest, again the applicant explains very much his private interest and so did mr geros we know that they want to buy low and sell high but the question for you is what is this the public's interest and and according to the land use laws as developed by governor tom mccall it is in the public interest have the maximum amount of agricultural land the maximum amount we can have and that is already paying off because there are countries like korea and like japan where they're running out of hay land and central oregon is exporting hay over to them why because we have it and they don't speak beth you're you're a little bit over oh i'm sorry i'd be happy to answer them I would just really quickly like to say that we do not, it's not that we don't disagree with the EC analysis. The EC analysis was conducted in 1992, and this application does not comply with it. Any EC analysis done in the present is irrelevant because the EC was conducted however many years ago.

Thank you. Thank you, Carolyn.

Okay. At this time, sorry, are there any more people who want to testify in opposition or online? Okay. At this time, applicant rebuttal.

Good afternoon. Thank you again. It's Christopher Kobach for the applicant. I'll be very brief. Just a couple of corrections on what the law is. In the case of Last Ranch, which is I think before you on remand, Luba talked a lot about the relevance of an old history of farming and diminished that. historic use of the property is not always indicative of what its current use is. And the test under the state law is the current employment of land, primarily for a profit. So we'll put that, I think we've put it in writing, we'll reiterate it in our rebuttal. There's another LUBA case, I can't remember which one it is. I'll put it, it's in our written material and I'll reinforce this, but LUBA has agreed that a more accurate soil study is a change in circumstance. So legally, these new studies do fall under that category of a change in circumstance, which your code allows as one of the criteria for zone change. But if the historical use was relevant, one thing that we had in the hearings officer hearing, and if you go back to the record on that, you'll hear the original lazy Z guy, he owns the nature preserve across the street. He's the one who testified for us. He pointed out that this specific property formerly was used as a golf course. So that's not a farm use. And so I just want to point that out. That is in the record in his testimony. The ESEE, that's another legal inaccuracy. The applicants are doing these new site-specific ones because LUBA declared that the 1992 ESEE is not adequate if you change the zone that allows uses that weren't allowed at that time. And it kind of makes sense. If you're going to go through and you're going to ask for a zone that has uses that weren't considered in 1992, and that's what Lubb has said, then you have to do a site-specific study. All we're doing by submitting these is complying with the law. And if Landwatch had a dispute over our new study, they had an opportunity in this proceeding to present their own conflicting ESEE. They have their ability to bring in a farm expert to say, no, that's wrong. Here's how you'd farm this property. They don't. They just come in and say, we don't think you can do it and just throw out these hyperboles. So, again, just we'd ask that you focus on the record, apply it to the criteria. And I do want to clarify the open record period. What exactly are we able to do and not able to do in those periods?

I do have a question. Is this in farm tax reform? It is.

I just looked. There's no special assessments on this property according to dial.

Okay. Thank you.

Well, real quick on that record moment there. Is words from a couple commissioners going to have legal merit there? I mean, it's just an open record period, rebuttal period, and final arguments. I understand you're saying let's not go back and forth during the open record period and then have to figure out rebuttal.

Here's what I don't want to see. I want to be able to rebut the stuff that came in this morning in the second seven-day period, and I don't want to have an objection that you all have to decide whether that's valid or not. I just want to know what the rules are. and so i think we can do it but i would defer to mr doyle on whether or not we can do it and that's my thought too yeah have legal give us a clear box that we're all working in and agree about but because and i think mr lewis point is that we don't have any new evidence to come in everything we have is rebuttal so if we do our rebuttal in the first seven days and and then land watch has the second seven days to rebut we're disadvantaged because they came in late today with all their 34 pages of stuff

uh could we have uh legal counsel give some input on this question you could certainly impose the restrictions council's asking for i'm not sure how binding it's going to be on on carol and her client um you know if they think it's an inappropriate condition or timeline you put on i don't know that they're precluded from challenging that um I think it makes sense if you're going to dump a 36-page document on somebody an hour or two before a hearing that they ought to have an opportunity to rebut that. And I think what counsel on both of these have asked for is the ability to do that during the seven-day rebuttal period. Seems to make sense, but the folks at LUBA and then ultimately people in black robes decide that, not me.

I guess what would the specific action be then? Because we ended up defaulting to 777 again in the previous.

I think the action would be just to clarify on the record that rebuttal can happen in the second seven-day period as long as it's not new evidence. And I agree. If we want to present something that is absolutely new and not in rebuttal to what we saw, see when we get back to our offices, then we have to do it in the first seven days. But if what we're going to present is actually in rebuttal to what came in today at eight o'clock this morning, we can present that in the actual rebuttal period, which is the second seven day period.

And the board certainly allowed for that. But I'm saying I don't know that you could bind LUBA or the Court of Appeals if they think differently. And I can't control Carol and her client and what they may or may not do. And as you well know, land use oftentimes delay and procedural back and forth is part of the game as well. So I can't speak to that. And I don't want to give you a representation or a belief that, you know, it's guaranteed. LUBA generally doesn't you know defer to dave doyle and order the courts of appeals they probably should but they don't well there you go seems like dropping things at the last minute is standard legal practice it's it's it's a tactic yeah if you do it you do it if you don't you don't oftentimes it's it's it's genuine there is a reason for the 11th hour and it wasn't necessarily gamesmanship sometimes gamesmanship who knows You know, I've worked with Carol here for 12, 13 years. I trust her. I would assume there was a reason why it came in at the 11th hour and, you know, a computer broke. She had 12 other things to do, whatever. I don't know. It was raining.

Computers were down on Monday.

Miss Macbeth raised her hand. I mean, you know, if we're if we're if we're kind of parsing this this procedural question, I think it's reasonable to ask to let other people hear anything about that.

I think that evidence can come in as a matter of course through the first open record and the rebuttal periods and then it's closed to evidence in the final argument. So I have no objection if they would like to submit evidence during rebuttal or if we can submit evidence during rebuttal. But during rebuttal, the evidence has to be in rebuttal. It can't just be new evidence that they couldn't keep going with something that they mentioned in open record that we're rebutting with our own evidence. But they will still have seven days. And I think that The cure may be if he would like to have more time is to request a slightly longer time argument period so that he can address everything that came in during open argument and rebuttal. You know, 10 days or 14 days, or whatever the intern would like me to go back with. That's all I know.

