ENTERPRISE — “So,” the governor of Oregon said as she sat down at a conference table at Wallowa Resources in Enterprise, “I hear you want to build some housing.”

And for the next 45 minutes, Gov. Tina Kotek mostly listened as Wallowa County officials, staff members from the nonprofit organization Wallowa Resources and others talked about the shortage of affordable housing in the county.

Kotek spent Friday, May 5, in Wallowa County as the latest stop in her One Oregon tour. She’s pledged to visit every Oregon county during the first year of her term.

During her afternoon discussion she was briefed on efforts in the county to create more housing — specifically, housing that’s affordable to working families.

“We’re feeling the pressure of the lack of housing,” said Nels Gabbert, a member of the Wallowa Resources advisory board and a key player with Working Homes, the nonprofit organization Wallowa Resources created to help ease the housing shortage.

Businesses across the county frequently are unable to hire because potential employees can’t find affordable places to live.

“This is a stranglehold for us in the county to try to continue to revitalize our economic base and maintain the community values that are so important to us,” Gabbert said. “We need the help of the state to help us fill that gap.”

Working Homes has an option to purchase a 21-acre parcel of land in Joseph for a potential housing development. And it also is exploring acquiring the EM&M Building in downtown Enterprise, with an eye toward preserving the 27 apartments there for workforce housing.

At the May 5 meeting, Wallowa County Commissioner John Hillock made the pitch for House Bill 3317, which would create and fund a countywide board to focus on workforce housing and economic development. He told Kotek he had based the bill on a similar measure that she had helped to write for Malheur County when she served in the Oregon House of Representatives.

The bill asks for $5 million in state funding and so it, like many other measures, is pending before the Legislature’s Ways and Means Committee, which must decide how to allocate what lawmakers have warned could be a relatively limited amount of state money. Kotek said she would sign the bill if it makes it to her desk.

Hillock also noted that Wallowa County has set aside $500,000 in federal funds to work on housing issues. Katy Nesbitt, the county’s natural resources director, said the county also has committed to financially support Working Homes for the next two years.

Nesbitt added that Wallowa County is hoping to receive money from the state to pay for a countywide housing needs assessment. The city of Enterprise already has gone through a similar needs assessment, with assistance from the state.

Kotek said she appreciated the work underway at the local level to address the housing issue and wanted to explore how the state could assist those local efforts, both as a “funding partner and as someone who removes the barriers of regulation.”

The governor also touted the work of the Housing Production Advisory Council, a group of experts she has charged with developing a plan to meet her goal of building 36,000 housing units per year. She said she expected the council to produce “very aggressive recommendations” at the end of the year that she could present to the February 2024 short session of the Oregon Legislature.

“We are building capacity in state government to pounce” on the issue, she said.

Kotek said the workforce housing issue also had come up during a Friday morning discussion she had at the Wallowa Valley Center for Wellness. She had praise for the efforts the county has launched, but warned that plenty of challenges were ahead.

“You’re asking all the right questions,” she said. “You’re thinking about it the right way. You’ve galvanizing people’s interest to do this, because there will be a point when people are like, ‘Hey, yeah, housing’ and then, ‘oh — (don’t put the housing) there.’ You’re going to have that moment. So you have to get past that moment. But we’re all in trouble if we don’t figure this out.”