By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews
An 11th-hour roadblock to getting a new Lincoln County drug possession deflection program up and running has been cleared and is now only a speed bump away from the on-ramp to implementation.
Hiring a coordinator to oversee and manage the program is all that stands between arresting and sending people to jail for possession of small amounts of controlled substances or possibly “deflecting” them into a rehabilitation program.
Internal wranglings within county government about whether the coordinator position would be placed in the district attorney’s office – as planned for months by the work group tasked with implementing the program – or in parole and probation as put forth at the last minute by county legal counsel, were finally resolved last week by county administrator Tim Johnson.
Johnson, who returned to work from bereavement leave Sept. 23, said he made the decision to put the deflection coordinator in the district attorney’s office, as the work group had suggested.
Assigning the deflection work to someone in another department would use county general fund money instead of the state grant, something Johnson said he wanted to avoid in case the 2025 Legislature does not keep funding local deflection programs.
“Let’s use the grant as it’s been suggested and allocated and see how it will work out,” Johnson told YachatsNews on Wednesday. “We do not require an elected official to say ‘Yea’ or ‘Nay’ on this. It’s an administrative decision. It’s a grant.”
Johnson’s decision cleared the way to post an advertisement seeking a coordinator with an estimated salary of $80,000. But then something else happened.
Parts of the job description decided by the workgroup was unexpectantly changed by the county’s human resources department, said district attorney Jenna Wallace.
But first, the basics
Oregon lawmakers voted this spring to re-criminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs and allocated millions of dollars toward rehabilitation as an alternative to jail. The legislation encouraged counties to create “deflection” programs to allow people to avoid jail and court and have their arrest expunged if they successfully complete a rehabilitation program.
Lincoln County and 27 of Oregon’s 36 other counties are setting up programs funded by $20.7 million in grants. Lincoln County received $341,500 and a workgroup comprised of law enforcement, judicial and treatment providers met for months in hopes to launch the program by Sept. 1 – the date designated by legislators.
The legislation itself, House Bill 4002, was in response to the failures of voter-approved Measure 110, which decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs.
Back to the workgroup
Wallace plans to take the revised job posting back to the work group next week for possible approval of its posting, but says she is perplexed by the changes.
She received the altered version shortly after a Friday, Sept. 27 meeting of the Lincoln County Local Public Safety Coordinating Council. Wallace announced during that meeting that the job requisition form she had submitted was initially approved and was just waiting final county commission approval.
“I had worked with HR on finalizing that job description, I think the middle or end of August,” Wallace later told YachatsNews. “So commissioners approved it and HR sent over kind of a rough draft of what the job posting would look like online Friday (Sept. 27) afternoon and said to look it over and let them know if it was good to post.
“And what was really odd about it is that it was not the same job description that we finalized with HR a month prior,” Wallace said. “So I responded and said, ‘Oh, I think something must have gotten lost in the translation, and here are the edits that put it back to the original job description that we had already approved through HR before the roadblocks that happened in September.’ ”
Wallace said she was then told human resources made the changes and there was nothing she could do about it. She asked who approved the changes with the hope she could meet with them and explain why some of those changes may not be beneficial. And she sent back a revised version incorporating some of the changes with the original in hope of reaching a compromise.
“And I was informed that none of my edits would be approved,” Wallace said. “And that the one they had sent me was the final addition and there would be no changes to it.”
She told YachatsNews that she sent another email asking who made the changes and who approved them, but has yet to receive an answer.
The same lack of communication prompted three elected members of the work group — Wallace, presiding circuit judge Sheryl Bachart and Sheriff Curtis Landers – to use the public comment period during commissioners’ Sept. 18 meeting to complain about not getting responses to their questions about the deflection program.
Commissioner Casey Miller, who is a member of the work group, also expressed his frustration during the meeting and questioned county counsel Kristin Yuille’s involvement in managerial decision-making. Miller was met the next day with allegations of bullying and harassing county employees and ordered to work from home pending an outside investigation.
Miller said this week he again tried to get deflection on the board’s Wednesday’s agenda but it was denied. He said he’s unclear who denied it and why.
Where deflection stands now
Wallace told a meeting of the safety coordinating council last week that until a coordinator is hired and brought up to speed and the program launched – which Landers says will probably be in November – offenders in possession of small amounts of drugs will go to jail.
“We are almost a month into the re-criminalization of simple possession and given that we’ve been unable to get our deflection program off the ground I am going to advise law enforcement today that my office will start charging those crimes,” Wallace said. “I cannot continue to just ‘No-file’ them, especially not knowing where the program is going.”
Retired attorney and council chair Guy Greco asked Wallace whether the people charged will be allowed to go into deflection retroactively once the program begins.
Wallace said it would be more of a “conditional discharge” that is built into the statute.
“I’m not sure if it can be deflected at that point, if they’ve already been arrested and charged,” she said. “So, I think we will be assessing whether they are conditionally discharge eligible.”
Leading up to Wallace’s decision to begin charging violators Monday, Sept. 30, Wallace and Landers had been encouraging law enforcement agencies across the county to hold off arresting people – when possible — for possession.
“On Sept. 1 the sheriff and I were pretty positive that we were very close to implementing a deflection program,” Wallace said. “And because of that, the sheriff and I really encouraged law enforcement officers to be patient with us and allow us to get the program in place.”
Agencies supported the suggestion, so except for a few cases where arrests were deemed necessary, only about 20 to 25 people have been charged in Lincoln County under the new law, Wallace said.
Landers offered some statistics from the state’s Criminal Justice Commission on the number of arrests made since the law went into effect Sept. 1.
Statewide there were 650 arrests for possession of a controlled substance in the first three weeks of September, which averages out to about 215 per week. Prior to decriminalization of drugs two years ago that number was about 300 a week. When Measure 110 went into effect that number dropped to less than 50 a week across the state.
Waiting on the sidelines in Lincoln County to begin working deflection are several treatment providers and other partners to help with counseling, stabilizing and housing participants if needed. To successfully complete the program a participant must go 30 consecutive days sober within a sixth month period to account for relapse. Once completed the violation will be expunged from their record.
The district attorney’s office recently added three new attorneys, according to Wallace, and Greco said the public defender’s office now has the staff to handle an influx of cases along with funds to hire another attorney if need be.
“What’s really sad is we all believe so much in this program and it really has been such a collaborative effort between law enforcement and the DA’s office and our treatment providers and the courts,” Wallace said. “We just really want to see this be successful and we want to see it start. We want to start seeing people get in touch with treatment rather than being taken to jail.
“We’re only hurting our community in postponing it,” Wallace continued, “And that’s the hardest thing for the people who have been involved. And it’s hurting the people who need the services the most.”
- Garret Jaros is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com
Casey Miller has worked in the Lincoln County board of commissioner’s office since 2008, under many other commissioners (Lindly, Thompson, Hunt) and several district attorneys (Bovett, Branam, Cable, Danforth and Wallace) and is known to be the easiest going and nicest guy. Casey Miller is no bully and I doubt that he has created any hostile work environment.