Mr. Kovach, what do you think about adding to this?

I don't need to propose a final argument. My real concern is just that in that seven... So some people interpret the rule to say if we were following the statute, the seven-day rebuttal period is only for rebuttal to what came in during the initial seven-day period. So that's how some people interpret the statute, 197-797. Right, so that's, and now we're getting there. So if we don't submit our rebuttal to what came in today in the first seven days, they're going to argue that we can't rebut it in the second seven days. That's what's going to happen, even though we got it this morning. And I just think that's patently unfair, and it's not an oversight in this case, because last week they said we will do better, and they didn't do better.

The county, as Mr. Goyle and Ms. Marshall know, We think that the county should be following the procedural rules in ORS 197-797 through the letter, but they're not. And our behavior in our submission of materials is in response to the county's way of interpreting the law. And if the county starts to interpret the law more strictly, then everything will run ship shape. But it's kind of ironic to have people on both sides saying they don't like the way it's going. It's a matter of the county always following procedure, which means applicants must submit their materials 20 days in advance. We have 20 days in advance of the hearing by law to look at the materials, but, for example, in the Thornburg case we've got not just, I did not by the way submit dozens, I've submitted over 200 pages today. And we got thousands of pages from Thornburg on the day of the hearing and then they changed their application during the open record period and the county stood by and let them do it. So the procedural, you know, problems are are happening from the company itself, from the company taking some of the procedures, then none of these problems will arise. They did not used to arise in the past.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like the kind of past practice is the precedent that everyone plans around and That's an argument for just sticking with the way that we've done 777 in the past.

Well, I don't think you have to. The statute doesn't apply strictly. The statute applies to the first evidentiary hearing. This is not the first evidentiary hearing. You don't have to give any open record period. You do it as a courtesy and largely because of the tactics we face. We submit our stuff weeks ahead of time and we get on the day of the hearing 200 pages of material. It's not what the county's doing that's creating this problem.

Well, I mean, I think you could argue that whatever procedure we lay out, people will think about how to game it, right?

Perhaps.

Yeah. Thoughts from...

Well, a good discussion in front of us, and this is, you know, getting down to a little bit more meat about what's going on here. But, I mean, 777 is, you know.

You know, that's what we've been doing. Yeah. Right. So, thank you. Okay. At this time, staff closing comments.

um i just had one item that i wanted to clarify because there's been lots of discussion about the city of sisters um affluent wastewater treatment so i'm just going to read from their wastewater facilities plan update 2024 which the city's um wastewater department confirmed is accurate in terms of how the water can be used but they i quoted i pulled directly from their very long plan. It says that though the type of crop that could be irrigated with what recycled water varies with the quality of recycled water per Oregon Administrative Rule 340.055. For example, Class D recycled water cannot be used to irrigate crops for human consumption So I'm just wanting to highlight here, it appears there's a variety of applications, and I don't know whether they can be used for farm use or whatnot, but I just want to just go on the record that it's not clear to me that the applicant's testimony that it can't be used for agricultural purposes matches what's in their wastewater facilities plan. So that might be helpful to clarify during the open record period, to the extent arguments are related to that specifically. Other than that, I have a few slides for open record period. So with the board's decision for the open record 777 period, so new evidence and testimony, the deadline will be Wednesday, September 9th at 4 p.m. Rebuttal evidence and testimony will be Wednesday, September 16th at 4 p.m. And the applicant's final legal argument will be due no later than September 23rd at 4 p.m. And I can't get to the keyboard, but the next slide, if you could advance that one for me. All submittals should be directed to my attention. Again, my name is Caroline House, and if you're submitting electronic submittals, please email them to me at caroline.house at deschutes.org. And we do not retrieve any information from a cloud storage system or website link, so please put any information directly into the record and make sure everything is received by our county server by 4 p.m.

um caroline you what you just suggested clarifying during the open record period that this piece you know what the city's wastewater can be treated wastewater can be used for is that something that we should request from the city or it's that homework that we can assign staff or

I just pointed that out because the applicant made some statements which seem to be contradicted in the materials that the city of sisters confirmed and so I just think to the extent there's arguments that are tied to that it'd be helpful to get clarity so I would probably just ask the applicant to coordinate with the city to the extent they believe it's relevant. I don't think it's not clear I mean I'm not trying to create a problem when there there is not a problem but it's to the extent the applicants are lying on that water not being able to be used for farm uses, I'd just like to get that confirmed from the city. Because I think that would help support the board's analysis, of course.

Okay. Now we understand whose homework that is. Thank you. Is there anything else for this public hearing before we move to our next agenda items? Okay. Thank you very much, Caroline and everyone involved. It is one o'clock we are we have exceeded the suggested timeframes for items on our agenda. We can either Do items eight and nine at this time, or we could hold those till we return from lunch recess? Is there a preference?

Lunch recess?

I'm sure glad I ate something for breakfast. Could have fainted.

I hear that. Okay. So at this time, we will adjourn for lunch recess and return the way that we wrote the agenda. We're returning at 1.45 p.m. Does that still sound okay to everyone?

sure yeah and chair if i can just clarify are you returning at 145 with item 10 that's scheduled for 145 or are you going to start with the other agenda items which should only take 10 minutes um we didn't make item 10 a time certain for for anyone did we i mean you know it's how it was it's it's 145 on the agenda just because there are a number of people coming for that but

If items eight and nine between them will only take 10 minutes, then I think maybe we still ask them to wait and just finish those up.

I support that.

Yeah, good.

Okay.

Thank you, everyone. We'll see. 2026-014, the last ranch plan amendment zone change remand application to change the comprehensive plan designation of a plus or minus 20.36 acres at 65100 North Highway 97 and 64994 Deschutes Market Road and 64975 Deschutes Pleasant Road and rezone the properties from exclusive farm use to rural industrial.

