QuickTake:

A Lane County behavioral health care provider is ready with a shovel-ready project if lawmakers approve funding. Statewide and in Lane County, the needs remain  high for addiction treatment and residential care.

Oregon lawmakers may put $65 million into expanding state beds available to treat people with mental health and drug addiction needs.

As lawmakers look at funding for Oregon’s needs, the demand for behavioral health care is high in Lane County and across the state — even as new facilities open to serve more people. For example, Willamette Family Inc., a nonprofit, plans to open Buckley House on July 1 in Eugene. 

The residential facility in Eugene will have 55 beds for detox and residential services for people suffering addiction to drugs, including fentanyl. In 2024, lawmakers provided $4 million for that project.

That same year, a state-commissioned report found Oregon needs about 3,700 more adult beds to adequately serve those who need residential treatment care. The high demand for expansion is a perennial challenge for Oregon, one that has grown worse in recent years with the fentanyl addiction and overdose crisis.

That’s why lawmakers on the Legislature’s powerful Ways and Means Committee this week were considering House Bill 2059, which allocates $65 million statewide to boost services.

Providers across Oregon, including Willamette Family Inc. in Lane County, are hoping the state makes investments to advance their work — and meet the needs in communities. This session, Willamette Family told lawmakers it supports the push for more funding to serve the demand — and has another project in mind.

Willamette Family has a “shovel-ready project” to develop for Lane County with 72 treatment beds, Eva Williams, executive director of Willamette Family, wrote in a letter to lawmakers in testimony for House Bill 2059.

If funding comes through, the timeline for construction is 24 months, the letter said.

The bill does not identify specific projects, though its charge is to expand behavioral health capacity statewide through the Oregon Health Authority. 

For Willamette Family, the Buckley House is an example of how state funding can help local efforts to expand services and care. The facility is set to open July 1 at 640 W. Seventh Ave. in Eugene, with 35 detox beds in a renovated structure formerly owned by the Salvation Army. That’s an increase of 13 detox beds from what the nonprofit currently offers at 605 W. Fourth Ave., in Eugene. 

Detox provides 24-hour medical monitoring when a person is going through withdrawal and needs extra care, including medication and clinical supervision.  The facility will care for youth and adults 18 and older. 

Besides the detox beds, Buckley House will have 20 more adult residential beds for people with medical needs, making the total 55 beds, said Colleen Smith, senior director of community relations at Willamette Family. 

Those beds will help people who still have physical issues and need medical care after they have completed detox, Smith said. That could be a variety of situations; they might need more time to stabilize medication doses, for example, or wounds that need medical attention. Detox care is usually three to seven days, a relatively short period of time. The medical beds after detox give the patients and providers more time to plan a full recovery.

Lawmakers acknowledge slow pace

For lawmakers on the Joint Ways and Means Committee, the state’s longstanding efforts to address the problem have not gone unnoticed. This latest proposal comes four years after the 2021 session, when the Legislature appropriated a historic $1.1 billion to expand behavioral health care programs, facilities and workforce. 

Even so, the Oregon Health Authority, which is responsible for awarding funding to organizations, has come under criticism in recent years for its slowness to dole out cash. In 2024, several providers publicly complained about the agency’s plodding pace. 

The agency’s performance came up again in a Tuesday committee hearing.

Saying he doesn’t “mean any disrespect” to the health authority, Sen. Fred Girod, R-Stayton, said the state should go through the Department of Administrative Services to run the projects, not the health agency. 

“I don’t understand why, with their track record, we just don’t go directly through DAS,” he said. 

Committee co-chair Sen. Kate Lieber, D-Beaverton and southwest Portland, said the state’s push to expand and build out capacity takes time, money and “a lot of energy.” But she said it’s necessary to help the state’s criminal justice system and ensure people can have places to go for care when they leave the Oregon State Hospital. 

Sen. Wlnsvey Campos, D-Aloha, and co-chair of the budget committee’s human services subcommittee, said her group will work to keep the state accountable.

“It does not happen overnight,” Campos said. “And dear God, I wish it did. But as folks here know, we are the government.”

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Ben Botkin covers politics and policy in Lane County. He has worked as a journalist since 2003, most recently at the Oregon Capital Chronicle, where he covered justice, health and human services and documented regional efforts to fentanyl addiction. Botkin has worked in statehouses in Idaho, Nevada, Oklahoma and, of course, Oregon. When he's not working, you'll find him road tripping across the West, hiking or surfing along the Oregon Coast.