4/24/2012 Updated 4/25/2012: Bill Graves story here. Kroger talked the talk on public records, but didn’t deliver. He threatened me for putting the PR manual online, then wrote a series of retrograde public records opinions that set Oregon back 20 years. To cap it off, Jeff Manning’s Oregonian piece today reports that a judge has just ruled Kroger’s DOJ illegally withheld public records in a criminal investigation:
A Marion County Circuit judge has ruled that the Oregon Justice Department deliberately withheld pertinent documents from a state employee embroiled in the 2010 criminal investigation despite the employee’s public records request.
Ironically one of the lawyers on the opposite side was Dave Frohnmayer, who helped draft the PR law in the 1970’s, did a good job enforcing it as AG, then shamelessly and repeatedly broke it as UO President, most famously by having his lawyer Melinda Grier hide the contracts that led to the $2.3 million Bellotti deal.
Kitzhaber will appoint a replacement for Kroger. The permanent AG will be determined by the May primary between Dwight Holton and Ellen Rosenblum, but won’t take office until January. At the moment it looks like the election will be decided by whichever candidate makes the most credible promises not to prosecute the increasingly powerful marijuana growers. Maybe Kitzhaber will wait til the primary is over and then appoint the winner? The DAs and the newspapers are endorsing Holton, Frohnmayer and Phil Knight are making donations to Rosenblum.
On an unrelated matter — a survey is going out to the Option Retirement people from a committee charged with some kind of review of the program.
Anyone know what’s going on? Is OUS going to try to screw the ORP people like they did years back (only to fail when they realized what they wanted to do would not pass muster in the courts)?
Good grief, if they are trying to pull another fast one, I might even give up my PI grant to joint the union!
Forget state politics. It’s Chinatown.
Kroger is very intelligent with a lot of energy. Its unfortunate that he was not able to apply himself constructively in the state gov’t political environment. I can’t imagine this guy working out at Reed. He’s not collaborative at all and yet Reed has a history of shared governance. This guy is GP on steroids. It will be interesting to see how long he lasts at Reed.