All right. Good afternoon. Again, this is Caroline House, Senior Planner with the Deschutes County Planning Division. Yeah, so I'm here to help support the board with first reading today of an ordinance to ultimately approve another zone change request. In this case, it's exclusive farm use to rural industrial for the property that Chair Chang just described. The board held a remand hearing on July 8th and then on August 19th the board voted voted two to one to approve the applicant's request. Staff and the applicant have drafted the board's decision document and it's attached as exhibit F to the ordinance that's before you. And just noting that assuming first reading is completed today, staff will be returning on September 23rd for second reading and adoption of the ordinance. And after second reading, the ordinance would be effective on December 22nd of this year unless of course that decision is appealed to LUBA or beyond. And I am available to answer any questions if there are any.

Are there any questions?

uh no questions just one uh on page four i think of our decision there's four e's in a row and i think it's supposed to be an ec so it's just a just a typo one s to an e it just jumped out at me as i was reading you know yeah that sounds like a typo i don't have it up right now yeah not a problem we correct that for the second reading sure yeah that's fine and then the um The EC is going to be part of this. The way it reads is it's included as a exhibit I, correct?

Correct. Yeah.

And that's kind of a new norm for where we're at these days.

Correct. One of the prior applicants noting that that is needed, or Luba alluded to, we have in order for the county to incorporate that into our comprehensive plan, it has to actually be adopted.

Great.

Any further questions or comments?

Oh, just acknowledging the heart-shaped garden out there with the big arrow in the middle of it, too. It took me until kind of the end of this thing to think, well, I don't know, is that a Goal 5 resource to see that thing that's been built out there? But it never came up. Okay. Okay.

I'll move approval of first reading of ordinance number 2026-014 by title only.

And I will second it.

Moved and seconded. Any further discussion? I'll just say that I do not support this decision. I believe it eliminates agricultural land with senior water rights at a time where we need such lands that it provides inadequate protections for scenic resources. And that if this is one domino in a number of dominoes that will fall in that area, we will um to the upshot will be that we will have a massive rural industrial park at the uh junction of deschutes market road and highway 97. so just explaining my vote with that uh commissioner adair yes mr de bon yes and chair votes no thank you okay before the board of county commissioners of deschutes county oregon an ordinance amending deschutes county title deschutes county code title 23 the deschutes county comprehensive plan to change the comprehensive plan map designation for certain property From Agriculture to Rural Industrial and amending Deschutes County Code Title 18, the Deschutes County zoning map to change the zone designation for certain property from exclusive farm use to rural industrial. Ordinance number 2026-014.

Thank you.

Thank you, Callie.

Just confirming again, I'll be back on September 23rd. Sorry to interrupt. Great.

Okay. For second reading. All right. And now item number nine, consideration of second reading of ordinance number 2026-015, Deschutes 2040 plan limited remand.

good afternoon commissioners for the record nicole mardell principal planner with the deschutes county planning division uh i'm here today to present ordinance 2026-015 for consideration of second reading and adoption by the board so this would amend ordinance number 2025-007 and title 23 of the deschutes county comprehensive plan to adopt limited revisions to the deschutes county 2040 plan that is on remand from the land use board of appeals so on august 5th the board conducted a public hearing at the conclusion of the hearing the board deliberated and voted two to one to approve the limited remand amendment package and first reading was conducted on august 19th so i'm here before you today for that second reading and a recommended motion is in your packet and i'm also available for any questions

Congratulations.

Thank you.

No, it's so nice to see you.

I figured she was going to do that.

Yes, of course. Welcome.

Good to see you.

Thank you. Nice to see you as well. And thanks to Stephanie and Will for carrying this while I was out.

We missed you, Nicole. Hey, are there any questions or comments?

No.

This is the second reading, so no other comments. I'll move approval of second reading of ordinance, probably by title only.

Yes.

Move approval of second reading of title only of ordinance number 2026-015. Oh yeah, it's the end of that statement.

And I'll second it.

It's been moved and seconded. Any further discussion? Well, I will repeat that I think that this is an inadequate product. And I've given many reasons for why I think that in the past. No need to repeat them now. But I will be very interested in revisiting this comprehensive plan with a new board of commissioners in 2027. With that, if there's no further comments, we can proceed to the vote. It was, you made the motion. Commissioner Adair, sorry, Commissioner DeBone? Yes. Commissioner Adair? Yes. And chair votes no. Thank you. Thanks.

And then I'll move to adopt ordinance number 2026-015.

Well, actually, should I do the second reading first before we?

Oh, but did you just?

Before we do adopt? Yeah, sorry.

It doesn't matter, but yeah,

Okay, before the Board of County Commissioners of Deschutes County, Oregon, an ordinance amending ordinance number 2025-007 and Title 23, the Deschutes County Comprehensive Plan to adopt limited revisions on remand from the Land Use Board of Appeals and superseding inconsistent portions of ordinance number 2024-007 only to the extent necessary. Ordinance number 2026-015. Okay.

And now I'll move to adopt ordinance number 26-015. I will second it.

Moved and seconded. Further discussion?

Thank you for this work product. I know it's been a bumpy road since it was published, but even before that, it was lots of great outreach and discussions in the community. It is a big update for it. I was here for the 2011 comprehensive plan, and that was more the adoption my first year, so I didn't even have the big picture from before that, but I sure do now. And, yeah, I mean, there's moments. This is a moment in the state of Oregon's land use system, you know, 53 years into it, seeing that, hey, you know, we love it so much, we don't want anything to change, but probably things are going to change. And the state legislature definitely needs to get engaged if we want to see some more limits or expectations on what private property rights are, could be, and how expensive it is to debate it and, you know, be represented by land use lawyers up and down the state land use system. So as I say, this does fit in. It fits in with the big picture right now. And this small little item that we're editing to get it to be acknowledged, hopefully it will be acknowledged, is appropriate at this time. But thank you for this work product.

OK, with that, any further questions or comments? Calling for the vote, Commissioner Adair? Yes. Commissioner DeBone? Yes. And Chair votes no. All right. Thank you. Now, on to item number 10, board discussion regarding Quays Energy's request for a five-year tax abatement through the, what does RREDZ stand for, the Rural Renewable Energy Development Zone program?

