Portland city commissioner and mayoral candidate Rene Gonzalez violated campaign finance law by using taxpayer money to edit his Wikipedia page, the city auditor’s office found.
Portland City Commissioner of Public Safety, Rene Gonzalez, during a meeting of the Portland City Council, May 31, 2023.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
The office issued Gonzalez a $2,400 fine, saying he used city staff time, money and services to spiff up the page and clarify that he’s a Democrat in what it describes as “a key campaign strategy.”
“The role of Commissioner in Portland is nonpartisan; therefore, the funds and time spent on this Wikipedia edit are unrelated to Gonzalez’s City duties or accomplishments as a City Commissioner,” a Monday press release said.
Gonzalez’s office paid $6,400 to a New York company called WhiteHatWiki to make eight edits to the page in 2024, and the office “concludes that the City provided these funds and services to and on behalf of Gonzalez in his capacity as a candidate, not a current City Commissioner.”
The auditor’s office said “Gonzalez could not identify any reason why a Wikipedia edit pertaining to his status as a Democrat related to City business.”
Gonzalez pushed back against the auditor’s office Monday, accusing it of being partial as the November election nears. In an email to Auditor Simone Rede earlier this month, Gonzalez raised concern about an undisclosed “real or potential conflict” between the chief deputy auditor and the person who filed the complaint. The auditor’s office says the deputy auditor does not know her.
“Would you trust a referee that owns a house with and was in a romantic relationship with the opposing team’s head coach?” said Gonzalez, who was elected in 2022. “There’s a clear conflict of interest in the Auditor’s office. We’re confident that voters will see this for what it is: a distraction from the important work we need to do to move Portland forward.”
The Oregonian/OregonLive was the first to report in August that Gonzalez had used public funds to “spruce up” the page. The auditor’s office initially said in September that it had “insufficient evidence” to determine whether Gonzalez broke Portland’s campaign finance law.
But auditors said Monday that the initial finding was “an exceedingly close call” and that they “had not received all of the documents it had requested in the course of its investigation.” Despite what it describes as “a pattern of obstruction and interference” from Gonzalez during its investigation, the auditor’s office received “additional evidence” to support its latest finding, the release said.
Among Gonzalez’s efforts, auditors say:
- He asked the auditor to remove the Chief Deputy Auditor Reed Brodersen from the investigation, alleging Brodersen didn’t disclose a potential conflict.
- His policy adviser and chief of staff misled auditors by falsely stating that an email attachment did not exist. According to the auditor’s office, that attachment included edits to the Wikipedia page that Gonzalez’s office had proposed to WhiteHatWiki about him being a Democrat.
- He asked the auditors’ office to “void” its referral of Gonzalez to the Secretary of State for further investigation.
- He made “baseless claims that the investigation was tainted by political bias, all after his representatives misled the Auditor’s Office about key evidence.”
“This is the first time in almost two decades of enforcement that the Auditor’s Office has seen an attempt to apply this magnitude of pressure on its staff by a person under investigation,” the auditor’s office said Monday. “We find this, and the misleading of the Auditor’s Office about a key document in the investigation, relevant in the context of determining penalties in this matter.”
In his email to Rede, Gonzalez said: “From day one this investigation has had all the appearance of a politically orchestrated attack and one that has substantially interfered with the function of an elected office.”
On Monday, the auditor’s office acknowledged that the complainant “is on the board of an organization that the Chief Deputy’s former partner is on, and the organization has been vocal in its opposition to Gonzalez.” But it said there is no conflict of interest because Brodersen “does not know (the complainant) and has no relationship with her.”
“Across the nation, elections officials find themselves under attack and painted as politically motivated when they are simply performing their jobs as local bodies or the public have asked them to,” Elections Manager Deborah Scroggin said in the release. “The Auditor’s Office is committed to non-partisan, independent oversight, and conducts thorough, timely investigations as required by city law.”
This isn’t the first time this election cycle that auditors say Gonzalez ran afoul of campaign finance law. In a release earlier this month, auditors said Gonzalez broke the rules by failing to provide a disclaimer stating who had paid for a large campaign banner on a Portland street.
During a publicly televised debate on Portland-based KGW last week, Gonzalez stood by his decision to use public funds on his Wikipedia page.
“We are in an era of tremendous misinformation online,” he said. “Wikipedia is one of many tools that I have used and will use in the future to try and communicate about these difficult policy issues. And no, I don’t regret investing in staff — in terms of teaching them best practices of how to do this online.”
Moderator Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, who first reported the story for The Oregonian/OregonLive, asked Gonzalez if he was “fine with sticking taxpayers with that bill.”
Gonzalez said he was fine with training staff and then accused Kavanaugh — without providing evidence — of writing an inaccurate article that he corrected under a threat of a libel lawsuit.
Kavanaugh disagreed with Gonzalez’s characterization of the correction, which states that the article “has been corrected to reflect that Commissioner Rene Gonzalez’s office, not WhiteHatWiki, submitted the proposed changes to Wikipedia on June 25. The original article incorrectly said WhiteHatWiki had done so.”