Betsy Johnson at St. Helens |
Oregon State Senator Betsy Johnson, Democrat of Scappoose, has had a lousy week, starting with articles in the Oregonian and Willamette Week suggesting she was involved in corrupt activity, and going on from there. NW Republican put her picture under the headline “Salem’s culture of corruption,” but Democrats chimed in, at Loaded Orygun (“Betsy Johnson F’s Up“) and at Blue Oregon (“Betsy Johnson’s self-dealing legislation“).
The core of the Oregonian piece (“Sen. Johnson makes a fast $119,000“) – what it suggested, at least – is that Johnson and her husband bought a piece of land near the airport at Scappoose northwest of Portland, and three months after flipped it to a developer for a profit of $119,000 (their sale price minus their purchase price). She then proposed legislation which, the article suggested, would benefit the business operation of the new owner. In all, it sounds like using public office to make private money.
And something else – she failed to report the $119,000, as she was clearly required to tell the Oregon Government Standards and Practices Commission. She made that filing only after the Oregonian brought it to her attention, and on that she admits “I am culpable”. (The deal closed early in 2005, so it should have shown up on forms in 2006.)
But of what else is she guilty – of self-dealing or worse?
There, after watching Johnson interact Sunday with a crowd at St. Helens, we’re more hesitant to convict. Not that what follows is intended to be entirely exculpatory, but it’s enough to give us pause before settling on a conclusion.
Saturday and today, Johnson spoke at six town hall meetings around the district. (Yes, implications to the contrary, they were scheduled well in advance of the Oregonian piece – notice appeared in weekly newspapers in the area, the St. Helens Chronicle for one, the week before last.) We wanted to see what happened at the session at St. Helens, since that is close by where the Scappoose airport developments were occurring.
There was another reason: Those developments were of long standing. Johnson and her husband, John Helm, have been in business at the Scappoose area and nearby for a long time, for a quarter-century and more, much of it involved with the airport. Johnson was a member of the governing board of the Port of St. Helens, which runs the airport. There’s a lot of history there, some of it acrimonious; over the years she has had battles with some of the people involved there (though she said she and the current management get along better). The point is that this is a long, involved story. The people gathered at the Columbia Center auditorium this afternoon, including local city officials and others steeped in the community (and a camera from KATU), were well aware of the history.
And not all of them were fans. Some were, but others were taking lots of notes as Johnson spoke, and some of them had sharp and pointed questions for her. They would not be easily spun.
Johnson sat alone at a table in the middle of the room, only rarely glancing at a notepad as, for 20 minutes or so, she ran through the history of the property and her family’s involvement with it. Toward the end, she said that though the property sales price was $119,000 more than the purchase price, that didn’t include a string of expenses her family made in the process of getting the deal to go through. Her family’s actual profit, she indicated, was somewhere south of $50,000, less than half what the headlines indicate. More to the point, the action on the airport land was so involved and complex over such a long stretch – a decade or so, not three months – that measuring profit becomes a complex proposition.
Said one local man who had been sharply questioning her: “Still dicey, but I’ll accept that.”
The more serious issue has to do with Senate Bill 680, which Johnson proposed (she was the only named sponsor) and which had to do with rural airports. It concerned “through the fence” business – that is, allowing businesses to move planes through the security fences so as to use them more easily for commerce. The bill said “The Oregon Department of Aviation shall establish a pilot program at up to three rural airports to encourage development of through the fence operations designed to promote economic development by creating family wage jobs, by increasing local tax bases and by increasing financial support for rural airports.” Scappoose was later chosen for one of those projects, which would seem to enhance the value of the land around the airport, such as the land Johnson and her husband were selling. And Johnson did formally declare a conflict of interest when voting on the bill.
Problem with that analysis is that – Johnson said, and no one in the local crowd contradicted her – the Scappoose airport already had, for many years, an established “through the fence” policy – had reinstated it specifically twice this decade, and had it in place before that – so that the new state would would not affect business practices there. If so (this should be easily enough determinable through Port of St. Helens records) that would mean the bill didn’t affect the value of the property being sold.
At the St. Helens meeting, Johnson started the meeting with a discussion about the Oregonian story and kept at it until all questions (and there were quite a few) were answered. That’s not the standard approach of a duck-and-hide politician. And she countered a string of allegations with a string of credible responses that seemed to satisfy an audience of people who have been living with the saga of the Port of St. Helens and the Scappoose Airport.
As noted earlier, this isn’t intended to be exculpatory, particularly; we don’t think we have enough information to settle on many conclusions.
The Standards and Practices Commission meets on June 22, and consider what to do. It ordinarily does not say much about the reasons behind its decision; we should hope that whatever its decision, it makes an exception this time. There’s too much complexity in this case to reach a snap conclusion.
Share on Facebook