You got it.

Good afternoon, Commissioner Jen Patterson, Strategic Initiatives Record, Strategic Initiatives Manager for the record. I will just give a quick introduction and with me at the table is Scott Langton, the County Assessor. Also with us in the audience are representatives from EDCO. We have John Stark and Patricia Clark and we have a representative from Quays Energy and they are all available to come up and talk and answer any questions that you may have further i'll start with an introduction and then turn it over to the commissioners for the direction you'd like this conversation to go uh so over over the course of the summer staff was approached by edco letting us know that there was interest from quays energy which is a geothermal company who is doing some exploratory drilling and geothermal drilling in the newberry area and they are interested or they were interested in exploring potential tax abatement options through the county as they are ramping up to begin building and production up there for the geothermal project. So just a quick background on Quays and then I'll let them expand further if you guys have questions on there. But as I said, Quaze Energy is a geothermal power plant that generates electricity from the earth's heat deep underground. They are involved in a multi-phase capital investment to develop, construct, and operate a 50 megawatt super hot rock engineered geothermal project in Newberry, Oregon. This project is expected to include geothermal wells and well-filled infrastructure, power generation equipment, electrical interconnection facilities, supporting roads, controls and monitoring systems, and deliver clean, firm geothermal power. So construction and investment are expected to proceed in phases and Project Obsidian, which is what they're calling the project, is structured as a 50 megawatt project with phase one representing 20 megawatts of contracted capacity and phase two representing 30 megawatts of contracted capacity. So their current milestone schedule is to contemplate a commercial operation date of June 1st, 2030. So, staff has met originally with and with the assessor's office and then staff and had met 1 on 1 with commissioners to discuss this project. And then since that time, we heard directly back from that they were interested in exploring in our red zone program with a 5 year tax abatement. So there is a three-year tax abatement that they're, I want to say, most likely qualified for. I'll let Scott talk to that further. And then to extend that to a four- or five-year abatement, it is done through approval of the commissioners. I think Quaze and EDCO are at the process of potentially submitting an application for that five-year abatement. And so before that consideration of that application, we are before you to discuss any questions you may have about what that would look like and answer any questions regarding the financials of that. So with that, I'll also turn it over to Scott to see if he has anything additional to add to that background.

Are you going to get peppered with questions?

Just to understand real clear, so this is capital that would go on the ground at this site, and there's an estimate of $173 million, correct? I mean, so this is not property, real property tax, but capital assets. No, that one's not working. The middle one is on. Got to wiggle the wire or something. Did the middle one works?

For the record, Scott, is that working? Yes. For the record, Scott Langton, County Assessor. Yeah, this is a unique property type power company like Pacific Corp or even the railroads or whatnot are essentially assessed property, which means the Oregon Department of Revenue values the company. And if it's multi-state or multinational value, the entire company. and then allocate back the value to what is Oregon represented, and then back to the individual area within the county. So this would qualify under that, which the unique thing about that is it's the business value. So you're both tangible and intangible. It's a little different than building here. So did that help?

I'm glad I asked that question. So the 173 is an estimate. Do people agree on that right now? Or I don't know.

where that number comes best information of it best information okay we've been in conversations with um oregon department of revenue and also business oregon and came up with that pro forma but it's really an unknown because what is this company going to be worth yeah okay what is this asset it shoots county what does that contribute to it it's a starting point then yes

And what I'm getting to is, is there a quick depreciation? Because this little table we have here shows the same number five years in a row.

There you go back to what's the business value. Is a business going to be worth more because they have this asset?

We don't know if it'll go up or down even. Okay. See, that helps. Yeah. So it's just a number.

So this is the best information. Yep. Apple investment is going to be, which then times that tax rate will give you that sort of information. What the future holds. Yeah, it's a big unknown. The Department of Revenue isn't able to answer that either.

That's fine, though. So it's kind of a blurry number, but this is the scope of the number. It's... 100-something million, 1.75 million, 175 or 3 million or whatever. But I mean, that's just a starting point. I was trying to say it a different way.

So the assets that I assume would be claimed for accelerating depreciation at the federal level We don't understand how that plays into the taxable value within Deschutes County.

Well, I guess clarification at the federal level, what are you referring to?

So I mean that, you know, many renewable energy projects, you know, in terms of their federal tax obligations, they claim accelerated depreciation of the energy project that they've built. And so I'm trying to kind of reconcile how that works with, I mean, this is just sort of an extension of Commissioner DeBone's question.

Really, they have nothing in common. And the same thing's true, like business, personal property, machinery, what the depreciation factors they apply for their federal tax return. what we're looking at for property tax is the value thereof. What is it worth? Not what they get to depreciate out. So you can actually have this stuff appreciate, or it could depreciate. It really all depends. Like wind turbines, when they first came on, they were depreciating because new technology came out. Well, then they changed out the heads. Well, then all of a sudden it was worth a whole lot more. So there's a lot of moving parts. reviewed annually, it'll be based on a filing that they're required, the companies are required to file with the Oregon Department of Revenue. So those values can and will, and we see that with all the utility values, year to year, they can swing drastically, even without adding additional assets, either up or down.

It's good to understand.

Thank you. So does this tax year start next year, even though they're not going to start commercial operation until 2030?

That's a fantastic question. There's a certain amount of uncertainty because this wouldn't kick in until they're actually producing power. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Urban or revenue would not be valuing this until they're actually producing power and on the grid. So in the interim, then it would be up to local, my office, to then be valuing, okay, what assets are there? And we'd be looking at it as we would machinery and equipment, that type of thing. So it would be a different model altogether until it's up and operational.

Thank you.

And an additional question about year one, year two, year three, year four, year five. There's an opportunity for additional local requirements. When would those start? Do those start in year four when the extended tax abatement kicks in? Or can those start in year one? Or... Do those not start until after year five?

Yeah, with that, and I'll just take a step back, basically what the zone sponsors have approved, then whatever that contract is, we'll get an annual filing for the enterprise zone exemption to my office. We'll see if those criteria have been met, and then we'll grant that exemption. We do that on an annual basis based on that. So really to your question, I think I needed to defer to EDGO for that.

