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Tell Steve Yamamori that Multnomah County spent more than $3 million renovating an old print warehouse to turn it into a drug-crime deflection center, and his eyebrows rise.
Yamamori is president of the Reveille Foundation in Eugene, where the nonprofit runs a 66-room homeless shelter that was once an Econo Lodge. Yamamori rents a block of rooms to Lane County. Rent costs the county just $577,304 a year, but the rooms do something a $3.2 million deflection center can’t: house people while they wait for drug treatment.
Multhomah and Lane are among the 28 Oregon counties that took state money to offer an alternative to jail for people arrested on minor drug charges. The Legislature budgeted the money after it voted to repeal Measure 110 and recriminalize drugs, ending the nation’s biggest experiment with legalization as an antidote to tumbling into the justice system.
Talk to drug counselors, and most will tell you that the key to getting people clean is catching them when they’re willing. Facing possible incarceration is one of those times. When a cop in Portland offers deflection, the violator is taken to the Coordinated Care Pathway Center on Southeast Sandy Boulevard. In almost every case, the person is given an appointment with a treatment provider and sent on their way. The moment passes.
Things are different in Eugene. A person offered deflection there can go immediately to the Reveille Foundation’s shelter, where services wrap around them, starting with a warm bed, a grocery bag of food, and even a television. There are daily room checks and weekly classes on such topics as personal hygiene, room cleaning and conflict resolution.
“It’s not a destination, it’s a place to land,” says Reveille program director Joey Whittaker. Some people stay hours before heading to treatment, and some stay months.
District Attorney Christopher Parosa says Lane County’s priority with deflection was contracting with experienced outreach workers and housing navigators to help people kick their drug habit.
“At no time did Lane County ever say, ‘Hey, let’s take that money and build a facility to house our treatment program’ because we saw it as an obligation to use the money in the most effective way to try and eradicate substance abuse in Lane County,” Parosa says.
Judging from a discussion of results for the first year of deflection in Multnomah County, commissioners here want their program to look more like there. Commissioner Meghan Moyer said she was concerned that Multnomah’s program “doesn’t fundamentally work.” Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards says the program needs a “reset” in part because it was “designed in private meetings, away from commission oversight.”
Commissioner Shannon Singleton put out a statement Monday describing changes she would make, mostly to connect deflection candidates with housing, because 92% of people who arrived at the Pathway Center had experienced homelessness in one way or another.
Most galling, Singleton says, is that staff at the Pathway Center doesn’t check to see if arrestees are on the county’s new by-name list, a monthly count of people in the county who are homeless, with names and other information that could be used to help them. The county called it a “major milestone” when it announced completion of the list in April.
“Deflection is about immediate, practical steps like what Lane County is doing,” says former County Commissioner Sharon Meieran, a longtime critic of Multnomah County’s approach. “You take someone out of a police car into safe shelter with drug and mental health treatment and then eventually stable housing. It doesn’t have to just be a dream.”
Apples-to-apples comparisons of county programs are tough because each county defines “participation” in deflection and “completion” differently, as the Legislature intended.
According to its deflection dashboard, 280 people have participated in deflection in Lane County since the program began on Sept. 1, 2024. Those are the people who have given the program a go. Thirty-four of those have completed deflection, which in Lane County’s system means engaging with a treatment provider.
That may seem a small number, until it’s compared with Multnomah County. When Brim-Edwards asked earlier this month how many of the people who arrived at the Pathway Center had requested or completed detox treatment, county staff said only that of the 20 who opted to go, eight “went on to pursue treatment within the 30 days.”
One thing that can be compared is budget. Multnomah County spent $3.3 million to build out its temporary deflection center. That money came from a $25 million state grant, most of which will be used to build a permanent facility, set to open in 2027. Multnomah County also got $4.3 million to operate in the first year, compared with $2.1 million for Lane.
So how has Lane County produced results that seem to exceed Multnomah’s, and with much less money? Parosa, the DA, says some of it was luck. The county found an abandoned fire station to use as a kind of deflection HQ that happened to be right across the street from Reveille’s shelter.
The rest took some skill. Parosa tapped an old hand, Clint Riley, to run the program. Riley, now 54, had just retired from the Lane County Sheriff’s Office, where his last job was jail captain. With short gray hair and a Terminator physique, Riley doesn’t look like the kind of guy who would introduce yoga classes to a jail, but he did, and in the course of his law enforcement career, he saw the importance of treatment.
Working together, Parosa and Riley hired a paralegal to handle much of the legal work around deflection, instead of dragooning a more expensive senior prosecutor, as some counties have. They added two office assistants, and that was it for in-house staff.
The Legislature gave counties a wide berth in how they handle criminal charges, and Parosa chose to hold them in abeyance while people worked their way through deflection. If they stopped making progress on their treatment plan, Parosa could issue a warrant.
“What we do is compassionate accountability,” says Art Zamudio, a supervisor at Ideal Option, the treatment program that Parosa and Riley tapped to do outreach.
Multnomah County just took a step in Lane’s direction. As it stands, cops here don’t issue a citation to people who choose deflection. District Attorney Nathan Vasquez said on Tuesday he would require police to submit all reports to his office for review. Staring Jan. 5, if a deflectee doesn’t take any step toward treatment, the D.A. will issue a warrant.
“If they touch the door and leave, we’re going to prosecute them,” Vasquez tells WW. Same for people who don’t seek services within 90 days, he says.
Another key difference from Multnomah County: In Lane, any agency or nonprofit can refer someone for deflection, not just law enforcement, as long as there is ample space and a person who has been charged for possession of a controlled substance won’t be turned away.
After setting legal parameters, Parosa and Riley lined up outreach through Ideal Option and temporary housing through Reveille Foundation, which already served veterans with federal housing funds.
Then, they made their sales pitch to law enforcement. Many of the top police brass jumped on the deflection wagon quickly, but cops on the beat were skeptical, Riley says. They had just lived through three years of drug decriminalization because of Measure 110, when there was little they could do about controlled substances but issue a maximum $100 citation and refer someone to treatment.
Parosa and Riley met repeatedly with police departments in Lane County, pitching a system that was a happy medium between incarceration and a wrist slap.
“We had cops come up to us and say, ‘This might work,’” Riley says.
So far, it seems to. Before deflection came along, Yamamori, the Reveille Foundation president, used to rent a block of rooms to the state for its long-term rent assistance program, which required leases for all tenants but didn’t require them to be sober. Too often, tenants trashed the units. Two units were destroyed by fire, he says.
No longer. Lane County checks on tenants once a day. If they have trouble keeping their rooms clean, there are weekly classes on how to do it.
“This is the best use of our property that I could hope for,” Yamamori says.
As luck would have it, Reveille has 200 rooms that could be used for deflection in Multnomah County, just like they are in Lane. Yamamori says the county should get in touch, if it’s interested.
