Here are answers to the most common questions I get asked about my time as a county commissioner
and the decisions I made while serving.
Let's Get Focused:
The Landfill
What I inherited, what we did, and the fee waiver
The Facts:
Everything we do as a Board runs through one question: does it pay off for the people of this county? Here's how that applied to the landfill.
When I took office in 2015, the landfill was costing the County about $4.5 million a year straight out of general-fund reserves just to stay open. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality requires any landfill to prove it can pay for 30 years of monitoring and leachate treatment after it closes. Years of lost timber revenue meant we couldn't show that, so we were out of compliance. On top of that, the landfill had only about eight or nine years of capacity left, which put closure around 2023. If DEQ shut us down, or we ran out of room, every load of trash in Douglas County would be trucked out of county at a much higher price. That's what we inherited.
In September 2015 the Board put disposal fees in place. The advisory committee had recommended a $15 gate fee and closing eight of the transfer stations. We went with $10 and kept all twelve open, including the ones that see a handful of loads a week. Today Douglas County has THE LOWEST DISPOSAL RATES ANYWHERE, and the landfill no longer drains the general fund. It also means waste from Coos and Curry counties, which currently rolls straight through Douglas County on its way to Medford, can potentially stop here instead. That future revenue could help keep our rates low, and it takes heavy trucks off our highways.
The fees paid for the fixes DEQ needed to see:
- A 70,000-gallon leachate tank replaced a 3,000-gallon one, so heavy rain stopped sending overflow toward the river.
- Backup generators keep the pumps running when the power goes out.
- Better compaction and new equipment stretched the space we had.
- A DEQ-approved financial assurance plan for the 30 years after closure.
Then we solved the capacity problem. The County bought the old Dixonville log pond, with its wetland credits, for $500,000. We used those credits to make the Sutherlin industrial park shovel-ready, sold eight acres there for $320,000 with another $300,000 from the City of Sutherlin, and traded what was left of the Dixonville land for about 300 acres next to the landfill. That trade bought us 75 to 100 years of capacity.
Now, the fee waiver. The old Windmill Inn and Elmers restaurant sat at the freeway entrance to Roseburg, the first thing anyone saw coming into town. The Hanna family, who have been investing in this community for more than 80 years, put private money into tearing it down and building two hotels and a retail center in its place. On March 21, 2018, Solid Waste Director Scott Adams sent Bruce Hanna a letter on the landfill fee waiver for the demolition debris. The form came back the same day. Director Adams signed it March 23, 2018. The value was about $48,645. That's a one-time waiver on debris that was going into our landfill either way, in exchange for a redevelopment that put property on the tax rolls at a higher value for good and gave travelers a reason to stop in Roseburg.
The Windmill Inn was used by fire and police agencies for several weeks to provide invaluable training they couldn't get anywhere else.
It was not a one-off favor. The County granted a similar waiver to the out-of-state owners of the old Safeway and Rite Aid buildings downtown, which had sat empty for about 20 years. Those came down too. Nobody made a story out of that one.
Demolition debris, drywall included, has gone into the Douglas County landfill for as long as it has existed, waiver or no waiver. The problems at the landfill were there in 2015. The work we did since is why it's still open.
One more thing, since it gets said. I was the liaison commissioner to solid waste at the time. The waiver was handled by the Solid Waste Director. Bruce Hanna is an acquaintance. I respect the work he's done in the Legislature and the giving his family does, including his partnership with our efforts to get the wreaths on 7,000 veterans' graves each December.
To date, I have not personally asked him for nor received a campaign donation. If I do, I'll update this page.
The records are public. Search Friends of Chris Boice, committee 16986, at ORESTAR.
The Libraries
What the voters decided, and what the community did next
The Facts:
This is the most controversial thing I've been part of in eleven years on the Board.
Douglas County ran a library system from 1953 on, eleven branches, paid for the way most county services were paid for: with federal timber receipts. When that money dried up, the libraries were competing with the Sheriff's Office, the jail, roads, and emergency response for a general fund that couldn't cover all of it. By the time Commissioner Freeman and I took office in 2015, hours had already been cut for years. The county was spending down reserves to keep the doors open.
