BEND, OR -- Deschutes County Commissioners will discuss Wednesday whether to purchase Bend property to house Parole and Probation clients.
Community Justice Director Deevy Holcomb tells KBND News the facility on Southeast Wilson, set to open next month on the 10th, would allow shelter for about 50 parolees.
“I think it's going to probably be double than what we had initially anticipated, which also means we're going to be serving hopefully a wider range of people on supervision for different types of crimes or different offenses or with different kinds of conditions that they have to meet,” Holcomb says, adding the housing will help about 50 convicts meet the conditions of their parole or probation, “I'd say about 10% of the supervised-population in Deschutes County is homeless. And then there are different types of homelessness, different levels and different lengths of time that people can be homeless. So, we're going to try to focus on those who are chronically homeless.”
She says providing a place for them to stay benefits everyone, “Basically as a way to provide an elevated level of supervision and public safety in the sense that we can know where people are, they are not moving transient from one place to one place each night or each week or that sort of thing.”
Free On The Outside, an Oregon City organization operating 20 similar sites around the state is contracted to manage the site.
Holcomb says they notified neighbors it should open next month, “Just wanted to start out being as good neighbors as we could. And we had some people go to all the adjacent properties. I think we went to about 25 residences around the proposed property.”
A $1,078,518 10-year state grant will fund the program.
