Roundup Year in Review

Covering Oregon politics is only dull if you expect failure and scandal; 2024 was no exception

Governor Tina Kotek (right) and her wife, Aimee Kotek-Wilson pose for a photo in the Oregon Governor’s mansion, Mahonia Hall.

The year 2024 was a mixed bag for Oregon, and Oregon Roundup was there to cover it all. From Measure 110 quasi-repeal to Aimeegate to self-dealing addiction nonprofits to Oregon DOJ’s letting everyone involved in the $500,000 FTX to Democratic Party of Oregon donation off the hook to an admission the state had registered noncitizens to vote to a stinker of an Oregon election to the House district that gave Democrats a tax-hiking supermajority in votes counted well after election day, here’s the year in this here Oregon Roundup.

Measure 110

As January 2024 dawned on the ongoing public policy experiment that is also where I, and many of you, live, hard drug decriminalization, perhaps the boldest experiment of them all, was front and center. In what is still, I believe, an Oregon Roundup exclusive, I wrote about how the Measure 110 citizen commission run by the Oregon Health Authority was using public resources to defend the measure against growing opposition.

I also thought it was interesting how Oregon’s hard drug decriminalization experiment was undermining long-held progressive darlings like public transit and recycling.

As pressure grew and Oregon approached the legislative session in which Democrats promised to address, my piece in National Review Online described the inadequacy of their preferred approach. Once the session was underway, I wrote about how Representative Paul Evans (D-Salem/Monmouth) changed his vote from yay to nay on the more strident (and better) repeal bill once it became clear Republicans would have enough votes for the bill, which most Democrats opposed. (Evans easily won re-election in November).

Ultimately, the legislature passed, and the Governor signed, a bill that recriminalized hard drugs, kept the hundreds of millions of dollars in Measure 110 funding in place (still dispensed by the absolutely conflict-ridden and radical-captured OHA commission), and established an entirely new “deflection” program to help direct people charged with hard drug possession to treatment. By Oregon standards, this was a win.

Aimeegate

Oregon Roundup didn’t break the story about what is probably Kotek’s best-known and politically damaging scandal, so far: giving significant power, and staff and other resources to wield that power, over addiction and mental health policy to her wife, Aimee Kotek-Wilson. Willamette Week broke that story. But I did cover some aspects of that story that others didn’t.

The scandal blasted into public knowledge because Kotek’s Chief of Staff Andrea Cooper and other top staffers resigned over Kotek-Wilson’s role, which existed outside the standard staff pecking order. Cooper entered into a (still) weird “Transition Agreement” that described her temporary role with the Department of Administrative Services, which by the terms of the agreement was to conclude the day after Thanksgiving, last month. Basically, Cooper was to be paid the equivalent of $303,000 per year for performing a set of nebulous duties that I was able to nearly replicate via AI.

In an attempt, mostly successful, of stopping the news stories about her wife, Kotek held a press conference that is best described as evasive and untruthful. I wrote about the press conference here.

I’m still following this story and will update when I have something worth updating.

Bad behavior at taxpayer-funded nonprofits

Oregon Roundup was the only news outlet to report, at all, on the sad, bizarre story of how as state legislator, the Oregon Health Authority and addiction nonprofits in Portland worked together to shield nonprofit leaders from credible accusations of sexual harassment and financial self-dealing.

State Representative Rob Nosse (D-Portland) plowed more money into a program benefitting nonprofits owned by friends and campaign supporters of his, even after he knew those friends were accused of harassing at least one former employee. To my chagrin, nothing has changed, the state keeps giving the nonprofits ever more money (much of it Measure 110 funds).

Oh, and Nosse told me I didn’t “seem like a proper investigative reporter.” I have not given up hope more can come of this series of stories.

Noncitizen voter registration

Where do I start? After the story broke that Oregon had unlawfully registered noncitizens to vote, and at least a handful of them voted, I wrote about how Oregon had put those noncitizens in legal jeopardy, and went on to break news that Elections Director Molly Woon said her personal views were different from Oregon law, but consistent with the state registering noncitizens.

I also dove into the fact that Oregon first learned that it had registered noncitizens to vote from a leftwing dark money nonprofit in Chicago, and as soon as the news went public sought an emergency briefing from a related and similar nonprofit.

In the aftermath of the election, I addressed the noncitizen voting issue again in a deep dive into the Salem precinct that gave Democrats a supermajority in the House of Representatives come January.

Et cetera

Mostly because I’m running short on time, here are some other high points for the Roundup, i.e. low points for Oregon, from the year.

I freaked out (I think justifiably) when Oregon DOJ announced it saw no reason to charge criminally anyone in the saga of the Democratic Party of Oregon (I think knowingly) misreporting the source of its largest-ever donation. DOJ did not even charge Nishad Singh, the FTX executive who donated the funds, even though Singh had pleaded guilty to federal charges of campaign finance fraud for the same behavior he exhibited in the Oregon case, and admitted to violating Oregon law.

Another piece of good news came at the end of the year with the resignation-under-threat-of-firing of the aforementioned Elections Director Molly Woon. I don’t have anything personally against Woon, but as the former deputy director of the Democratic Party of Oregon she had no business running a theoretically nonpartisan election program. Worse, she behaved like a partisan Democrat during her tenure.

In the next couple days, we’ll have an update on where Oregon stands on the stuff we care about as we enter 2025, and of course we’ll see how 2024 is faring at Gregorian High School. If you know, you know.