Lane County voters will soon vote on whether to renew the levy that funds Lane County’s Jail. 

The five-year levy, which was first approved in 2013 and then renewed in 2017, provides the county sheriff’s department with roughly $20 million a year, around half of its annual jail funding.

The levy guarantees that the county will be able to properly operate and staff a 255-bed minimum for local offenders, as well as eight youth detention beds and eight youth treatment beds.

The levy was originally passed by Eugene voters at 55¢ per $1,000 of assessed land value, costing the median Lane County household roughly $118 per year. Since the levy was first approved nearly a decade ago, annual independent audits have confirmed that the funding is being used appropriately for jail operations.

The levy, however, is not without opponents.

“We already have the funding for 125 jail beds. This is just adding more capacity so that we can hold more people,” Rose Wilde, a volunteer with the organization Healing Not Handcuffs, said. “And so I think that it’s not necessary and that we should redirect those funds to housing and mental health.”

Wilde said she recognizes that the jail levy funds cannot be directly rerouted to housing and mental health services, but she would support a new levy funding those services.

The Healing Not Handcuffs website claims that a single year’s levy money — about $20 million — could pay for the construction of nearly seventy homes for the unhoused.

Wilde said a big reason the county jail needs so many beds is because it “criminalizes basic survival behaviors.” Crimes like public camping and defecating in public areas, Wilde said, are only issues because people do not have homes.

Lane County Sheriff Clifton Harrold said he recognizes the need for more housing, but he  thinks HNH is misleading the public.

“HNH wants to make it sound like that’s everyone in jail, and that’s just not true,”  Harrold said.

Harrold cited the crimes for which some offenders were being held in prison on that day, April 28.

“17 for murder, 66 for Measure 11, those aren’t crimes related to your housing status usually,” he said. “People with houses and resources commit violence against each other unfortunately.”

Measure 11 crimes are the most serious crimes for which a person can be held in jail. They include serious assaults, murder, rape, kidnapping and sex abuse among other serious offenses.

Starting around 2008, Harrold said, the federal government began drastically reducing the amount of Secure Rural School funding provided to Lane County. This declining funding of county law enforcement led to a time of crisis in 2012 and 2013, Harrold said. From 2008 to 2012, the Sheriff’s Office had to lay off 100 employees and reduce jail capacity to 125 beds.

“In 2012, when our jail was down to 125 beds, 16 hours a day we had patrol deputies on duty. Eight hours a day, seven days a week, there was no sheriff’s deputy on duty,” Harrold said.

This meant that if someone called 911 in the Sheriff’s Department’s jurisdiction during the eight hours when they had no on-duty deputies, there would be no one to immediately respond. Instead, Harrold said they would have to call an off-duty deputy at home and send them over. “That’s crazy for a county of this size,” Harrold said.

The sheriff said the levy funds the county jail at a basic level and does not over-incarcerate.

The county employs a practice called “pre-trial release” in which a release officer determines how dangerous an offender could be to the community, along with their likelihood to appear on their court date, before releasing them. Many non-violent offenders are released this way, Harrold said.

According to the Lane County Sheriff’s Department, between 2012 and 2013, before the levy was passed, the jail had to release 48 Measure 11 offenders and 206 violent felony offenders before their trial because there was not enough room in the jail.

The Sheriff’s Department said these are offenders that would not ordinarily be released, and since the levy’s passing, none of these types of offenders have been released pre-trial.

Wilde said the Sheriff’s Department is trying to use fear to motivate action.

“It’s a very powerful tool, but it makes people afraid when they don’t really need to be,” she said.

She said the money should go toward more social services rather than operating a jail with an unnecessary number of beds.

Harrold said HNH is describing a utopia that would be great but is not realistic.

“Any community is going to need a methodology for the good of public safety to hold people accountable for violent behaviors, and that’s what we endeavor to do and need to continue to do with this levy,” Harrold said. “If the levy is not renewed, it’ll be catastrophic to the sheriff’s office. We will go back to what it looked like in 2012.”

Measure 20-340, theRenewal of Jail and Youth Services Five-Year Levy, will be voted on on May 16 by Lane County residents.