Good-government groups say HB 4018 would gut Oregon campaign finance reform

Presenter: Opponents of HB 4018 testified Feb. 10 and 12, saying the bill will delay and dismantle campaign finance reform in Oregon. Sen. Jeff Golden:

Sen. Jeff Golden: My name is Jeff Golden. I represent Senate District 3 in Southern Oregon.

Mr. Chair, this bill is moving and changing fast, as did HB 4024 in 2024. There’s a lesson here that we should have learned, because that speed-of-light assembly of a very complicated bill in 2024 is seen as a primary cause of our basic problem now: a new campaign finance program with unclear provisions that has turned out to be astonishingly difficult, time-intensive, and expensive to implement.

That’s the problem that this bill, HB 4018, was supposedly drafted to solve. I’m here today, Mr. Chair, because the -6 and -8 versions of this bill appear to do a lot more than that.

Rather than merely improve implementation for HB 4024, it seems to change important elements of the substance of this bill in ways that violate the stakeholder agreement that got the bill passed.

Parts of the bill before you apparently carve big new loopholes to evade disclosures and allow the funneling of more money to candidates than did the bill that passed two years ago. Not small details.

You’ve received (or will be receiving) testimony from the good-government groups that list at least nine very specific examples that violate the terms they agreed to when they signed on to HB 4024, two years ago.

We need to remember that after Oregonians overwhelmingly passed Measure 107 in 2020 to constitutionally endorse our ability to regulate campaign financing, almost nothing happened for four years.

Then the good-government groups, which previously ran very successful ballot measures to limit campaign financing in Portland and Multnomah County, organized IP 9, a very robust petition drive to put a campaign finance program on the ballot that didn’t advantage the big donors that have dominated Oregon politics.

The likelihood that that measure would pass is what galvanized those big donors to put aside their differences, throw together (HB) 4024 in a matter of days, and run it at breakneck speed through the last short session. Those big donors did bring the good-government groups to the table and accepted several of their suggestions in return for cancellation of IP 9.

The good-government groups would never for a minute have considered dropping that particular initiative—that popular initiative—if they had known that the terms they’d agreed to would be largely canceled out by a rushed, opaque short session bill like this one, a bill that has been framed solely as an effort to overcome the implementation problems of the original bill.

Mr. Chair, if that summary related to me by the good-government groups has material errors, I very much hope someone will straighten me out. But if it’s essentially what has happened, I have to ask: What are we doing? Is this the kind of reform process we want to show Oregonians who’ve already become so cynical about how we do business?

I hope you’ll drop this legislation, Mr. Chair, or at least anything that resembles its -6 or -8 versions and work in the interim on the task we thought you were undertaking, making implementation work for HB 4024, or maybe for a simpler, more implementable and better bill. 

Norman Turrill (League of Women Voters of Oregon): My name is Norman Turrill. The League of Women Voters of Oregon wants to express our strong opposition to this gut-and-stuff amendment.

This amendment is a complete betrayal of the deal made in 2024 for withdrawing initiative IP 9 in exchange for passage of HB 4024 and agreeing to work on technical fixes without policy changes.  

This deal was made after extensive four-way negotiations between Honest Elections Oregon, with the Oregon League (of Women Voters) as a constituent organization and legislative leaders, including Speaker Fahey, labor union lobbyists, and business lobbyists.

This also followed a constitutional amendment passed by Oregon voters by 78% in 2020 that allowed campaign finance reform. It is clear that many, many voters will be unhappy if this amendment is adopted. 

Honest Elections Oregon made many attempts to offer technical fixes for HB 4024 over the last two years. The League will not repeat those fixes.

We also not attempt to critique the long amendments to this bill, which are offering so many bad policy changes. I would ask you to next talk with Dan Meek, who will present the defects on behalf of the coalition.

I’ll just say that the amendment allows large special-interest organizations to largely continue dominating campaign finance in Oregon, contrary to voters’ will and interests, while still limiting individual contributors.

It also delays for four years and subsequently erodes the financial disclosure requirements. I urge your opposition to these amendments. 

Dan Meek (Honest Elections Oregon): My name is Dan Meek. I’m an attorney in Portland with several decades of experience in campaign finance reform.

The Honest Elections Oregon Coalition most strenuously opposes the proposed -6 amendment, which was first revealed by posting on OLIS (Oregon Legislative Information System), the process that excluded all campaign finance reform advocates in Oregon, including the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, the Consolidated Oregon Indivisible Network, the Campaign Legal Center, the Independent Party of Oregon, and all other campaign finance reform advocates, although we have asked for years to be included in the discussions.

Neither the 2025 legislature nor this one has considered an actual technical fix bill. We identified the necessary technical fixes to HB 4024 in June of 2024. (The most recent description of those technical fixes is attached to my testimony, followed by the original version of those fixes.)

The -6 amendment does not fix those technical errors. Instead, it massively changes HB 4024 to come very close to making the contribution limits and disclosure requirements illusory. 

We’ve identified so far nine significant substantive changes with more to come:

1. It delays all disclosure requirements, including reporting of all original sources of funds used to make independent expenditures by three years to 2031. It moves the informational dashboard requirement to 2032.

2. It doubles the limits on contributions into multicandidate committees by changing the denominator from election cycle which is two years to one year, without changing the numerator.

3. It deletes the ban on donors making contributions that exceed what a recipient can lawfully accept. That means that none of the contribution limits can be violated by donors to candidates or committees, which is a massive change to HB 4024.

4. It effectively eliminates anti-proliferation requirements on persons making contributions so that any person can contribute the nominal contribution limit several times over.

