After several attempts over many years, the Legislature appears poised to pass a bill that would change the laws governing how Oregonians can be committed to involuntary mental health treatment.
House Bill 2005, which significantly reworks the state’s civil commitment laws to make it easier to mandate mental health treatment, passed the Oregon House on Wednesday with bipartisan support.
The bill is a hodgepodge of several proposals to alter the rules around involuntary commitment for both people accused of crimes or in mental health crises.
It would make it easier to build residential treatment facilities inside city limits, impose time limits on how long someone accused of a crime can be held in treatment, change the rules governing who can trigger a hearing to determine if someone is incapacitated by mental illness, regulate which crimes can cause someone to be sent to custodial mental health treatment and require the state to collect and share certain data when a tribal member is involuntarily committed.
Were it to become law, the bill would make it slightly easier to mandate mental health treatment, both for people accused of crimes and not. Specifically, it would allow for a broader timeframe, past court records and attempted violent crimes when considering behavior that may indicate someone is likely to become dangerous and should be committed.
For civil commitment specifically, the proposed language would enable judges to determine someone was likely to cause harm to themselves or others “in the near future, even if such behavior is not imminent.”
Emily Cooper, legal director at Disability Rights Oregon, whose organization opposes the bill, said the change could allow for people with mental illness to be targeted for removal from society based on bias. But supporters of the new wording have argued the change is necessary to allow people with severe mental illness and their families an easier path to much needed treatment.
Under current law, judges must be able to determine that any danger posed to oneself or others is imminent.
“Typically, the danger is not immediate enough,” said Chris Bouneff, executive director of the Oregon chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, who supports the changes. He said it can feel to families trying to get a loved one into treatment like the potential danger must be likely to occur “in the next five seconds” to meet the current criteria for mandated treatment.
Where to send people who need treatment remains a challenge. The state’s residential treatment system is overwhelmed with patients whom it does not have enough treatment beds to serve. House Bill 2005 would only slightly increase capacity for community providers and would not add beds at the Oregon State Hospital.
“I am not here to say that this bill, in and of itself, is a fix,” Rep. Jason Kropf, D-Bend, told his colleagues on the House floor. “This bill and the other work we do represents progress, but not necessarily perfection.”
Kropf, a chief sponsor of the bill, led an expert workgroup meant to find common ground on the controversial public safety, mental health and justice topics brought up by involuntary commitment. Several of those experts said they’d worked on language for their specific issue without understanding that all the bills would be combined into one at the end. Kropf did not respond this week to multiple attempts to reach him with questions.
The bill passed the House 38-13, though several lawmakers who voted for it said they did so with reservations.
Rep. Bobby Levy, R-Echo, said she had been among the first to call attention to the problems surrounding the state’s civil commitment system. She said she supported House Bill 2005, but believes additional beds must be added to the state hospital to fully address the problems. A bill that would have added those beds failed earlier in the session.
“I’m going to vote for this, but I want it to be clear: We don’t have a place to put anybody,” Levy said.
Lawmakers did pass a separate bill that would allocate $65 million to expand the state’s residential treatment beds. And House Bill 2005 would allow those facilities to be built within a city’s residential and commercial zones. Under the new rules, no zone change or conditional use permit would be needed.
House Bill 2005 was first made public last week, surprising many advocates who had been working on the separate bills that now make up the sweeping legislation.
Bouneff, who has been a key driver on the effort to change the civil commitment rules, said he was told June 13 that his bill would be combined with several others. When his team got the new bill a few days later, he said it contained “surprise language to us” and felt rather “slapdash.”
In particular, Bouneff was concerned about language that he worries would allow a much wider range of people to call a hearing to assess someone’s mental stability.
Section 15 of the bill states that “any person . . . who is interested in the affairs or welfare of” a person with a declared mental illness “may file a petition” to have the individual determined incapacitated.
Despite his qualms, Bouneff said he would continue to support the bill because he viewed the civil commitment changes as “essential legislation.”
House Republican Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby, took the opposite approach. She said Wednesday that while she supported the changes to the civil commitment process, she could not support the new time limits for how long criminal defendants can be held in treatment and would therefore vote no.
Under Oregon law, severely mentally ill people can be required to undergo treatment so they become well enough to “aid and assist” in their own defense. Court orders resulting from a decades-long federal lawsuit against the state hospital for its treatment of this population require new patients to be admitted to the state hospital within seven days of being determined to be unfit for trial.
Those requirements – meant to prevent people with mental illness from languishing in jail – have been hard for the state hospital to meet, in part because there are limited facilities to which the hospital can safely discharge patients. The idea is that time limits compelling patients’ release from the state hospital after a set period of treatment could free up beds for new admits.
But the proposed time limits would require “providers to release defendants regardless if they have been restored to competency,” Drazan said. “These timelines will arbitrarily result in people charged with serious offenses, including domestic violence violations of restraining orders and attempted kidnapping, being released from care and having their charges dismissed.”
Inside the sensory room at Oregon State Hospital in Salem in 2023.Beth Nakamura
The maximum periods of commitment and community restoration services for criminal defendants proposed in the bill range from 30 days to an upper limit of three years after exhausting all available extensions. The maximum commitment periods are connected to the type of crime of which the defendant stands accused, with more serious crimes having longer maximums. The proposed limits are set to sunset on January 1, 2028, giving lawmakers the opportunity to evaluate their effectiveness at that point.
The Oregon District Attorneys Association also opposed the time limits.
The bill would also prevent people who are charged with violations or most misdemeanors from being involuntarily committed.
Yet another change would allow a judge to consider the attempt of several serious felony crimes, including rape, arson and murder, when considering evidence that someone should be committed as an “extremely dangerous person with mental illness.”
Despite her no vote, Drazan praised the bill’s changes to the state’s civil commitment statutes.
Even among those who voted yes, several lawmakers said Wednesday that the bill did not go as far as they would like, nor encompass all the changes they would like to see, but that it was forward movement in the right direction.
The bill would allocate $5.4 million to expand community based mental health treatment programs and $1.1 million to support additional public defenders to work with people subject to mental competency hearings.
This is at least the fourth time since 2019 that lawmakers have considered changing Oregon’s civil commitment laws.
While joining the chorus of people saying the bill was a step forward and not a complete solution, Rep. Tom Andersen, D-Salem, who was a chief sponsor of this bill and has also sponsored previous bills with the same aim, pronounced himself satisfied.
“This is a policy decision to reprioritize civil commitment treatment to help people get the services they need before they end up in the criminal justice system,” Andersen said. “I’m extremely pleased with the progress we’ve made on this issue.”
The bill now heads to the Senate for a vote.
Lillian Mongeau Hughes covers homelessness and mental health for The Oregonian. Email her with tips or questions at lmhughes@oregonian.com. Or follow her on Bluesky @lmonghughes.bsky.social or X at @lrmongeau.