We had a choice: keep quietly bleeding the general fund, or ask the people who pay for it what they wanted. In June 2016 the Board put Measure 10-145 on the November ballot: a library district with its own permanent tax, 44 cents per $1,000 of assessed value. A dedicated funding source, decided by the voters, instead of a line item fighting the Sheriff every budget.
I said at the time that I'm a no-new-taxes kind of person, that I was passionate about the library and understood its value, and that I wasn't going to campaign for it or against it because I wanted an unbiased, well-educated electorate to make the call. We front-loaded that year's library budget so every branch stayed open through the election.
On November 8, 2016, the measure failed, about 55 to 45. Roughly 25,500 no, 20,700 yes.
That was the answer. Without a district there was no dedicated money, and I wasn't going to take it out of public safety. Ten branches left county operation on April 1, 2017. Roseburg's main branch closed May 31. The county library system ended after 64 years.
Here's the part the "Boice closed the libraries" version leaves out.
Sutherlin's library was open again on April 4, three days later, with the city, the school district, and about 60 volunteers. Reedsport and Oakland reopened on volunteer hours within weeks. Riddle reopened June 6 with the building, the computers, and about 12,000 books the town kept, checking out on index cards. Reedsport and Drain passed their own local library levies that May. By the end of 2017, nine of the eleven former branches were running again as city or community libraries. The City of Roseburg reopened the flagship in January 2019 with the ESD and the Ford Family Foundation behind it. Today, all eleven are open under city, district, or community models.
The people who saved the libraries were not a county department. They were neighbors, city councils, friends groups, and local voters who taxed themselves for their own library. That's a community win, and I'll say it every time.
In 2022 the Board sent about $85,800 in grant money to those community libraries so they could put paid staff on the floor and qualify for more state aid. That's the county doing what it could once the books allowed it.
This happened alongside the rest of the 2015 triage. The landfill was draining $4.5 million a year and facing closure. Parks had lost its general-fund support, so we put in temporary day-use fees, and in 2021, once parks paid for themselves, we took the fees off. Same pattern every time: stop the bleeding, hand the work to whoever can carry it, give back what we can when the county is back in the black.
I understand why people are still angry about 2017. It was a hard year. But the voters were asked, the county lived within their answer, and the libraries are open. That's what happened.
Public Health
What we did and why
The Facts:
People still tell me we "closed public health." Here's what actually happened.
In 2014, before I took office, the County announced it was getting out of public health altogether and handing the job to the State of Oregon. Mental health had already gone. It would have been the first county in Oregon to do it, and the state called the situation unprecedented. The Board backed off after a couple of months and left the decision to the two of us coming in that January. Public health is funded with state dollars. We ran it as a county department out of one building in Roseburg, the old hospital building on Madrone, and that building alone cost us a lot just to keep the lights on. One door, in one town, for a county of 5,000 square miles. If you lived in Glide or Drain or Reedsport, you were underserved.
At the same time, health care nationwide was changing. For the first time, just about everyone had a payor, and clinics like Aviva Health had opened doors in the outlying communities. So the question was simple: why keep paying for one building in Roseburg when the people who need care already have a clinic in their own town?
It was urgent. I had just been elected, I was drinking from a firehose, but I understood the need for the change and I supported it. Commissioner Freeman led the work. Instead of sending public health back to Salem, we paused, studied it, and built something local. The Douglas Public Health Network is a nonprofit run here, governed by the organizations in this county whose job is the health of the public. It contracts with the County to run the administrative side. The clinical side, immunizations, testing and treatment, family planning, happens at Aviva Health and the other clinics that were already in every community. UCAN runs WIC and nurse home visits. No new building. No new bureaucracy. More doors.
And we kept the public health authority. That matters. It means decisions about public health in Douglas County get made in Douglas County, by a local doctor, Dr. Bob Dannenhoffer, working with the Board. When COVID came, that authority let us keep local decisions local instead of taking every order from the state.
The result: more access points throughout the county and more services for the same dollars. When the Oregon Health Authority did its three-year review of Douglas County in 2018, the first strength it listed was the new public health structure, and it said the change had increased access to preventive care like immunizations. The same report noted smoking rates going down and immunization rates going up, said the County and the network excel at community partnerships, and called the way DPHN and Aviva get people from a diagnosis to treatment a strong model. You can read it yourself; it's on the state's website. If we had done nothing, the state would be running a stripped-down version here today, the way it does in Curry County, which has no local public health authority at all. Instead, public health in Douglas County is closer to home than it was in 2015.