But it adds the requirement that two entities are not ever considered to be the same for these purposes unless they were established for the sole purpose of evading the contribution limit. So if you have the purpose of evading the contribution limit but some other purpose, then it’s okay to have as many entities as you want and multiply your own contribution limits.

5. It extends the massive allowed in-kind contributions by membership organizations, including thousands of hours of staff time per year, to candidates for local office, which HB 4024 does not allow.

These amendments allow any membership organization to provide 2,080 hours of staff time to any local government candidate and HB 4024 allowed zero.

6. It changes the massive limits on in-kind contributions from any source, from an aggregate limit per candidate per election cycle, to a limit per contributor per candidate. In other words, HB 4024 limited a candidate to accepting an aggregate total of $5,000 in food and beverages, $5,000 in transportation, etc., and 2,500 square feet of office space.

But the -6 amendment allows the candidate to receive all of those items in those amounts from every individual corporation, union, or other entity, and that renders the limits on in-kind contributions completely illusory.

7. It eliminates the limits on funds carried over by a candidate from one election cycle to the next, which makes it extremely unfair for non-incumbents and threatens the constitutionality of the entire system.

8. It reduces or eliminates several elements of the required reporting of original sources of money used to support or oppose candidates.

9. It changes the threshold for entities to report their sources of funds for political campaign independent expenditures from an aggregate of $50,000 per election cycle to not less than $50,000 in election cycle for any statewide or local election.

That means that under the -6 amendment, any entity can avoid reporting by spending $49,000 on independent expenditures per candidate, while actually spending an aggregate of millions of dollars in the election. And that’s what HB 4024 was supposed to apply to.

We urge the committee to reject the -6 amendments and reject any amendments developed behind closed doors and without public scrutiny.

Dawn Regier: Hello, I’m Dawn Regier from Portland, Oregon. I’m on the board of the Oregon Progressive Party Board and a member of Honest Elections. I vehemently oppose HB 4018. The people have spoken on campaign finance reform and honest selections, but they’re being drowned out by big money. Oregon Progressive Party is very different from Democrats and Republicans and would not try to kill honest elections and real campaign reform.

Delaying real campaign reform and honest elections by obfuscating the issue shows disrespect to the voters and how little that they’re being cared for.

Patrick Starnes: I’m Patrick Starnes. I’m a non-affiliated voter. And I ran against Gov. Brown and Dr. (Knute) Buehler in 2018 on this issue of campaign finance reform, and we got the governor to commit to amending the constitution, which is a huge project. 

And like Norm said, it wasn’t just barely passed by the voters with 51%, but with 78%. The lowest support was in Lake County was 60%.

So imagine any candidate, any politician would love to have 60% support, right? So in 2022, I ran against Gov. Kotek and I hope that she will veto this. I don’t know how many vetoes she’s done, but hopefully she’ll veto this. 

No offense, but I have to call BS on this whole delay tactic. And we’ve seen this for decades in Oregon on campaign finance reform. Maybe they need an extra year, you know, but I just, it’s sus to me. 

I mean, ’31? That’s right after Tobias’s governor race. So that’s sus. And if Fahey’s running, that’s suspect too. So I’m just calling bull on that whole delay technique.

Now, if you want a simpler bill, back in 2023 my rep, Col. Marty Wilde’s last bill he wrote for me was (write this down, please) LC 1469 and I’ll make sure your staff get it. 

I know I talked to a bunch of you back in ‘23 about that, because it’s as simple as no corporate money, no PAC money, and $1,000 limit on each of us, including Phil Knight. So his $1,000 would be equal to my $1,000. 

So if you want a gut-and-stuff and make something really simple for IT to process with the existing ORESTAR, then you make this LC 1469 Oregon’s campaign finance reform. 

Catherine Nikolovski (Civic Software Foundation): I’m Catherine Nikolovski, executive director of Civic Software Foundation. Our nonprofit built and currently maintain the city of Portland’s small donor elections core system. 

I registered as neutral. I feel I have very important perspective to bring here from the software development side. So we were also on a very aggressive timeline. It was a high- risk and complex piece of software to build.

We executed our contract in March of 2019, and we delivered this software in September of 2019. The program has been using this software successfully for six years.

So when we built the software, we had ORESTAR in mind and we built the capacity for the system to scale up, to meet the volume of transactions that would provide statewide performance.

So in this case, I certainly understand—while I registered as neutral, I do get that the timeline is very aggressive, in order to deliver bespoke software for Jan. 1. 

But this should not be the barrier, because the city has a functioning software system that off the shelf is going to meet nearly all of the requirements that I saw in the RFP.

So, particularly if there was some ability to look into and speak with the city about possibly an intergovernmental contract, we are continuously upgrading and innovating the software—feature requests, responding to policy changes—all of this is part of an open source strategy that has been very successful in this specific campaign finance case.

And we have an entire talent pool of experts that do exactly this and we know ORESTAR very well. I think this is a real option. It would be a fraction of the cost and six months we can stand something up that is going to meet the requirements that you’ll need to effectively have software to run the program, but you won’t be vendor-locked.

You can completely continue to improve the software beyond Jan. 1, 2027, and you’ll get exactly what you want eventually.

If you go with a large-scale financial software vendor, it’s very likely it will cost a huge amount of money. It may not deliver anyway, even if we push the date out. There’s a whole lot of reasons why that software is not a great fit in the long term.

Presenter: Opponents of HB 4018 say the bill betrays the 78% of Oregon voters who supported campaign finance reform in a 2020 referendum, while a software development nonprofit says its small donor system for the city of Portland can be adapted for the state in six months.

The House Committee on Rules has its next work session on HB 4018 on Tuesday, Feb. 17.