When Tracy Sandahl stopped by her home on her lunch break last November, something felt off.
The back door of Sandahl’s rural Florence-area home was open, something she, or her husband would never forget. The front door, she discovered moments later, had been forced open.
"I just started panicking. I thought, ‘what is going on?’” Sandahl said. “I went to my bedroom, because I looked around the living room and didn't see anything amiss. So I went to my bedroom, and the bedroom was destroyed.”
Speaking in her living room, Sandahl said the thieves stole thousands of dollars worth of items including jewelry, firearms, and family heirlooms.
She called 911 and was eventually transferred to a Lane County Sheriff’s Deputy.
“He started talking about what forms he was going to email me so that I could make a list of the items that were stolen,” Sandhahl said. “I realized what was happening, and I said, 'are you telling me you're not coming here?' and he said 'yeah I'm sorry, I'm the only one on duty and I'm in Eugene.'”
Sandahl said she left her bedroom undisturbed for days in hopes a deputy would have free time to stop by and collect evidence, but no one ever did.
“What is going on that the police won't come to your house?"' she said.
KLCC spoke to several other residents who live in unincorporated areas near Florence who have experienced burglaries in the last year. Each said deputies, if they responded at all, did so hours, or sometimes days later. Residents said they’ve also been frustrated with other aspects of Lane County’s criminal justice system, such as the District Attorney’s Office, for not being aggressive enough in pursuing cases against people who are arrested.
Stretched thin
Lane County deputies patrol around 4,600 square miles stretching from the Cascades to the coast. They have jurisdiction over about 119,000 people in the unincorporated area, which is about a third of the county’s population.
Lane County Sheriff Carl Wilkerson said the county’s challenging geography, paired with other responsibilities like search and rescue, managing the jail and state-required court duties, has left his department stretched thin.
In an interview with KLCC at his office in downtown Eugene, Wilkerson said he and many deputies share unincorporated residents' frustrations.
"Deputies are literally crisscrossing the county, going from priority call to priority call to priority call,” Wilkerson said. “What that leads to is very little unallocated time, which means they're not doing things like traffic enforcement. They're not doing things like following up on the cases they've been investigating.”
He said right now, he has three deputies and a supervisor on patrol duty and available to respond to calls in the unincorporated area. Just one detective is assigned to property crime. The rest focus on homicide, crimes against children, and other violent offenses.
Wilkerson said Lane County’s commissioners already use around 75% of general fund money for public safety. They’ve also set aside additional one-time funds to ensure outlying parts of the county are patrolled, but that’s at risk of running out.
"They prioritized us, but that doesn't fix the model," Wilkerson said.
Lane County District Attorney Christopher Parosa said every aspect of the county’s public safety system is struggling. There aren’t enough deputies available to investigate crimes and provide his office with evidence.
Jail alternatives and services that help monitor those who are arrested, like parole and probation, also don’t have enough resources to meet the region’s needs. Parosa said his team is chronically understaffed and at risk of buckling under the number of cases it handles.
He said last year, the attorneys in the criminal division had about 6,700 cases referred to them from agencies across Lane County.
"We are potentially on the cusp of system collapse, in that they are working far too hard.” Parosa said. “It's not a sustainable level, is really the issue."
Paying for public safety
Lane is one of a few counties in Oregon that kept taxes low because of timber subsidies. In the ‘90s, the County’s tax rate was frozen at one of the lowest levels in the state when voters amended the Oregon Constitution.
“The problem is that the federal (timber) subsidy went away after Ballot Measure 5 came into existence,” Parosa said. “Over time we've had to cut, cut, cut, cut."
A task force assembled to study Lane County’s criminal justice issues found the county would need to raise new revenue to reduce the stress on the system.
Increasing Lane County’s patrol to match the state average for deputies per capita, and hiring enough prosecutors to handle the cases those deputies refer, would cost around $27 million a year. Larger scale solutions to address broader justice system fracture points would likely cost much more, potentially from $55 million to $95 million, the task force found.
The county is now researching the viability of a few of the task force’s suggested solutions, including a payroll tax, or creating a new, special taxing district dedicated to public safety.
Lane County Board of Commissioners Chair Ryan Ceniga, whose West Lane County district includes the Florence area, said he’s looking for a sustainable fix.
Most of the county’s elected officials, including Ceniga, have not yet weighed in on what option they prefer, saying they’d like to first see the results of focus groups, and other research aimed at gauging voter sentiment.
“We're not grabbing some lottery money and hiring somebody for three months to fix this,” Ceniga said. “This is a long-term solution, it's taken a while, but everything's going to be exhausted. There's going to be a unanimous direction that we're going to head, and hopefully it's a long-term solution.“
The task force recommended county leaders send whichever option they prefer–a payroll tax or a special district–to the ballot.
Jeff Lovaas, 75, is a retired firefighter who lives in the same neighborhood outside Florence as Tracy Sandahl. He said he was home, asleep, when someone broke into his garage just after Christmas, stealing thousands of dollars of tools, and his electric bike.
He worries that if more rural crime isn’t addressed soon, burglaries could escalate to violence.
"I realize a lot of it is about funding, and it's not their fault,” Lovaas said. “I think the deputies probably do a wonderful job, there's just not enough of them."
Lovaas said he doesn’t like the idea of new taxes, but might be open to if it meant someone would respond when he calls.
