Governor Kotek’s Road to Perdition: A Timeline
Considering all that's happened in the past year, what's next for Oregon's embattled governor?
Ascensio: Meet Oregon’s 39th Governor
Christine “Tina” Kotek, a savvy political operative who previously led the state’s House of Representatives for nine years as speaker (a state record), has managed to keep a low national profile since winning the governor’s race in 2022. A native of small-town Pennsylvania who moved to Oregon during college, Kotek, 58, in 2023 became the nation’s “first openly lesbian” governor, according to her official bio — (an honor she shares with Mass. Gov. Maura Healey).
Being openly lesbian might not seem like a top qualification for governor, but Kotek, in a relatively close race, edged out fellow House members Betsy Johnson (I), a centrist timber heiress and former helicopter tour pilot who served in the House for 20 years, and minority leader Christine Drazan (R), both of whom quit the House to oppose Kotek’s progressive agenda. With strong labor union support, which contributed around $1.2 million to her gubernatorial campaign, Kotek won 47% of the vote on pledges to tackle homelessness, housing, mental health and education challenges across the state. (Drazan and Johnson got around 43% and 9%, respectively.)
Peccatum Originale: Staff Exodus
The governor’s office first became embroiled in scandal in March 2024, which saw the departures of chief of staff Andrea Cooper, deputy chief of staff Lindsey O’Brien, and special adviser Abby Tibbs. These were experienced, capable and dependable members of the governor’s team: Cooper had previously served as deputy chief of staff to former Gov. Kate Brown, and O’Brien had served Kotek faithfully since 2015, acting as her chief of staff when Kotek was House speaker. Their sudden departures augured dark days ahead for the governor.
The following month saw the additional departures of deputy general counsel Lindsey Burrows and communications director An Do. Investigative reporting by Willamette Week revealed that Cooper had actually been fired in retaliation for repeatedly questioning the unofficial yet growing influence of Kotek’s partner, first spouse Aimee Kotek Wilson, who increasingly asserted herself in policy and personnel decisions. At a press conference the governor hosted in May 2024, she was asked about the reason for the high-profile departures; when asked whether she had sacrificed her top people to make her wife happy, Kotek responded, “I have not.”
Former Gov. Barbara Roberts, whom Willamette Week interviewed for a story, opined that for five senior staff to depart in such short order meant they must have found the situation “intolerable.” Ultimately, the furor prompted the governor’s office to produce a handbook on the role of the “first partner.”
Luxuria: Getting Away With It
On June 28, complaints brought by the departing staffers were dismissed at a meeting of the Oregon Government Ethics Commission — or rather, the motion to proceed to a formal investigation deadlocked in a 4-4 vote along party lines, with the ninth, tie-breaking Democrat vote absent that day. Kotek, for now at least, was off the hook.
The commission was created legislatively to comprise nine members appointed by the governor: eight on recommendations from each party, and the ninth at the governor’s sole discretion. In January 2024, the commission appointed a new executive director, Susan Myers, who enjoys “compet[ing] annually in a fantasy Tour de France league” and watching Doctor Who, according to an OGEC newsletter. Could Myers, newly hired by the committee to conduct such investigations, simply have lacked sufficient interest — or independence — to subject the governor to such an inquiry?
Indeed, several commissioners questioned why director Myers had not interviewed any of the three women who initially brought the complaints. Myers responded that nothing she saw in her review of the governor’s emails warranted taking such a drastic step. After the commission’s vote, the governor’s office praised the commission for its “thorough deliberations” on the matter (adding insult to injury, in the opinion of some).
Avaritia: Spending Irregularities
In January this year, another scandal erupted over spending irregularities by the governor’s office. These included paid parking for the first partner in Salem, Ore. ($65/mo.), paid parking for the governor’s federal affairs director in Wash., D.C. ($315/mo.), and four separate instances of entertainment events that seemed to serve “no official purpose” (totaling $615). The irregularities were described by the Secretary of State’s Audits Division as “minor.” Those findings were referred to the same ethics commission, which promised to review them.
Superbia: Executive Order 24-31
In December last year, Kotek issued Executive Order 24-31, which directed executive branch agencies to require private contractors bidding on public construction projects of a certain size to negotiate a “project labor agreement” (PLA) with a labor union as a condition for awarding the contract. Trade unions cheered the announcement, calling it “a huge win for Oregon,” one that “solidifies Gov. Kotek’s commitment” to organized labor.
