Klamath County officials outline proposed East County policing district, tax and governance details

Klamath County commissioners and Sheriff Mitchell presented details of a proposed East County policing district at a town hall in Bonanza, outlining a plan that would levy a per-tax-lot fee — about $90 per tax lot under the current proposal — to fund a sergeant, four deputies and a code-enforcement officer dedicated to the district.

The proposal, which county staff said is already written for the May ballot, was developed after a town meeting nearly a year earlier where East County residents said they did not “feel safe in our own homes,” county Commissioner Derek De Groot said. “We went back, got together with the assessor, got together with the sheriff, and tried to come up with something that would provide that safety,” De Groot said.

County officials told residents the district would have its own budget committee — three elected commissioners plus three citizen members drawn from the district — and that funds collected could be used only for public-safety services inside the district and only as described on the ballot. “It would be against the law to spend these dollars for anything other than services in the district,” a county official said.

Most immediately contested in the meeting were money and oversight. Officials described the proposed budget as roughly $1.6 million to staff and equip the unit — a number that the sheriff said would pay for a sergeant, four deputies and a code-enforcement position — and told residents the annual per-tax-lot fee was chosen to spread cost across the district’s roughly 17,855 tax lots. County staff said many lots are held by absentee owners; the assessor’s office estimated about 60% of tax lots are owned outside the county, which would mean a portion of the cost falls to nonresident owners who do not vote in the district.

Residents pressed on response times and station location. Several said two-hour response times were not uncommon now for some parts of East County and asked whether a substation in Bonanza — currently under consideration as a temporary home for deputies — would materially shorten responses to remote areas such as Glide Mountain, the Estates, Bly and Beatty. Sheriff Mitchell said deputies would not be required to report to the substation first each shift and that patrol deputies would be out in the field; he also said body-camera and computer-mapping tools would let supervisors monitor where deputies spend time.

On governance and durability, officials explained two distinct controls: the new district would be voted into existence by district voters; once in place, a six-member budget committee (three district citizens and three county commissioners) would set the district’s annual assessed tax level. County staff said the budget committee could choose not to collect the assessment in a given year, but completely dissolving the district would require another ballot measure. Officials also said the per-tax-lot fee would remain fixed by ordinance and could not be increased without voter approval.

Several technical and implementation questions were explained in detail. The assessor described a process to combine multiple tax lots (so owners with several contiguous lots could reduce their per-lot exposure), and an agricultural discount of up to 75% was incorporated to reduce the fee on qualifying farm parcels. Officials said property owners would still be responsible for surveyor or legal-description costs if they asked the county to combine lots; the county proposed to cover internal application costs. The sheriff’s office said training and retention remain challenges: a deputy’s total cost to the county, including training and benefits, was described in the meeting as roughly $130,000–$140,000 per year, and officials argued that the district would create more secure positions that could improve retention.

Opponents and skeptical residents asked who would really pay (many absentee owners, they noted, will not vote) and whether county commissioners could divert the funds. County officials repeatedly said the law would restrict district funds to the district’s public-safety purposes and said taking those dollars for other uses would be unlawful. Several residents proposed a shorter pilot period or a sunset to test the program and allow voters to revisit it; officials replied that the measure as written goes on the ballot for a long-term district and that the county had already considered but not adopted a temporary sunset in the current draft.

A larger fiscal context underlay the discussion: county leaders described decades-long reductions in timber receipts and federal payments that previously funded local services, and they said the county faces a structural shortfall that has pushed commissioners to use reserves to avoid immediate service cuts. The county cited the Secure Rural Schools federal payments and changes in state valuation decisions that have reduced local revenues.

Town council member Ashley Pence, who said Bonanza does not want the policing district to become a “Bonanza police” force, urged that the proposed program be treated as an East County-wide solution and noted a recently completed municipal building that could temporarily house deputies. “It’s not just Bonanza — it’s East County,” Pence said.

Officials closed the meeting by reiterating that the ballot measure will ask district residents to approve the per-tax-lot fee; if voters approve it in May, county and sheriff’s staff said they would use the remainder of the year to hire and train deputies and to finalize stationing, with the goal of reducing response times and providing regular patrol presence across East County.