I also have a little bit of input there. Are you talking about the additional negotiations that the county could put into the contract for year four and five? Yes. So I have reached out to Business Oregon and I have several examples of that, but they did kick in for the

specific year.

So there was a couple of different ones that they gave me examples of. I'm still waiting on more final details, but they are applicable to the actual year of the extended abatement. So for example, there was one who did a pay zone sponsor. They did a community service fee. They did equal to 30% of the taxes normally owed in the fourth year of the abatement and 60% of the taxes normally owed in the fifth year of abatement. There's several other examples that were less than that, but it applies directly to that extended year abatement was the negotiated terms that they put in there.

Any additional local requirements, those would kick in in year four and five.

Based on how that contract agreement was drafted up between the company and the county, but yeah, they were applicable very specifically for those extended abatement years.

Okay. John, were you just raising your hand? Did you want to add anything to that?

Another question I have, just to get it out there, is are we representing Deschutes County's one tax rate here? Are we representing other jurisdictions by having this discussion? Because we've got countywide 9-1-1, but also there's the school district, the fire districts. And are we representing more than just Deschutes County here?

The way it works is Red Zone, for the first three years, like any enterprise zone, but you're the zone sponsor. that that's kind of the automatic, it's really your four and five, but it's all the tax within that area. So of course, very crater you have, you don't have a fire district, you don't have certain things, but you do have a school district.

Yeah.

So, and we, most of it is the county wide districts, but yeah.

So like the sheriff's rates and the sheriff rural patrol and 911 are county wide rates. I mean, I guess I hadn't thought through all that yet.

Yeah, under your umbrella.

Yeah. But, I mean, it talks about $1.20 tax rate percentage. So that percentage point.

Well, dollar and some rate.

Got it. Okay. Just because that's close to our permanent rate, too. That's why the number wasn't real clear. Okay.

Got it.

And to the other questions, for the record, I'm John Stark, CEO of EDCO, and I wanted to address the term, the three-year versus the fourth and fifth year, and any additional requirements to receive an extended abatement that Commissioner Chang brought up. So first, once you establish the R-RED zone, just like the enterprise zone, a three-year exemption is, as of right, if they meet the eligibility requirements so if they create the jobs have the investment and it's an eligible activity and an eligible use of the enterprise zone so then we could sign an authorization without public approval to receive a fourth and fifth year That is an agreement between the company and the county commission, the zone sponsor in this case, because it's rural, it's Deschutes County. And so if you were to attach additional requirements to receive the fourth and fifth year, generally, because it's as of right in the first three. that it would be applicable to the fourth and fifth year. Why? Because if they didn't meet eligibility requirements in the fourth year, they would not receive exemption for those extended benefits, which would include the community responsibilities that you may negotiate. But they would still revert back to a three year because if they met the minimum criteria for investment and jobs, they would still be eligible for the three-year. So because of that, that fourth and fifth year is typically when those additional requirements are negotiated. She was correct. But I just want to add some additional information to that.

Thank you. Scott, so in our staff memo, you're showing the potential taxes owed if there's no abatement with a rate of 1.27826. I think that that's just our county general funds assessed.

Right. She put that in a percentage, not a rate. So, you know, a lot of times property taxes are a percentage of the total value. And a lot of times they're shown as a rate per thousand. And I'm going to have to ask Jen. I'm pretty sure that is the. This is what you were just talking about. Twelve.

Twelve.

We, yeah, we validate.

Well, it went in a big circle right back to you. No, this actually, the spreadsheet and this information had EDCO, Oregon Department of Revenue, Business Oregon. We all worked on this. But no, I would say that this is a rate displayed as a percentage. So you could really move that decimal place one, and it would be 1.27%. And that would be almost positive. I'd have to double check and do that.

12.7 would be the would be rate of all the districts.

Okay.

So we are representing all this 12.7826 dollars per thousand. Yep. Okay. If you've converted the percent, it looks like our primary rate.

That's why it was such so deceiving.

Yeah, it really is.

Yeah.

And I will validate that and make sure that's fine. But

And so within that 12.78, that for us, for the county, that includes the sheriff's office 911 and the county general fund?

Yes, it should.

Okay. And then beyond that, there's...

Tricia does have the thing, and yes, that is indeed accurate. So it's a tax rate of 12.7826, of which Deschutes County rate is 1.278. So they are very similar. Yeah, it's the same number there. And this is just displayed as a percent. So what I mentioned earlier is accurate. Thank you.

Okay, so if that $12.78 covers DCSO, the Sheriff's Office 911, what was the third one I said? Sorry, the general fund. In addition to that, there would be tax abatement or tax liability to the school district?

Yeah, the other districts where you have the countywide extension 4-H, you have Deschutes Soil and Water, you have School District 1, COCC, and High Desert ESD. And so the cumulative total... using the last certified role is where that tax rate comes from. Is the library in there, too? Yes, it would be. but that's um that's in addition that that's inside or outside the 12.78 dollars per thousand that's include everything is included in that for that total rate okay now as far as you know that's for the first three years if you get into years four and five Then the legislation calls for 15% of the taxes need to go to education. So you take 15% of that, and that's where you can see it.

That's school support fee.

School support fee. So really, schools are getting paid something in four and five.

Okay. And then after years four and five, the schools would get their full rate?

Along with everyone else.

Okay. Okay. Okay. And just for me to double check, so the funds, both that school support fee and then in the long run, the full tax payment, that is then turned over to the common school fund. They send it to Salem and then they get the percentage back. Is that accurate?

Well, yeah, we apply it locally. Education has that complex way. So it's going to be billed as any other taxable account where then the state school funding formula equalizes how much per student. For whatever reason, we were able to double the assessed value. That's not going to mean more dollars to education. Same thing if it goes in half, it's equalized to the state.

It's still basically like 3% of whatever we send to Salem comes back for the Ben Lepine School District.

And that can vary year to year just depending on the rest of the complicated formula.

