The people of Baker County received several million dollars recently from a federal program to compensate for losses during the government mandated shutdown of the economy and society due to the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic emergency. Baker County Commissioners decided to spend a large portion of our emergency money, $1.45 million of it, to payoff a 70-acre land purchase. That’s about $20,750 per acre for ground that had been used as farmland. And, it was reported that the commissioners have no set plans for the property. If there are no plans, then why was the purchase made with such importance and urgency that they’d spend our COVID emergency money to pay it off?

I notice also that New Directions Northwest — NDNW — recently received a large amount of money from the federal government and I think it was some sort of housing grant. NDNW contracts with Baker County to provide this county’s mental health program under the title New Directions Northwest Behavioral Health and Wellness-NDNWBHW. NDNWBHW operates under Oregon’s “Community Mental Health Treatment Law” passed back in the 1990s. These programs, like the one in Baker County run by NDNWBHW, brings into the communities the people who would once have been housed in a lockdown, state-run mental hospital. As you can imagine, NDNWBHW clients sometimes have difficulty securing housing.

It is these community mental health laws and county contracted programs that I think have created what the bureaucrats call a “homeless crisis”. It is not a “homeless crisis” it is a “mental health crisis” created by the failing system of community mental health treatment. Severely mentally ill patients and society at large are no longer protected by housing the mental ill in state-run, lockdown mental hospitals. Instead, severally mentally ill adults in Oregon are usually arrested, cycled through the legal system, and eventually placed into community mental health programs and shipped into small towns like Baker City and their dangerous and/or unacceptable behaviors are controlled by prescribing to them powerful psychotropic drugs.

Powder River Correctional Facility, additionally, has brought a constant revolving population of at least 286 inmates to town and New Directions brings in hundreds more not only through its contract as the county’s mental health program provider but through numerous programs for the transient, drug addicted, and incarcerated population. This brings clients in from all over Oregon and beyond. If you see a young mother pushing a stroller in Baker City there’s a 90% chance it will be an incarcerated woman brought to town for the incarcerated mother program. Most young men in town between ages 19 and 30 are likely incarcerated or enrolled in rehabilitation of one form or another.

We no longer are allowed to harvest trees in this region, so we’ve shifted to harvesting human lives and Baker County and city have embraced the human harvest industry. Boy, I bet there are some current day regrets for this town passing on Eastern Oregon Normal School, known today as EOU.

That 70 acres urgently purchased by Baker County sits fairly close to New Directions’ treatment empire on Midway Drive. It is conceivable that there could be plans for the organization to expand toward Hughes Lane. With all the talk lately of “affordable housing” in Baker County and with New Directions handing out affordable housing surveys, it’s even conceivable that such a land purchase could be used to build housing for the overflow of the mentally ill living on the streets of Portland. If you follow the style of Oregon’s government, the good of the many outweigh the comfort of the few — Bakerites are few but many are the mentally ill on the streets of Oregon’s western cities. So, it’s conceivable that local government might foster a plan to house a couple hundred or thousand of Portland, Medford, and Eugene’s mentally ill adults.

Hope not.

Brian Addison

Baker City