Meet the Executive Director

John Arens Executive Director

Welcome to our web site. The Mid Columbia Council of Governments (MCCOG) has been serving this region since 1979. We are organized under ORS 190 as an intergovernmental cooperative, which simply means the five counties we represent created us to assist them in providing services. Our goal is to provide a regional approach to collaboration and cooperation with local governments so that we can efficiently provide services in multiple jurisdictions. Typically the different programs we provide need to be administered in a region to minimize the administrative cost of providing the services and by providing trained staff that serve a larger geographic area, it maximizes the funding that is available.

One of the biggest advantages that we offer to our communities is our ability to be responsive to the needs and demands that are often placed on the individual municipalities. For instance if we can bring three or four jurisdictions together to help fund one full time staff person to provide a service for all of the jurisdictions then we are saving all of the partners resources. We have the ability to be very flexible in our services and we can respond in a reasonably short period of time to the project or service under the direction of our Board of Directors.

As the Executive Director of the Mid-Columbia Council of Governments my responsibilities are to oversee all aspects of the agency. The agency has ongoing contracts to manage, risk management issues, facilities, vehicles, multiple jurisdictions and agencies that we work with on a whole host of different topics. We currently have a staff of approximately forty very dedicated individuals all committed to providing the very best client services. Most of our programs are grant funded and we are working to diversify our funding streams to give us more flexibility.

I hope that our agency may be of some assistance to you today or in the near future.

John R Arens
Executive Director