Last week, three of Gov. Tina Kotek’s top aides announced their departure from the Governor’s Office. Sources with knowledge of the matter told OPB that the shakeup could have come from personality conflicts between staff and the governor’s wife, Aimee Kotek Wilson.
Now, Kotek is considering establishing an Office of the First Spouse and has already hired two state-funded staffers to accompany First Lady Kotek Wilson to an out-of-state conference in Salt Lake City.
Dirk VanderHart is OPB’s political reporter. He joins us to share more on recent news.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Last week, three of Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s top aides announced that they were leaving the Governor’s Office. Sources suggested to OPB that the departures are due to personality conflicts between staff and Kotek’s wife, First Lady Aimee Kotek Wilson, who has been regularly attending some staff meetings. Now, Kotek is considering establishing a new Office of the First Spouse. Dirk VanderHart has been following this, he’s one of OPB’s political reporters, and he joins us to sort through this news. Welcome back.
Dirk VanderHart: Hey, pleasure to be here.
Miller: So let’s start with the Friday news. Who announced that they were leaving the Governor’s Office?
VanderHart: That is sort of a complicated question. Actually, what first happened on Friday is that Kotek, or her staff, announced that the chief of staff in the office, Andrea Cooper, would be leaving the office as of this Friday. That obviously inspired questions about what exactly was going on. And in talking with people about the move, we learned pretty quickly that the departures went deeper. On some additional questioning, the Governor’s Office acknowledged that two more of Kotek’s senior staff were also departing or going on leave. That’s deputy chief of staff Lindsey O’Brien, and special advisor Abby Tibbs.
Miller: How significant are these positions? What do these folks actually do?
VanderHart: I think this is one of the more significant shake ups you could imagine for a Governor’s Office. These women constitute three of the four members of Kotek’s executive team. Essentially, they are the people with maybe the largest role in helping implement the governor’s agenda on, as you know, some really tough challenges. Things like housing, homelessness, the very severe crisis of mental health and addiction, all these things the governor has said she’s gonna prioritize. These are really her top lieutenants of making sure her dicta go forward and are carried out.
Miller: What have you learned about why these three people left the Governor’s Office, or are going to leave?
VanderHart: Sure. Very little official, this is one of the things where the rumor mill runs rampant. You got to talk to a lot of people. These three women haven’t said anything publicly about these departures, and the Governor’s Office is refusing to offer any details. But pretty soon after the shake up became public, people who know and talk to members of Kotek’s staff began hearing a pretty clear narrative, which is that the chief of staff, Andrea Cooper, had registered major concerns about the expanding role of First Lady Aimee Kotek Wilson, and how that’s playing out in the administration. Those concerns were apparently rebuffed, we have heard, by the governor, and that ultimately appears to have led to this shake up. It is not clear whether Kotek was fired or quit. It appears that the other two women departed voluntarily.
Miller: How involved in official governor’s business has First Lady Kotek Wilson been?
VanderHart: She has been in the mix, and I don’t think in ways heretofore that have been really surprising. From what we know, Kotek Wilson has participated in meetings that touch on behavioral health policy. That’s something we learned in the past week, and that she’s attended meetings on the governor’s schedule and travel plans. But she’s also sometimes attended events officially on behalf of the governor’s office. She was a fixture of this one Oregon tour that Kotek carried out in her first year where she visited every county. I don’t think that’s very surprising. It’s been out there, but we haven’t known a ton about it.
Miller: Does she have a clear policy focus?
VanderHart: She does. Kotek Wilson has a background in social work. She has her masters of social work. It’s a career she began to pursue after actually getting her start in the political realm where she met Kotek. But the social work history has been a focus for her since she became first lady. She has said for some time actually that she wants to use this platform of being First Lady to make things better for people with mental health and addiction issues. Not too much more details than that, but certainly what she’s been focused on.
Miller: Yesterday afternoon, Kotek Wilson put out a press release saying that she lives with mental illness and alcohol use disorder. What was the context for sharing that?
VanderHart: I think that’s the statement that had some people scratching their heads when they read it. I took the intent for her bringing up these personal struggles to be justifying her interest in this larger role in state policy, which as you can imagine has been the subject of some really intense inquiry among Oregon media in the last five days. I think by talking about those personal experiences, it seems she is perhaps answering the question about why this larger role is necessary, even if she’s not really addressing it head on. There was certainly no suggestion in the statement that Kotek Wilson’s struggles with addiction had anything to do with the recent departures. It just seemed to offer a more personal emphasis on why she wants to do this.
Miller: And as you’re saying, maybe an explanation for how her lived experience could be beneficial as a member of a kind of advisory team.
VanderHart: Correct.
Miller: Before this weekend, how much had the governor talked about her wife’s involvement in policy meetings? How much was publicly known?
VanderHart: I don’t think a lot. Again, she was the first spouse, so she was accompanying the governor when she visited all 36 counties, having dinner with people, meeting folks in the community - very, very routine stuff. I don’t think there was any indication until last week of how much Kotek Wilson wanted to expand her influence, or the tumult that was apparently causing the Governor’s Office. I have heard even among folks within the Governor’s Office, some of this was pretty surprising when it all came out.
Miller: So the Governor’s Office wrote in a statement released to the press yesterday, “the exploration of the establishment of the Office of the First Spouse is in preliminary stages.” What does that mean?
VanderHart: What it means is Kotek is thinking about doing something that, as far as I know, hasn’t been done in Oregon, which is formally creating an office that her wife would have control over within the administration. What that looks like at this point, as far as I know, is very unclear. Kotek’s office has said it’s trying to figure that out as part of this process.
