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The Multnomah County Board of Commissioners is scheduled to vote July 25 on whether to retrofit a vacant building on Southeast Sandy Boulevard to turn it into a deflection center where people arrested for drug possession can go if they agree to take steps toward treatment.
Construction is expected to cost as much as $2 million. The vote is one of the few chances for commissioners to determine the fate of the deflection center, plans for which are being worked out in closed-door meetings among County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, District Attorney Mike Schmidt, DA-elect Nathan Vasquez, Portland Police Chief Bob Day and others.
That secrecy has rankled two county commissioners: Sharon Meieran and Julia Brim-Edwards. In a meeting Tuesday, Brim-Edwards said she was skeptical of being able to approve the plan by Thursday because details remain scarce about who will be eligible for deflection and how many people will ultimately get treatment, even after months of work.
“I don’t know whether the commission will be ready to vote on a $2 million investment since there are a lot of questions that are not answered,” Brim-Edwards said. “We need a lot more specificity by Thursday.”
Meieran expressed similar doubts in a letter to Vega Pederson on July 20.
“I find it difficult to understand how board members can be expected to vote on [construction funding] when we have virtually no information about the goals of the center or how it will function,” Meieran wrote.
The Oregon Legislature introduced the term “deflection” in House Bill 4002, passed in March, which recriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs, overturning a central plank of Measure 110. As a condition of that, the Legislature asked counties to take steps to keep drug users out of the criminal justice system, as Measure 110 intended.
Brim-Edwards criticized Vega Pederson anew for keeping the meetings secret, She also chastised the county health department for not distributing a presentation on the deflection center in a timely manner for the board session today.
“We got it just before the meeting and not well in advance,” Brim-Edwards said.
Both Brim-Edwards and Meieran have pressed the county to describe clear goals for the deflection center. Brim-Edwards has pressed county officials to explain why it won’t have more features of a sobering center that she proposed months ago.
Much of the commissioners’ time over the past month has been spent teasing out the meaning of “deflection” and “sobering.”
”Multnomah County has minimal shelter, detox, treatment, and recovery services available compared with need, and it’s not clear exactly what services will be offered at the proposed deflection center nor when they will be offered,” Meieran wrote.
One detail that has been nailed down: The deflection center will be run by Tuerk House, a Baltimore-based drug treatment organization, Vega Pederson said.
Another sign of progress, Vega Pederson said: The group working out the details of the deflection center could have an agreement by the end of this week.