Oregon desperately needs more mental health and substance use treatment centers. But a bill aimed at easing restrictions on where those facilities can be built died in the 11th hour of this year’s legislative session.
House Bill 4023 aimed to prevent local governments from using zoning or land use restrictions to limit where mental health or substance use facilities can be built. It passed the House in February with just one no vote.
The Senate added a notable provision last week, then passed it 22-6 on Thursday, the final day of the 2024 session.
But top House lawmakers hit the brakes, right before the bill crossed the finish line.
Without the new provisions easing providers’ ability to open small and medium-sized treatment centers on publicly owned land, the money the Legislature allocated to add residential mental health and addiction treatment beds could be slow to translate into new treatment slots – or be blocked altogether.
“There is broad and passionate agreement across Oregon that we need to ramp up the availability and treatment for mental health and substance abuse disorders,” Rep. Mark Gamba, a Milwaukie Democrat, said in a committee hearing. “It is also tremendously difficult to site and build these actual treatment facilities.”
Gamba pushed for the change that the Senate made to the bill, which provided that treatment centers would need to be allowed without restrictions in residential as well as commercial, industrial and public use zones.
That “changed the bill so significantly” that House leaders including then-House Majority Leader Julie Fahey, a Eugene Democrat and a sponsor of the original bill, felt it required extra discussion. There wasn’t time for that before the session ended, Fahey said.
The bill would have helped municipal leaders overcome the not-in-my-backyard arguments that often prevent mental health facilities from being built in the face of neighbors’ opposition, Gamba said. As a former Milwaukie mayor and planning commission member, he said, he still has scars from the fights to clear the way to build treatment facilities in his city.
“Wherever these facilities are proposed, there’s almost invariably a group of neighbors that comes forward and loudly tries to kill them,” Gamba said. “The fear mongering and pearl clutching often makes its way to the city council level and many times the proposed treatment facilities die there.”
But the bill wouldn’t have served its purpose without adding the provision including residential areas, Gamba said.
Gamba said that change was “critical” for the success of work by the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Addiction and Community Safety Response to get dramatically expanded addiction treatment beds off the ground.
Passing the bill without saying that treatment facilities are allowed in residential areas would signal that lawmakers only want them in industrial and commercial areas, Gamba argued, and would strengthen the argument of neighbors who oppose them. The addition was important enough, Gamba said in an interview, that adding it in the final days of the session was worth risking the death of the entire bill.
“If you had a loved one who required mental health care or treatment for addiction, would you want them shunted off to an industrial area or to a facility right there in your community?” Gamba asked lawmakers during a Senate Rules Committee hearing.
Satya Chandragiri, a psychiatrist and chief medical officer at rural addiction treatment network Greater Oregon Behavioral Health Inc., told the Senate Rules Committee that having residential treatment programs in communities “allows the best possible outcome” for patients. Patients can practice the skills they need to succeed in society, he said. They lose those skills in facilities like the state hospital, he said. In a residential setting, patients can visit with family more easily and learn to live without stigma.
“This is a small but very important amendment which will really help us realize the essential purpose of what we’re trying to do after having such investments in our mental health system and much needed transformation,” he said.
Ariel Nelson, a lobbyist for the League of Oregon Cities, told the committee that the league supported the bill – but only if it had the amendment. Adding residential zones would keep cities from running afoul of the federal Fair Housing Act, which mandates that residential treatment facilities be treated the same way as other types of housing, Nelson said.
After the full Senate passed the bill with Gamba’s change, the Senate Majority Leader’s Office sent out a press release hailing the bill’s likelihood of allowing Oregon to create new treatment facilities.
But, because senators altered the bill after House members passed it, they needed to get agreement from the House to accede to the new version of the bill. Legislative officials listed the bill on their agenda for a so-called concurrence vote, but House leaders never called for one.
If lawmakers had opted to work two more days before sine die, as rules would have allowed, Gamba thinks the bill might have passed. The measure appeared to face much more controversy in the House than in the Senate, however, Gamba said.
Sen. Kate Lieber, a Portland Democrat who helped lead lawmakers’ efforts to expand addiction and behavioral health care this session, said Friday that she expects efforts to ease the siting of addiction and mental health facilities to come back in the 2025 session.
“Siting is a really important issue,” Lieber said. “It’s going to be really worth us to try to look again to see if we can get a bill across the finish line.”
In the meantime, Gamba said, development of new residential treatment facilities will likely continue to be swayed by how willing local leaders are to stand up to the residents who don’t want a treatment facility on their block.
“It’s going to vary community to community,” he said.
Sami Edge covers higher education and politics for The Oregonian. You can reach her at sedge@oregonian.com or (503) 260-3430.