But we gotta note, Kotek has taken some substantial steps toward what it might look like. Just this week, Kotek Wilson was assigned a highly paid staffer to act as an advisor. It’s a position that I think would be akin to chief of staff in many ways. And that’s on top of a scheduler that already helps Kotek Wilson and has for a while. And the governor also took the rare step of telling Oregon state police to accompany Kotek Wilson in a bodyguard capacity the way they do with Kotek, when she attends events on the governor’s office’s behalf. We have a first lady with two staff, bodyguard protection. It starts to look more like an office even if it doesn’t have that official title.
Miller: Does the governor essentially have absolute power to create and to fund positions within her own office?
VanderHart: No, but sort of yes. The governor’s budget is formally written and approved by the legislature. Any major additions need to be approved by lawmakers at some point. But that can seem like a pretty loose constraint in practice. People I’ve talked to say the governor has pretty broad leeway to spend the money on staff and initiatives that she wants once it’s approved. That doesn’t mean though that continued funding for those staff or for those initiatives would ultimately be approved by the legislature when she needs to come looking for more money next budget cycle.
Miller: What kinds of ethics rules govern this situation?
VanderHart: It’s a good question, and I will be frank, I don’t have the broadest command of every ethics rule. There has not at this point been any indication they’ve been breached. Kotek Wilson, I think crucially, is not drawing a salary of her own, even though she is getting more resources to serve as first lady. State law pretty clearly bars public officials like Kotek from installing loved ones in lucrative positions. So again, there’s not evidence right now that’s happening. And Kotek’s office has said it’s ensuring all state ethics rules are being followed as it explores this new office.
We do know though that at least one ethics complaint has been filed against Kotek since all this emerged. That’s not an indication of anything necessarily, anyone can file one of these. We don’t know what substance it has and that won’t become clear. But that’s out there.
Miller: I’ve seen a lot of mentions of former Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber and First Lady Cylvia Hayes in the last few days. It makes sense, because as longish term Oregonians or listeners to the show will remember, there are some parallels between that situation and what we’re talking about here. But the situations are also really different in meaningful ways. Can you just remind us what happened with John Kitzhaber and his partner, later fiancée?
VanderHart: This was during Kitzhaber’s third term in office. He’d been governor, took a break, became governor again. And when he got back into the office he brought his fiance, Cylvia Hayes who took a very active role in the administration. The reason this keeps coming up is is she did some of the same things we are now hearing about Kotek Wilson. She pressed for more influence in policy matters, she required a police detail.
But as you say, Hayes’s situation was different in a very important way, which is that while she was carving out this role in the administration, she was also accepting paid work from entities that stood to benefit from influencing the administration, which is a crucial difference here. That ultimately led to ethics violations against Hayes, fines, and it ultimately forced Kitzhaber to resign in 2015.
Miller: So let’s get back to the position that Kotek Wilson could have. Again, there was all that preliminary language from the governor’s office that they’re still exploring the idea of establishing this, it’s in the preliminary stages. But how many other states have something like what Tina Kotek is now envisioning for Oregon?
VanderHart: It is not very, very clear. I have spent a lot of time in the past few days looking over all these governors’ sites. All states handle this stuff a little differently. States like California or Virginia or Ohio are pretty up front that they have a formal office of the first spouse. In California, first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom actually has six staffers under her, which is the biggest example I’ve seen. Other states use some of the same wording but don’t seem to be quite as organized in terms of these offices. There’s just no systematized list of all this. I think it’s fair to say that the thing that Kotek and her wife are pursuing definitely have precedent in other states, even though they’re pretty novel for Oregon. And that’s something that the Governor’s Office has emphasized again and again since last Friday.
Miller: What kind of work do these first ladies or first gentlemen, first partners or spouses, do?
VanderHart: It’s another thing that varies with state, right? Often I think these can be fairly ceremonial positions, but, you know, they also take on some really weighty stuff. People talk about fighting child sex trafficking. They talk about helping out at-risk kids. But there’s also promoting the arts or preserving the governor’s mansions. There’s just a huge variety of things. It’s important to note that in most states, the role of the first spouse gets little attention from the public just because it kind of is more of a ceremonial, off to the side role.
Miller: So I’m just curious, when you have talked to lawmakers or lobbyists or other powerful people, have you gotten the sense that this story is going to snowball, or that it’s going to die down?
VanderHart: I think that is an open question. For a lot of people at this point, the role that Kotek Wilson is pursuing here is not very novel on the national stage. It’s not very rare. I think if this were just a story about that expanded role that she’s pursuing, we probably wouldn’t be talking about it. That’s what I keep hearing from folks I’m discussing this with.
But the fact that this dynamic has now led to this sort of seismic shake up in Kotek’s office is the real story here. It’s something that could hamper the governor’s ability to pursue her agenda on those things. We are talking about housing and homelessness, behavioral health, education. Who she fills these openings with, whether or not they are able to be successful I think is going to be a big question going forward. And exactly what happened here I think is still a question a lot of people are asking. Why did these people feel the need to bail after being pretty loyal to the governor for so long?
Miller: Dirk, thanks very much.
VanderHart: Yeah, my pleasure.
Miller: Dirk VanderHart is a member of OPB’s political reporting team. He joined us to fill us in on some of the details of recent departures from Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s office, and the more official role that she is seeking now for her wife, First Lady Aimee Kotek Wilson.
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