After taking office in 2015, Gov. Kate Brown struggled to outline a clear vision of her priorities for the state.
That problem was apparent by the second half of 2018 when, with the race for governor heating up, voters told opinion researchers they were unsure what the governor stood for. Even with the advantage of running in a blue state, it was clear the Democratic governor would have to work hard to make her mark against her Republican opponent, then-Rep. Knute Buehler.
Publicly, the governor’s office said there was a bright line drawn between the work of Brown’s campaign, which was explicitly political and focused on her re-election, and the state-paid employees in the governor’s office, who are to administer state business.
But newly released records show Brown’s state staff in fact shifted into overdrive during that period to lay out her policy positions — and accomplishments — on education and other central campaign issues. Her most influential aides orchestrated a series of “white papers” and minutely planned public events designed to show her as a heavy hitter who’d gotten things done and had strong policy views, according to nearly 4,000 pages of public records released to The Oregonian/OregonLive.
“Graduation rate disparities between student groups have narrowed,” Brown’s staff proclaimed in the “recent accomplishments” section of her education policy document. “While more is needed, investment in Oregon’s public schools increased 22 percent since the governor took office in 2015.”
“Since entering office in 2015, Gov. Brown has significantly accelerated state leadership in housing,” her state advisers wrote in the housing policy paper. “There has been a doubling of affordable homes in development since Gov. Brown has been in office.”
The public records, consisting primarily of emails and attachments, cover a 10-day period in August 2018 and give an eye-opening snapshot of how the governor’s high-level staffers operated heading into the height of her re-election campaign.
They provide an unprecedented look behind the curtain, the likes of which has not been examined for other recent Oregon governors. As a result, it’s unclear whether the campaign-like actions of Brown’s staff, including her chief and deputy chief of staff and communications officers, were out-of-step with those of her predecessors.
Oregon law prohibits public employees from promoting the election of a candidate during work hours.
When asked this spring about the purpose of the white papers, the governor and her chief of staff Nik Blosser both pointed out they were part of an internal plan developed in March 2018 to build the governor’s 2019-2021 budget proposal, which would be unveiled soon after the election.
“It kind of ran into this campaign timing, but that was not at all how it was initially envisioned or how it was used,” Blosser said.
The budget timeline created in March 2018, however, did not call for public release of the policies, let alone the minutely planned publicity events connected to some of the white paper releases that Brown’s state spokespeople ultimately carried out.
Brown acknowledged the policy plans produced by her state employees were important to her re-election bid.
“It’s not too surprising that that information would be either useful in supporting my re-election efforts or opposing my re-election efforts,” Brown said earlier this month. “I thought it was really important for me to lay out a very clear vision for Oregon and my white papers did that, frankly in great detail.”
Giving voters a more definitive grasp of her agenda was critical to her campaign. As Willamette Week reported, by 2018 even Democratic voters had a hard time pinning down what she’d done or stood for.
"In focus groups, we ask, 'What comes to mind when you think of Kate Brown?'" pollster John Horvick of Portland firm DHM Research told the Portland newsweekly in early fall 2018. "They really struggle to come up with anything. What is the policy she's pushed through or an argument she's taken to the voters? They can't say. She's just nondescript to them."
By late August 2018, Brown and Buehler’s campaigns were scheduling a series of gubernatorial debates and reporters were asking about the candidates’ positions on key policy issues. The Oregonian/OregonLive launched a series of weekly stories comparing the Democrat and Republican’s policy positions on Aug. 20 and other news organizations published similar articles. The governor’s office had a longstanding Aug. 24 deadline for her top aides to finish all the white papers. The first, on education, was released Aug. 27 in conjunction with a heavily promoted visit to Portland’s Madison High described by The Oregonian/OregonLive at the time as clearly a campaign appearance.
Kate Brown brought a large entourage, including spokeswoman Kate Kondayen, at left, with her for a short campaign visit to Madison High in Northeast Portland in August 2018.
Some people who read the policy papers and attended the events scheduled to promote them came away with questions about their intended use.
“What does the release of this education policy agenda mean?” wrote Paris Achen, a state politics reporter for the Oregon Capital Bureau, in an Aug. 27 email to spokespeople for the governor’s office and campaign. “How will this policy agenda be used in others (sic) way? For instance, will it be included her platform for re-election?”
Kate Kondayen, Brown’s deputy communications director, wrote back that the education policy paper would drive the governor’s budget proposal. She did not address whether it was part of Brown’s campaign platform.
Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish also wondered about the purpose of the housing policy paper on which Blosser sought input.
“Big question: what is the intended use of this document? Audience?” Fish wrote on Aug. 21.
Blosser replied, “It will be posted on her official web site and the audience for the detailed document is stakeholders and Oregonians more broadly.”
Fish wrote back with detailed suggestions more helpful to campaigning than building a budget proposal, including that the governor’s office should tie achievements more clearly to Brown. “You say that Oregon has 7,800 new affordable homes (under development) … This should be about Kate, not the state,” Fish wrote.
Portland real estate developer Robert Ball didn’t have any questions about the purpose of the housing policy paper, which he reviewed at Blosser’s request. To Ball, it was an opportunity to better position Brown to compete with Buehler for votes.
Ball wrote more than a page of notes, urging the governor to show “strong leadership,” do more to address housing needs in the Portland area and support new home construction.
“Lastly, I see that the Governor’s competition is now an environmentalist, has come out with a
solution to the housing crisis, etc … if you are to believe the ads,” Ball wrote. “I’m concerned because my hunch is that Oregonians want strong leadership that can articulate both sides of any argument and provides balanced solutions … That is out of my pay grade and (campaign consultants Kevin Looper and Angela Martin) and the strategists hopefully know who is voting and in what blocks of demographics, but I still wanted to at least voice my sense.”