Well, if I'm to be a little bit more transparent about this, what we've come to understand due to the legislative bill that was passed in 2023 or four, I don't recall exactly which year that established the school support fee. When we went through the resolution process with Ben Lapine and the other districts in the region, we came to realize that the allocation that they received from the state, this amount will be deducted from that. Hypothetically leaving this money at the state and not in the district.

So the district doesn't get any of it?

They receive it, but it's deducted from their allocation from the state.

Oh, okay.

That's a whole nother political conversation. I don't know that we want to unwind here, but, uh, yeah, so that's what we've come to understand. And we've worked with the superintendents of all the schools when we passed resolution within the program to all the districts in the region said we would like to, they had a 15 to 30% range and all the districts suggested a 15% in the region of, uh, the tri county area here. And so the superintendent in this case, choosing the 15% through that process that indicated that this amount would be deducted from the amount that they receive per student from the state, i.e. leaving the money at the state.

Now, there's some other credits. That's not even as good as getting 3% of it. Right. Okay. Boy, that's interesting.

It's a bigger issue that we've been trying to solve for a little while.

Okay. Additional questions? I have a few more, but... Go ahead. Other counties around the state we have seen have early experiences with big renewable energy developers and then learn from that in subsequent projects and maybe ask for different things. So I want to clarify that the tax abatement deal that we are working on right now, this would be for the first 50 megawatts. a project obsidian that that that quays is working on and subsequent projects would entail a whole nother tax abatement negotiation like another package is that correct yeah they they for now the

Maximum investment under this authorization is $250 million. They're applying for $173 million. So if they have later phases, they would come back and hypothetically ask for an additional abatement for later phases because they have a cap for this investment. So they may have later phases. That's up to the company to decide based on that trajectory, that timing, and that phasing. But I'd rather Paulos here from Quaze kind of address that and how they've analyzed strategically the use of this program.

For the record, Paolo Rossi, project manager with Quase Energy. Thanks for having us here today. Everything John just said is accurate. So our focus is squarely on the first phases of Project Obsidian, which is 50 megawatts to the grid.

Okay.

According to this, it says phase one is 20 and then phase two is 30. So you're just combining that together?

Yes, we often aggregate those together as they're on a fairly similar timescale.

But if there was another 50 megawatts after Project Obsidian, then we would be back here doing some kind of a tax abatement negotiation. Yeah, that's correct. And my next question is, it sounded like Jen has some of this information already, but I was curious about, you know, other red zone projects in other counties and kind of what they had asked for in years four and five, you know, as local conditions or additional local requirements. And it sounded like you had at least one example that you were citing earlier.

I have four examples. So I've been speaking with Business Oregon and up until very recently, they didn't keep this information on file. They didn't keep these agreements on file. So I'm unclear why, but they did do a little digging for me. So I have generic examples. I have another email back to see if I can get more specific or at least very specific the counties that they were talking to so I can engage with the counties. So the first one I already read out, there was another one, again, a community service fee. And so my question to them was what specifically did they use that community service fee for? I don't have that information. So the second example, they did 20% of the taxes normally owed in the fourth year of the abatement and 20% in the fifth year. Another project had a lump sum payment of $50,000 towards a very specific community project. And then the fourth example was to complete the purchase of a utility easement option agreement. So those couple of them were flat tax rate fees based off of the four and five year abatement, and then two on very specific projects.

Jen, we have dates for those, just curious if those were in ahead of the school district fee or after. Yeah, my recollection is those may have occurred before a school district fee was implemented in 2024, but I'm not clear on that. So just weigh that as part of your decision making that there is already a fee going back to the district. That doesn't mean you couldn't consider some of these other options that Jenna so eloquently outlined here. And then we've worked with some community service fees and other communities where they've addressed some sort of a gap. or some sort of a service that this project might begin to create, right? Such as fire, police, and things like that. So just add that to the conversation too.

Economic development efforts.

And I'll follow up on that too. While these don't have the specific dates, this information I'm acquiring is very specifically from the Our Red Zone program on Business Oregon that in addition to listing the community or the school service fees, it also very specifically states in the extended tax abatement that the sponsor may reasonably request additional requirements to the business to also satisfy. And they give a list of that. maybe 10 different bullet points of different things that the county could negotiate for that was reasonably requested. But additional options are available as well. So that that was written in knowing that the school service fee was already being applied for any tax abatements that were for year four and year five.

And could you I was trying to write it down as you were going through those examples, starting with the first very first example, the first one said the first two were community service fees.

The first one was 30% of the taxes normally owed in the fourth year and then 60% of the taxes normally owed for the fifth year of the abatement. The second one was just a flat 20% for year four and for year five. The third example was $50,000 towards a very specific community project.

Just one time.

One time. One time fee. And then the fourth example, again fairly generic. But the fourth example was to complete the purchase of utility easement option agreement.

And we don't know the scope and scale of those dollars.

And so I've written back and my deadline to get some of this information was pretty quick. And they turned around and got it to me pretty quickly. But I think the information they had was also pretty limited. Because of the record keeping.

You know, I do wonder whether, you know, Business Oregon, you would hope would be a good source of information on this, but I'll circle back to CREA, Community Renewable Energy Association. I do wonder if through CREA we could get, you know, some of our fellow counties could share some information with us.

Yeah, and I would say to that if the commissioners want to entertain going forward at some point in time with reviewing application, then we could really get digging dig into some details there. I wanted to give some generic examples of what have been given for this primary discussion. But staff can definitely go deeper into those details if and when we get to a point of consideration for a tax payment for year four and five and what those agreements will look like between the county and the company.

Well, even getting here today means that Project Obsidian is probably happening out there, right? And there's some drilling going on. So welcome and thank you for bringing this project to the area. There's a lot of history with the geothermal from 20, 50, and 100 years ago, understanding what Newbury Crater is. So, I mean, now we're at that point where there is a specific ask to go to a five-year abatement. And as you say, if we're representing multiple tax rates here, there's going to be other elected official groups that are going to be interested in knowing what's going on also.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it would be really important to have... uh other taxing districts you know being be part of this decision-making process whether we have like a a special hearing where we give them a chance to to come and uh discuss it with us and you know but we've often seen that people aren't really interested in tax exemption type type type issues but uh you know it's their money um i i think that that would be really valuable Patricia?

