Good governance groups that two years ago negotiated a historic campaign finance law with the Oregon Legislature now say lawmakers have betrayed them by backing a “technical fix” bill to that law that instead creates “huge loopholes” to political spending limits.
Leaders at advocacy groups Honest Elections, League of Women Voters, Common Cause of Oregon, Consolidated Oregon Indivisible Network and the state’s Independent and Progressive political parties are calling on lawmakers to vote against the bill. And they’re calling on Gov. Tina Kotek not to sign it into law if it passes both chambers.
The Oregon House Rules Committee is set to consider a not-yet-released amendment to House Bill 4018 on Thursday morning, with votes of the full House and Senate expected to follow.
If lawmakers pass the bill and Kotek signs it, Independent Party leaders said Wednesday they’ll bring new campaign finance regulations to the next legislative session in 2027.Honest Elections leaders, meanwhile, said they’ll go to Oregon voters in 2028 to get cleaner campaign spending and disclosure laws amended in the state Constitution.
“I am 100% committed to going back to a ballot referral in 2028 if we have to,” said Jason Kafoury, a Portland attorney and one of the leaders of Honest Elections Oregon, which worked on the 2024 law.
House Bill 4018 is backed by Democratic House Speaker Julie Fahey and negotiated by chief of staff Scott Moore at the behest of Secretary of State Tobias Read, who said it’s needed for Read’s office to meet a 2027 deadline to implement spending limits.
“If we don’t get this law right, the public will see it as another broken promise, and that would do more harm than good,” Read told lawmakers at a meeting ahead of the short session.
The bill would ensure that limits are enforced in 2027. But in its current form, would also:
– Double legal spending limits by applying them to calendar years rather than two-year election cycles.
– Increase allowances for in-kind contributions such as donated time, supplies, transportation and office space by applying limits per candidate, rather than in aggregate during an election cycle.
– Remove a provision clearly spelling out “coordinated expenditures” as campaign contributions, which experts at the National Campaign Legal Center contend could allow unlimited spending.
– Allow donors to create multiple LLCs to contribute money to a candidate, as long as the donors did not create the LLC for the “sole purpose” of circumventing the law.
– Delay until 2031 the requirement to disclose original sources of campaign funds.
The bill’s critics say it’s been written by business and lobbying groups to circumvent the limits and render the 2024 law meaningless.
“Democratic leadership in the House, which is primarily responsible for the negotiations back in 2024, basically ghosted us for the last eight months and has been in secret negotiations with the business lobbyists and the labor lobbyists, and they’ve come up with this bill that basically destroys the campaign finance compromise we reached in 2024,” said Dan Meek, a Portland attorney representing Honest Elections Oregon. “It punches huge loopholes in the contribution limits.”
Moore confirmed that business and union lobbyists from trade group Oregon Business and Industry and Our Oregon, a coalition of unions that play large roles in campaigns through contributing money and time, have been invited to weigh in on the bill for months. Groups including Honest Elections Oregon and the League of Women Voters, on the other hand, were not. Moore said this is because they were unwilling to negotiate and compromise with the union and business groups.
Preston Mann, vice president of external affairs at Oregon Business and Industry, echoed Read when he told lawmakers in February that meeting the 2027 deadline for enforcing campaign limits, while pushing back the timeline on meeting reporting requirements, was necessary to preserve public trust.
“Failure to extend implementation for these sections risks requiring an underfunded Secretary of State’s Office to launch a regulatory program that is not ready and will erode public trust in our elections at a time when we can least afford it,” he said.
Stalled negotiations
Labor unions, business groups and good governance groups have long sparred over the best approach to money in politics, but the prospect of competing ballot measures forced lawmakers to act in 2024.
“At the time, the thinking was that we should let the legislators implement something that they would agree to, rather than having it forced on them by the electorate,” Meek said. “Obviously that was the wrong decision.”
The 2024 law set limits to take effect in 2027, to give time to make any legislative fixes and for the Secretary of State’s Office to update technology and guidance to candidates and donors. But by the 2025 legislative session, with Read newly sworn in as secretary of state, the fixes were not ready.
Instead, campaign finance reform advocates were blindsided last summer by a last-minute proposal from Read and Fahey to delay the contribution limits until 2031. The proposal did not pass, but Read said he still desperately needed the Legislature’s help with either more time or more money to meet 2024 law deadlines. Among his biggest asks was for funding to contract experts to overhaul Oregon’s 20-year-old campaign finance reporting system, ORESTAR, so it could handle enhanced reporting under the 2024 law.
Instead of much money, Fahey bought Read time with House Bill 4018. She dropped in mid-February a 96-page amendment that makes up the bulk of the bill on the night before lawmakers first met to discuss the bill. It gives Read until 2031 to enforce many of the requirements around reporting the sources of donations, and to enforce penalties when rules have been violated.
Oregonians had an 8 a.m. hearing the morning after the bill dropped to provide comment, and a six-minute window to weigh in at the end of another committee meeting two days later. They also had several days to submit written testimony.
Lawmakers who have since voted to continue advancing the bill have bemoaned its imperfections. Senate President Rob Wagner, D-Lake Oswego, said ahead of a Tuesday vote to send the measure to the budget-writing Joint Ways and Means Committee said that he is “not done with the conversation around how to get a better system that works.”
House Rep. Nancy Nathanson, D-Eugene, in the same meeting voted to advance the bill with the caveat that “this is a very painful choice to make.”
“We have to give the secretary of state the resources to start working on something that absolutely needs to happen,” she said. “But this isn’t the end. There’s a long legislative session and it starts in less than a year, and the legislature can come back to this.”
Sen. Jeff Golden, a longtime proponent of campaign finance reform and a vocal opponent of the bill, tried to add two last-minute amendments to order Read to enforce the 2024 law, but extend for three years the deadline on contributors reporting the source of committee and group donations over $50,000.
The Ashland Democrat’s amendments weren’t ready in time to be heard and voted on. Instead, on Wednesday evening, the Senate Rules Committee advanced Senate Bill 1502 to require the Secretary of State’s Office to propose a plan next session to address campaign finance reform issues. Golden was the lone vote in opposition.
“Experience makes me skeptical of the ‘There’s a lot more work that we’re committed to doing’ line of reasoning,” Golden told the Capital Chronicle.
He said he’ll request an interim workgroup be formed to investigate delays around implementing the 2024 law.
“I find it stunning that we’re being told there’s huge urgency to push this mess through in a short session. I don’t see a shred of evidence for that,” he said.
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