Looking back, were there things we could have done differently in the transition? Of course. Every big change has them. But the gaps people point to today, like mental health services, come mostly from policy out of Salem, not from decisions made here. The model is still evolving and improving. That's not something to apologize for. That's the job.
Jobs, Business Climate, and the Forum Clip
What I said at that forum, and why I'd say it again
The Facts:
There's a clip going around from a candidate forum a few years back where I say I'm not really interested in creating new jobs in Douglas County. That's a real clip. Here's the rest of the answer.
Every candidate on that stage got the same question: what are you going to do to create jobs? I told the truth as I see it. Government doesn't create jobs. Business owners do. What government can do is keep the ground ready and make sure the people who want to hire can find someone to hire. That's where I put my effort. Here's why.
For years this county chased big outside companies with incentives. Dell. Bayliner. Alcan Cable. We wooed them, gave them tax breaks, and cheered when they came. Every one of them is gone. When the incentives ran out or the market moved, so did they.
They weren't here because they loved Douglas County. They were here for the deal. I've watched it happen enough times to learn the lesson.
Meanwhile, the companies that were born here stayed. The mills. Caddock Electronics in Glide. Romtec. Con-Vey. Orenco Systems in Sutherlin. North River Boats. Ireland Trucking. A&M Transport. I could name a hundred more. These are generational businesses run by people who grew up here and chose to stay when a tax-friendlier state would have taken them in a heartbeat. And almost every one of them tells me the same thing: they can't grow because they can't fill the jobs they already have. Truck drivers. Welders. Machinists. Construction crews. The openings are there today.
So do the math with me. If I recruit a new plant to town with 100 jobs to fill, where do those workers come from? From Con-Vey and Orenco and the mill down the road, who were already short-handed. The county doesn't gain a job. It shuffles them. And when that new plant closes the way the last ones did, we're worse off than when we started.
That's why the County has put money into the workforce instead: training for truck drivers and welders, support for the Allied Health Training Center and the UCC Nursing Program, so the companies already here can hire the people they need. And it's why the industrial work this Board has done is about the ground, not the gizmo. This Board put seven County-owned industrial sites back to work and back on the tax rolls. We helped secure $3.4 million in Connect Oregon funding for the Fred Wahl shipyard in Reedsport, which can now work on three boats at a time, but like so many employers is limited by the availability of workers. And when Roseburg Forest Products announced a $700 million investment in Douglas and Coos Counties in April 2023, the largest known manufacturing investment in Oregon history, I was on the stage with them, because Commissioner Freeman, Commissioner Kress and I had helped secure the state incentive package, the Strategic Investment Program, that made it possible. That's a homegrown company. That's the kind of job creation I'm interested in.
I'm not chasing smokestacks that leave when the tax break ends. I'm helping the companies that were born here fill the jobs they already have. I said it at that forum, and I stand by it. It makes as much sense today as it did then.
The Non-Sanctuary Resolution and Law Enforcement
What it says and why I wrote it
The Facts:
On July 22, 2026, I drafted and the Board passed a resolution stating that Douglas County is not a sanctuary county. It didn't change a single county policy. It put in writing a position this Board has held for a long time.
Why now? Because the Roseburg City Council took up the sanctuary question and stated its position. That's their right. But it put the subject back in front of everyone, and people started calling and writing to ask where the County stood. When enough of the people we represent ask you to say where you stand, you say it.
Here's where we stand. We live in a nation of laws, and laws are meant to be enforced. We don't agree with everything the federal government does. We do believe immigration laws are on the books for a reason, and that when federal agencies are enforcing them, local government should cooperate rather than obstruct. Oregon has its own sanctuary statute, and the resolution doesn't override it. It says what this Board believes, and it says the County will work with federal partners to the full extent the law allows. The Sheriff runs the Sheriff's Office. The Board funds it and backs it.
People ask why immigration enforcement is a local issue in a rural county hundreds of miles from the border. It became one the day marijuana was legalized in Oregon.
Douglas County voters voted to prohibit growing, processing, and selling marijuana. What happened anyway was an explosion of grow operations in every part of the county with the right ground and water, and a lot of them were never growing for Oregon's legal market. They were growing to ship to states where it's still illegal.