So, in addition to the tax revenue that will be generated, there's also a royalty fee that the company will be paying to the county. So, that will be additional revenue. And I don't know exactly the calculation, but it was generated by the company. And it's pretty substantial.

That's the portion of the royalty paid to the federal government.

Yeah.

To the county.

That comes to, yeah.

Does it go through the state and then come to the county? Does the state take the 15%?

No, some of it comes to the state and some of it comes to the county.

I believe it all starts with going to the federal government as the Bureau of Land Management is the leaseholder for this and then gets redistributed to state and county.

And then is there a goal to have this done by the end of this year or into next year or anything? Is there a kind of horizon for implementing this?

Our hope is that it's approved before the end of this county.

Yeah, okay.

I might add, if I may, that when a rural renewable energy zone or an enterprise zone is extended or created, so it was created about 12 years ago, I think two years ago, we extended the sunset to this. Don't quote me on the exact times of this. that during that process, all affected taxing districts in the county received notification that we wanted to extend it so that they could learn more about what that looked like, the investment, the jobs, the opportunities, et cetera. And so taxing districts are aware of this vehicle. And then I'll just reiterate just for additional consideration, we've been working in the energy space at EDCO because energy is the new real estate. meaning you can't site companies without energy first, even if you have the land. And we have been, for some time, been on a quest for additional energy support, and our utility's been working very hard at delivering that. open house later tonight about a line extension from K Falls at COCC. And so we've been in this for quite a while because of the growth economically, population wise, the types of load values that we have in Central Oregon for about 15 years. And it's become acutely aware Because we've had to tell projects that it's going to take a little while longer before they can be served. They can be served. It's just the timing in which to do so. And so, uh, this energy project, along with some of the others that are being considered in our region are hypersensitive, hyper important for us to continue the type of economic trajectory we've come to realize. And so, uh, that's why we're bringing this before you is that this is a solution in our backyard, central Oregon, creating a secret for us. So the secret, you read the book, right? Central Oregon creating a solution for us right in our backyard, and it's a tremendous opportunity for us to begin to chip away at some of the issues we've had on the energy side of things with the technology that the resources for that are right here. So I just wanted to add that as well for your consideration.

Thank you. Yeah. And I would like to say, you know, I'm asking a lot of hard questions about tax abatement here, but, you know, I want you to understand I am very excited about this project. I am very excited about the generation of clean baseload energy and the value of that to our environment and to our climate. Very excited about the addition of, you know, this, you know, economic enterprise. uh, to our community. Um, at the same time, you know, many people in, in the community are asking, well, what is in this, what's in this for us? You know, there's say, um, a federal public land site. Um, it will require a certain amount of water to, to charge up the system. And, um, you know that there's uh there are some potential impacts i mean there's no energy that uh doesn't have any impacts you know i am i am persuaded that you know these super hot rock geothermal uh projects have way less impacts uh even than many other renewal types of renewable energy. But that doesn't mean there's no impacts. And so the question is, if a bunch of constituents are asking me, well, what's in it for us? We need to be able to respond to that. And one of the places that people's questions frequently go is, well, so this is electricity for us? And I just have to say to them, that's not the way that power purchase agreements work. I mean, these may be locally generated electrons. The electrons generated here may literally physically travel to your house. But where the power is sold to, there are market processes and market decisions there.

Since it stays in Oregon, though.

Yeah, but, you know, stays in Oregon is. But we're in Oregon. So you. So then that leads me to OK, so what are we? what are we giving in terms of tax abatement to support this very important project that we're really excited about? And what does the community get? And so that's, you know, I'm very interested and maybe in a minute here after we are done talking about the mechanics of how tax abatement works, we can turn to discussions of, you know, How the money would be used or what kind of special local allocations we might be asking for. But I'm particularly interested in that piece of the discussion now that I have a better understanding of the basic mechanics. One of the best ways for me to respond to people who are saying, well, what's in it for us in terms of energy, if we don't know whether the energy is for our community, is to say, well, we could turn around and use some of the funds generated to invest in local energy projects, adding even more capacity to our local community. You know, that's one idea that I'm going to put on the table when we get to that part of the discussion. But, you know, first, before we go there, can I just check to see whether either of my fellow commissioners has more kind of basic questions about the nuts and bolts of tax abatement here? okay well with that do we want to move to a discussion of um a whether we support three years whether we support five years uh if we support five years what what additional local requirements we would put up on uh you know on that package

Well, it sounds like there's a five-year ask already, and by having this public meeting, we're talking about, okay, well, how are we going to get there? So that's what we're doing today. I want to acknowledge that the local value already is the economic activity, the revenue that's going to flow, the trades that are going to be employed, all the small support companies that are going to be showing support for all the activity that's going on. So let's acknowledge there'll be a burst of activity all around this thing, and that's going to be a lot of value for the community to start out with. As I say, now the next two steps is what's a procedure or a plan for how we're going to have some of these discussions. And I do have some ideas about a few items I'd like to prioritize. which are, if we're ready for that, I guess, but just like the fire district, Southern Deschutes County, Lapine Fire is that area, just be an optimal time to kind of plug them into resources they're gonna need to expand and mature their services. So that's just a local jurisdiction that may or may not be on that list, but it is, it is the one that would respond if there was a site accident or something also and then roads you know our deschutes county roads uh we're very uh fortunate to have the revenue we have and the uh the team we have to keep our roads in great order but uh just knowing the future of roads because there's uh i think you guys are going down finley butte to get to the uh to the access to your property there You know, there's just the truck activity in the area, you know, and ODOT and Deschutes County and the city of Lepine all are just going to have, you know, an intersection improvement or something. Something will pop up that could really be valuable there. So those are the two items that I bring. Okay.

mean i do want to say on roads you know the way that that oregon's uh system for funding roads and most other states um is set up right now is that um people who drive generate gas tax revenue and title and registration fees and then that that's what we use to pay for roads so i mean i i would expect there's gonna be a lot of there's gonna be a lot of driving to it from the from the site as part of this process and so we are receiving the gas tax benefit directly there.

