Oregon ethics watchdog rejects conservative group's complaint about Kate Brown

It took the Oregon Government Ethics Commission roughly 24 hours to vet and reject a complaint filed against Gov. Kate Brown this week.

The politically conservative nonprofit Oregon Capitol Watch Foundation filed a complaint Wednesday against the governor and her office alleging they failed to fully disclose their spending on lobbying as required under state law. The group, headed by former Republican state lawmaker Jeff Kropf, wrote that the governor's office failed to adequately disclose spending on 52 state employees who spent at least some of their time lobbying.

Oregon Capitol Watch Foundation cited public records released by the governor's office to a man in Illinois, Adam Andrzejewski, founder and CEO of a group called Open the Books. According to those records, the state spent more than $165,000 on compensation for employees who lobbied in support of the governor's office from April 2016 through the end of 2017.

The foundation alleged that the governor's office should have included overhead expenses for the state employees who lobbied. Some of the other issues the group raised – for example that the governor's office should have made sure the ethics commission was posting its lobbying disclosures online – do not appear related to state ethics laws.

Read more: http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/01/oregon_ethics_watchdog_rejects.html