The neighbors complained first. The County put money into the Douglas Interagency Narcotics Team and used every tool we had, including the state watermaster, because these operations were stealing water from the farmers downstream. And what DINT found on those sites, over and over, was cartel money, people brought into the country illegally and made to work off the debt, family members held somewhere else until it was paid, human waste in the creeks, banned pesticides, and garbage pits where the land used to be.
When you make arrests at a site like that, you don't know who you have until you check. You run the names. You find out if they have warrants somewhere else, in another county, another state, or federally. And if they do, you work with the agency that holds the warrant. That's what cooperation means. It's what a sheriff's deputy does on every traffic stop.
The people who call this racist are the same people who say they oppose human trafficking, forced labor, and poisoned streams. Every one of those things was happening on those sites. I don't understand how cooperating with the agencies that can stop it became the villain in the story.
That's the resolution. Rule of law, applied to what's actually happening in our county. It's what I believed before July 22, and it's what I believe now.
Timber
Why I fight for it, and who I answer to
The Facts:
Some people say the timber industry has me in its pocket. Here's the record, and here's my reason.
My campaign finance reports are public and have been since my first run in 2014. Anybody can look them up on ORESTAR, Friends of Chris Boice, committee 16986. A lot of my support has come from timber families and timber companies. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I'll also tell you those same families have their names on the YMCA, the library, Umpqua Community College, the high school stadiums, Wildlife Safari, and a hundred other things in this county that nobody made them pay for. They've been investing in Douglas County for generations. When they invest in a campaign, it's for the same reason. They think I'm the best person for the job. Nobody has ever asked me for a favor, and I've never done one.
Here's the part people miss. More harvest off federal land is not automatically good for the private timber companies. When public timber stopped coming to market, the private landholders invested heavily in their own ground to keep their mills running. They're the supply now. Every log that comes off public land is competition for them. They support responsible federal management anyway, because they live here too. But if I were doing the bidding of my donors, pushing for more public timber is a strange way to do it.
So why do I push for it? Because of how this County is paid for.
Douglas County collects property tax. That's it. No income tax, no sales tax, nothing else. This year's County budget is about $206 million. Property tax brings in about $13 million of that. It pays for about half of the Sheriff's Office, and that's all it pays for. It doesn't pay my salary. It doesn't pay for the jail or the roads or the landfill. For most of this county's history, those things were paid for by the County's share of timber sold off federal land under the O&C Act. That's the same revenue that once paid for a county public health department, a county library system, and a dump nobody paid to use. When the harvest stopped, that money stopped, and the County had to find other ways to keep the services going. That's the last ten years of this Board's work.
There's a second reason, and it's the one you can see from your car. We're tired of breathing smoke all summer. We're tired of watching the North Umpqua burn and not get replanted. Public timber is a public asset. It grows on public mountains whether anyone likes it or not, and managing it well is the difference between an asset that pays for county services and a liability that costs the taxpayers every fire season. That's what the County fights for, and it's what I'll keep fighting for.
Here's what that fight produced. In January 2026, Congress restored the O&C counties' share of federal timber receipts from 50 percent to 75 percent, where the law set it in 1937. Commissioner Freeman led that work through the Association of O&C Counties, and this Board backed it every step. Same harvest, more money for county services, no new tax on anyone here.
Commissioner Freeman put it plainly: none of the county commissioners has any personal financial interest in the wood products industry. There's no personal benefit to us. There is a tremendous benefit to the citizens of Douglas County, and to every family in this county whose paycheck depends on that industry. That's who I work for.
Homelessness
What the County has done, and what I've asked Roseburg to do
The Facts:
"What are you doing about the homeless problem?" I get asked that more than anything else, and I understand why. Anyone who drives through Roseburg sees it. So here's what I've done, and what I keep asking for.
Start with Sutherlin, because it worked. The city manager called me. The city had just finished its downtown project, Central Avenue was paved and looking good, and people were camping all over it. He asked what to do. I told him what I've told every city in this county: designate a place. Once people have a designated place to be, you can enforce the law everywhere else. Court rulings are clear that if a city doesn't provide a place, people can camp on public property. Give them a place and the rest of the town gets its sidewalks back.