The signal that's on the highway in Lapine, 1st Street, Deschutes County wrote a check. Well, it wasn't Deschutes County proper. It was economic development dollars from Lapine Industrial Group, $250,000 to help ODOT implement that project. So yeah, obviously, but to get prioritized and to really build a project, if we can write a check, it makes it happen. We've got an overpass down there that's abandoned and the whole town is standing by. Different topic, sorry, I'm bringing other stuff up. But the whole town's standing by and ODOT's not even focused on taking the next step on that, it sounds like.

Well, we understand why we have a state transportation funding crisis right now, I think, at this point.

But I'm just pointing, we've written checks before. We did that lower bridge too, $10 million to make sure that happens. So that's exactly what I'm referring to, this scenario there.

Yeah, I can see how one of the differences between this and other developments where we charge system development charges, for example, is that this is federal land. So we would need to think of another way to address that since we don't have the typical SDC structure. Patricia, did you have a?

So one of the safety improvements that the city of Lapine is working with ODOT on right now is to make an improvement at 97 and Roslyn road, because it's so dangerous to get out onto 97. It's really impacting future economic development in that area because of the difficulty that the truckers have and like transportation in general. So that's something that is a high priority of the community. And the sled advisory board is also supporting that.

Hmm. Good to know. Okay. Any thoughts on five-year red zone tax abatement in any special local conditions?

Well, I'd like to see more of those details. It sounds like we've got a superficial fluff, as I would call it. And I would like to see some details from somebody that knows exactly what other people have done. And I think this is an excellent opportunity to do something. And then, of course, on the other side of it, I have a grandson that's studying nuclear. engineering in college and I'm hoping that you know Americans can go can acknowledge that nuclear really isn't that bad of a way to go to I mean we need to do a lot of things in power definitely this is a godsend for Central Oregon but there are some things out there we could be expanding on so Jen if we could get I don't know some more details it just seems like I

We could go several different ways here. As you saw, I didn't put a specific motion or motions to entertain. So we could do something where staff I go back in and pull out some really specific examples and talk to other counties in Korea about different agreements. It's a little hunt and peck to find them. So maybe a little bit more time and come back for a working session.

Sounds like we have time if they really want this done by year end. I mean, we do have like a month to do some deeper research.

So, yeah, if the board wants to just move forward with staff doing more research on these specific agreements and then come back in a working session, or if you want to start entertaining the full application process and incorporate into that the written agreement. And again, just as a reminder, it's just year four and year five tax abatements that require board participation and approval here. They can move forward with the three year application process, assuming that they're gonna meet all the requirements, which it sounds like given the information they have on hand that they will. So the consideration here is for year four and year five. But if we're not ready to make that consideration of the actual application, staff can come back with some more specific examples in the next couple of weeks of their written agreements and what has taken place. I'm not sure we have apples to apples on some of these projects. And I think some of them are very localized, what they use the dollars for, and some of them are a little bit more general. But happy to bring back any examples I can find.

I would appreciate that.

And is there clarity on the years we're talking about here? What is year one?

2030 calculated it would be 2031 31 would be the first taxing year.

Okay.

So I appreciate going and looking at what other communities have done, but you've seen one county, you've seen one county, and the needs that we have and the potential impacts, small as they might be, associated with this project are unique. I don't think any of our fellow counties are unique. Negotiating tax abatement for geothermal energy projects. We see wind and solar all over the place. So I think we can look to ourselves first. I have Commissioner DeBone just listed a couple of his initial thoughts. I have some initial thoughts and I'd like those included in whatever staff memo we come back to to continue discussions about this at a future meeting. So fire districts, roads, road interchanges. I'd like to put on the table some water resource stewardship investments. Many of the biggest questions that people are asking about these two enhanced geothermal projects. How much water are you going to use? Where is it going to come from? What are you taking the water away from, potentially? Since this project is sited on national forest land close to a national monument, I'd like to also float the idea of some kind of investments in stewardship of federal public forest lands. This could actually be really beneficial to the project as well if you think about investments in forest restoration and fuels reduction done in the vicinity of the geothermal project to reduce the likelihood that a crown fire is going to arrive at the doorstep of the project itself. Some kind of national forest stewardship investment is another concept. Along the lines of the idea of investing in our own energy production capacity, energy security, energy reliability and resiliency in the region, to tie off of something that Commissioner Nader was just talking about, I think it would be really exciting to make some investments in a clean energy workforce in the region. This could conceivably come through OSU Cascades. OSU Cascades is actually working on a center right now. or through COCC. And then if we had a number of people who were getting specific educational training in energy then they would be able to answer questions for us like what are the trade-offs of small-scale nuclear in our community or other kinds of projects. and they could be helping to build, to analyze the feasibility of design and build future projects. So that's one idea for an investment in our energy future. Another idea is that the county owns substantial amount of land in the Redmond area right now that because of Air flight paths and things like that. We really can't use for anything else, you know, anything but it, you know, I've been I've had a couple of discussions with the airport manager. And they have probably hundreds of acres of land like this as well. There is land in the vicinity of the Fair and Expo and the airport and the Core 3 that sounds like a primo location for solar panels, you know, for a solar array. So a solar array with battery storage that could function as backup power for these critical community facilities during some kind of an emergency that results in a power cutoff. And then when we're not having an emergency, the other 364 days of the year could be putting energy into the grid for us locally through a microgrid project. So that's a way that the county could specifically use funds for Deschutes County to invest in our energy security and reliability in the future. Uh, Yeah, a number of people said to me they would like to see, or they're interested in, you know, salaries and wages and benefits for workers who are engaged in building these projects. I'm guessing if it's on federal land that there's probably some federal requirements already, but Patricia, do you have a?

Well, as a requirement for the extended abatement, they have to pay 150% of the average Deschutes County wage. And we've been provided with that information. The direct jobs that are being created will meet that requirement. That's what makes them eligible for the extended abatement.

But that would be at the time of, that would basically kick in in like year four or five, right? No.

No, it starts in this year.