The order also directed state agencies to set targets for using Office of Business Inclusion and Diversity–certified firms and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise businesses as sources of labor. “Oregon can both lift up workers and get big jobs done,” the governor wrote in an op-ed defending the order, published on Jan. 19.
The reality for rural Oregonians, however — especially those living in central and eastern Oregon, which covers most of the state’s land but contains less than half of its population — is that, to name one example, there are currently no union contractors doing heavy road work east of the Cascades. Statewide, a 2022 study by the Oregon Department of Transportation found that, for state construction contracts over $25 million from 2017 to 2022, 89% of projects went to non-union firms.
Chris Doty, Deschutes County director of public works, has been building roads for 24 years. He regularly speaks with peers in other county road departments and he worries that the policy will benefit mostly urban workers at the expense of rural Oregonians. Since there are no union shops in central Oregon, those road projects are likely to be staffed by firms from the Willamette Valley or southwest Washington state, he says.
In response to the December order, on Feb. 21 Kotek was sued in Marion County Circuit Court by the Oregon-Columbia Chapter of Associated General Contractors of America, more than a dozen of its individual members, and two other business groups. That lawsuit reads, in part: “The Governor does not have the power under Article III, Section 1 of the Oregon Constitution to require PLAs on public construction projects. … Under the Oregon Constitution, the governor is not vested with the power to make law, regardless of the policy objective.”
The timing of the order wasn’t random, argued the contractors, coming as it did one week after the Oregon Supreme Court heard arguments on appeal in a similar suit against another of Kotek’s orders for PLAs, and also one week before Christmas with immediate effect. In essence, he governor seems to have decided not to wait for the Supreme Court to weigh in — opting instead to issue a second, more expansive order intended to test the limits of executive authority. Those two cases are still pending in the Oregon circuit and supreme courts.
Ira: Illegal Incarcerations
In addition to the controversies listed above, Gov. Kotek so far has had four separate orders overturned by Oregon courts, including the Supreme Court, which were found to have unlawfully returned former inmates to prison. For example, in Brown v. Kotek (2024), the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that Kotek’s order had resulted in one woman’s “illegal imprisonment.”
In another suit brought by the Oregon Justice Resource Center, a Multnomah County judge ordered the immediate release of a man found to have “served approximately eight months longer than was legally allowable.” Malori Maloney, the attorney from OJRC’s FAIR Law Project who argued the case, gave the following statement to OPB: “[I]t’s extremely disturbing that it took the intervention of the courts to right these wrongs. … [I]n cases like [the Multnomah County case] and the three others, attorneys have successfully argued that Kotek’s orders unconstitutionally extended [prison] sentences,” said Maloney. Other cases are pending in the courts.
Perditio: What’s Next for the Governor?
Undaunted by succeeding scandals over her wife’s inappropriate role in official decisions, the loss of her senior staff, complaints to the Oregon ethics commission, questionable expenses, illegal incarcerations of ordinary Oregonians and executive orders seemingly intended to reward her biggest supporters, the labor unions, Gov. Kotek seems poised to continue testing the limits of her governorship. Emboldened perhaps by a lack of any consequences from the ethics commission or from the courts, Kotek continues to march bravely toward her undoing.
After 18 years in state politics — and with Democrat supermajorities in both House and Senate, as over much of the past decade, and with Democrats occupying ever other statewide elected office (Treasurer, Secretary of State, Attorney General, Commissioner of Labor and Industries, and so on) — it’s no wonder if Kotek doesn’t feel herself accountable to anyone anymore except for the people financing her campaigns. Infallible, invincible, untouchable by scandal, Oregon’s governor is soaring on waxen wings too close to her main-sequence star. Alas, alas, when will she tumble down like Icarus?
Her weakness, her waxen wings, are precisely that Kotek has come to believe in her own ability above all else — her own intelligence, her own counsel, her own attention to detail, her own prodigious memory, her own experience, her own previous victories — that has lost sight of her true place in the cosmos. Nothing lasts forever, no one rules forever. All that is born must die.
As the shoot leads to the leaf, the leaf to the bud, the bud to the flower, the flower to the fruit, the fruit to the seed, and the seed to the shoot, so too every form carries within it the seed of the following form, so the cosmic wheel goes round and round as the stars circle in their orbits, and so too Kotek will one day have to move on to make room for the next governor. Her self-assurance and lack of accountability, however, will only hasten that day.