Ball also offered to “prep the governor for questions.” Blosser forwarded Ball’s comments on the paper to the governor, describing them as “insightful.”
Earlier this month, Blosser said Ball misunderstood the purpose of the document. “People can’t help mixing things up … They don’t understand the bright line you’re trying to draw.”
Kondayen wrote in an email that “the inclusion of the governor’s accomplishments (in policy papers) was not made specifically for the benefit of the governor’s campaign.”
The mostly heavily promoted policy paper was the one covering Brown’s accomplishments and vision for education. The public records reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive show the governor’s state staff working feverishly to fine-tune both the white paper and the messaging around an event to release it. Oregon Department of Education officials combed graduation statistics to help choose Madison High, where rates had climbed, as the location.
With the event just days away, Blosser suggested in a late night Aug. 22 email that key staffers cancel plans to attend an annual gathering of coastal lawmakers.
“It’s going to take all of us working very hard tomorrow and talking with a lot of stakeholders to get this done,” Blosser wrote to staffers including Deputy Chief of Staff Gina Zejdlik, Chief Education Officer Lindsey Capps, education policy adviser Pooja Bhatt and Senior Director for Budget Debbie Koreski.
Indeed, at least six top staffers in the governor’s office ended up working long hours through the weekend to finish the policy paper and its publicity plan.
Blosser sought input from Brown’s communications director, Chris Pair, regarding whether the governor should acknowledge that improving the state’s schools would “require a significant investment from Oregonians.”
That statement did not make it into the final policy paper and Brown would not say in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive three days after the Madison event how much her education policies would cost, how she would pay for them or if the state would need to raise taxes. Weeks after she won election, Brown called for at least $2 billion to help schools in her budget proposal.
As Brown’s staff cycled through revision after revision to the policy paper, there was almost no evidence that Brown was shaping its direction. One exception was the governor’s insistence that they re-insert a sentence downplaying the significance of Oregon’s low high school graduation rate, which her education advisers had decided to remove due to unspecified “concerns.”
“While states have different graduation requirements and Oregon has among the most stringent, the current graduation rate still leaves too many kids behind,” the line reads. (No credible study has shown that Oregon’s graduation requirements are notably high.)
Brown did have two telephone meetings with her spokespeople, Pair and Kondayen, during the weekend before the high school event to go over her informal speech and talking points for a press conference.
Kondayen wrote in an email that a “two week snapshot of emails in the Governor’s Office does not capture the breadth of the governor’s direction and engagement on the development of the policies” in the education or other papers. Plus, Kondayen said, Brown gave input “on paper in written edits or verbally” that was not captured in the public records released.
Kondayen worked into the night Thursday and Friday and much of Sunday to write the speech, talking points and drafts of blurbs she would post on the governor’s Twitter account that Monday to promote her education policies.
In anticipation that reporters might point out the governor’s plans would cost money and ask “where will it all come from,” Kondayen suggested Brown avoid a direct answer and instead refer the question to a group of lawmakers tasked with identifying ways to improve Oregon schools.
In the speech Kondayen wrote for her boss, Brown for the first time called for Oregon to extend its school year to the national standard of 180 days — a policy Buehler had already been promoting for months. If reporters were to ask about Brown’s “change of heart,” Kondayen suggested the governor answer that the state budget was “in good enough shape that we can make some big changes.”
Earlier this month, Blosser said his concern about keeping the governor’s policy and budget process on track — rather than the need for a strong re-election platform — motivated the extraordinary push for staffers to work through the weekend. By late summer, Blosser said, he had grown frustrated that Brown’s advisers and other staff had not yet finished the documents.
“I was like, ‘I don’t care, you guys are going to work all weekend so we get one of these done,’” Blosser said.
Ulimately, the governor’s campaign proved wildly successful. Her opponent slightly exceeded her campaign finance firepower, spending nearly $19.3 million, but Brown beat him by 120,000 votes, 50 percent to 44 percent.
Brown’s executive assistant or “body man” Jack Polales was copied on many staff exchanges about her policy papers and events. At the time, Polales was working part-time for the governor’s office and the remainder of his time for her re-election campaign. Kondayen told The Oregonian/OregonLive that Polales was the only member of Brown’s staff who served simultaneous roles in both state business and the campaign.
Jack Polales, second from left, is Gov. Kate Brown's executive assistant, or "body man," and campaign finance policy analyst. In 2018, he worked part-time for the governor's office and part-time for Brown's re-election campaign. Here, Polales holds a sign at a campaign rally in Pioneer Courthouse Square last fall.
On the Sunday before the event at Madison High, Kondayen sent Polales the press conference talking points to print out and put on notecards to aid the governor’s delivery.
Brown’s state staff also helped burnish her record in other ways. Berri Leslie, a deputy chief of staff, created a document titled “Saving taxpayer dollars — accomplishments.” By stretching across past, present and projected future budgets and to money outside the state’s main general fund Leslie’s list provided the basis for Brown to claim, in an Aug. 20 campaign interview with a reporter for The Oregonian/OregonLive, that the state saved $500 million under her leadership.
The reporter asked for details and a Brown staffer arranged for a spokeswoman in the state’s budgeting agency — the Department of Administrative Services — to provide a detailed answer. That spokeswoman did not indicate the information had been copied and pasted from Leslie’s brag list.
Asked about the list Leslie generated which focused on her achievements rather than new ideas to save money, Kondayen wrote, “This document was not crafted specifically for the benefit of the governor’s campaign.”
— Hillary Borrud | hborrud@oregonian.com | 503-294-4034 | @hborrud
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