Governor Kitzhaber evidently thinks of Oregonians as idiots who will believe anything. He now wants us to believe that he called Secretary of State Kate Brown and asked her to hustle back from a conference in Washington, D.C., so he could tell her he was not resigning. Really?
Cylvia Hayes’ was throwing her weight around as “first lady,” as reported by The Oregonian/OregonLive, because she wanted Oregon to adopt a new way to measure changes in the economy. Most of us had never heard of the “Genuine Progress Indicator.” But thanks to Google you can look it up. It sounds like a ploy by people in […]
One thing the Kitzhaber-Hayes story shows is that the governor’s judgment in running his office leaves something to be desired. Now it also illustrates that Oregon’s claim to run a completely transparent government is a sham.
Oregon’s official state government website, www.oregon.gov, has a page devoted to “First Lady Cylvia Hayes” along with a description of a program she runs for the state, the Oregon Prosperity Agenda. It also includes her “full biography,” but as Oregon has found out in the last few days, the official version is anything but full.
Turns out that Oregon has a “Prosperity Initiative” and Cylvia Hayes, the governor’s lady, is in charge of it. I had never heard of this until Willamette Week reported that Hayes had given a talk about prosperity in Portland on Dec. 16, when she got a parking ticket for displaying a state police pass on […]
The answer: Openness and candor
The Kitzhaber affair would not have cascaded into a debacle if he had been forthcoming from the start. So the lesson for public officials once again is this: Complete and utter openness is the only thing that offers any hope of repairing serious mistakes.
Tags: Cylvia Hayes, John Kitzhaber, Oregon Public Records Law