The County owned a piece of land at the edge of Sutherlin, next to the industrial park. We'd gotten it from the city years earlier for the industrial-park expansion. Commissioner Freeman, Commissioner Kress and I deeded it back. The city built Hastings Village on it, opened in 2021, and made it Sutherlin's designated site. Downtown Sutherlin is a different place today. That's the model. The County provided the land. The city provided the will.
Before that, one of the first things this Board did on homelessness was deal with the little scraps of county land where camps kept forming: unused road rights-of-way and odd parcels, a lot of them down around Southgate. As long as they were public land, nobody could do anything. So we conveyed them to the adjacent private owners, and where two owners had a claim, we auctioned the piece. Private land can be posted and trespassed. And every one of those parcels went back on the tax rolls. That was more than ten years ago.
Now Roseburg. I want to be careful here, because this is where people think I'm passing the buck, and I'm not. County commissioners have no authority inside city limits. Roseburg, Winston, Sutherlin, Myrtle Creek, every city has its own government and its own responsibility for what happens inside its boundaries. The County is a support agency. We can't tell a city council what to do but sometimes we can help them do it. What I can do is bring them a plan, and I have.
A property owner on the edge of Diamond Lake Boulevard offered a parcel for a homelessness project, willing to donate it for a tax credit. I went to a local engineering firm and had them draw a site plan: small three-sided shelters, eight feet by eight, with a low-voltage outlet to charge a phone; coin-operated lockers so people could leave camp without losing everything they own; coin-operated restrooms; a tent area; a few spaces for people sleeping in cars. A pilot, not a fix for everything, but a real place. I had the land and I had the drawing. I took it to the people who controlled the council's agenda. It never got on the agenda.
Later I was seated on the Roseburg Homeless Commission. The commission can't decide anything; it can only recommend to the council. So I made a motion: recommend that the council designate a site, one it owns or one it buys, by a specific date about four months out. Discussion opened on all the reasons it couldn't be done. The motion never got a second. I resigned not long after, because I have a lot of work in front of me that actually gets things done, and that wasn't going to be one of them.
I'm as frustrated as anyone. I own a business in Roseburg and I deal with this every day like everyone else in town. Roseburg will have a new mayor and up to 4 new council members soon...
I hope the city can pick a place and let the Board know how we can help.
Champagne Creek
What we did and why
The Facts:
Champagne Creek is 205 acres out past Lookingglass that used to be a county dump and transfer site. It had been closed for about 30 years. The county still carried the obligations that come with a closed waste site, there was no public access, and nobody could build on it or wanted to buy it. In the county's own words at the time, it was "nonpublic access, unproductive," and a liability. Somebody will show you an assessor's number for the parcels. An assessor's number is not a price. A closed dump with monitoring obligations does not sell.
In 2017 our first idea was to keep it and build a county off-road vehicle park there. The neighbors did not want that, and they said so. We listened and dropped it. In 2018 the county leased the ground to a local group so search and rescue volunteers could train on it. That turned out to be the right use, so in November 2019 the Board ended the lease and granted the land outright to Champagne Creek Ranch, a nonprofit formed that year by the people who had been running the search and rescue lease, to take it on for good. Oregon law lets a county grant land to a qualifying nonprofit to provide a needed public service. The grant agreement requires the ranch to let Douglas County Search and Rescue train there at no charge, and it took the liability off the taxpayers for good.
That's what the ranch has done. Search and rescue trains there. Wildland firefighters and backcountry rescue crews train there. Law enforcement trains there. The kids' mountain bike race team rides there. The ranch runs youth OHV safety classes and holds a couple of events a year that raise money for local charities and food drives. The agencies pay nothing to use it.
Who runs the nonprofit? A five-person board of volunteer citizens.
The county harvested the mature timber off the property and replanted it before giving it away.
Do I use it? I've driven in the ranch's poker run and donated significantly to their food drives the same as everyone else who bought a ticket.
The land decision was made in November 2019.
Thirty years of a fenced-off liability turned into a place where the people who pull our neighbors out of the woods go to practice. I'd make that decision again tomorrow.
The Board's decision, the grant agreement, and the deed are county records. If you want to read them yourself, file a public records request at douglascountyor.gov and ask for the November 2019 Board action on parcels R25337 and R25609.
A Few Things People Ask About
The questions people have asked about me