Emails Reveal Kitzhaber Planned Showdown With Teachers Union

Willamette Week:

Before John Kitzhaber resigned last month, he had hoped to force a major confrontation with the Oregon Education Association in the 2015 legislative session.

Kitzhaber’s plan, outlined in some of the thousands of emails his office sought to delete from state servers on Feb. 5., is part of a larger narrative about the tensions between the former Democratic governor and one of the most powerful groups in Salem.

Kitzhaber anticipated a showdown with the 45,000 member teachers’ union because of what he referred to in emails as “the disconnect.”

That term refers to the disconnect between funding for K-12 education, about three-quarters of which comes from the Legislature, and school district budgets, which are set locally by Oregon’s 197 districts. Kitzhaber’s view was that at the local level, union representatives nearly always got the better of school boards in labor negotiations. Those local boards would regularly agree to contracts more generous than Salem could afford, creating misaligned expectations and a near constant climate of crisis.

In a Sept. 7, 2014 email to his labor adviser, Duke Shepard, Kitzhaber emphasized the importance of addressing “the disconnect” in his fourth and final term.

“This is a TOP priority and intimately related to our whole education agenda,” Kitzhaber wrote to Shepard. “It is the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the living room (I like this analogy much more that the elephant and all its Republican associations).”

Kitzhaber described to Shepard a conversation he’d had that day with House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland). He’d need the cooperation of Kotek and Senate President Peter Courtney (D-Salem), if he wanted to challenge OEA. He explained the situation to Kotek in the context of the overall state budget.

“The analogy I gave to Tina was this,” Kitzhaber wrote. “You (the Speaker, Senate President and the Co-Chairs) approve a 'salary pot' for me to use in negotiating with our public employee unions. It is approved by the legislature. I then ignore that pot and (taking the politically easy way out) negotiate contracts that exceed the salary pot by 20% — leaving us with only two options: laying off public employees or asking the E-Board or the legislature for more money.”

In the analogy Kitzhaber offered Kotek he would be in effect playing the role of local school boards, which, after agreeing to teacher contracts, have regularly faced choosing between layoffs and begging lawmakers for more money.Kitzhaber and his advisers knew changing the status quo would be difficult.In a Sept. 3, 2014 email to Kitzhaber, Shepard framed the stakes of the disconnect. "My read of the policy and politics is that this is the most important and significant issue in education – and if it isn’t addressed in a meaningful way, all of the targeted investments, changes to formulas, etc. won’t matter because the real money decisions are still made in bargaining with no connection to either sustainable budgeting nor to the desired outcomes the state seeks," Shepard wrote. “This is such a major push into OEA power and Democratic orthodoxy that if we look less than fully committed, it will never get anywhere. Like PERS, it will take all of the power of your office to make any progress.” Shepard was referring to Kitzhaber’s 2013 showdown with public employee unions, including OEA, over retirement benefits. 

Four years earlier, in 2010, OEA helped Kitzhaber eke out a narrow victory over his Republican competitor, Chris Dudley, contributing $1.1 million to the Democrat’s campaign.

After the election, Kitzhaber wasted little time in pushing through education reforms the OEA disliked in 2011. He followed that two years later with an even more aggressive move, calling the Legislature into special session in October 2013 to expand cuts to the Public Employees Retirement System, from $800 million to $5 billion.Those cuts created a tense relationship between Kitzhaber and OEA when he addressed the union's membership in the spring of last year.

OEA invites candidates to an annual gathering, at which they give speeches and ask for the union’s endorsement. 

Emails between Kitzhaber and Scott Nelson, a former staff adviser who was leading Kitzhaber’s campaign in the spring of 2014, detail Kitzhaber's preparation for the OEA event.

“Speech is probably closer to 11 minutes — assume that is not a problem?” Kitzhaber wrote to Nelson in a March 8, 2014 email.

“Speech time is not a problem,” Nelson replied in an email that same day.

But it was a problem. Kitzhaber spoke beyond the OEA’s prescribed 10-minute limit and people familiar with the event say an OEA official abruptly turned the governor's microphone off mid-sentence. Kitzhaber was at first livid, sources say, but then felt liberated. If he was going to confront OEA, the union’s lack of courtesy at the nominating convention made doing so easier.

The slight later became a running joke in the Kitzhaber campaign.

The following week, candidates’ Voters’ Pamphlet statements were due to the Oregon Secretary of State’s elections division for the May primary.

In a March 12 email to Kitzhaber, the political consultant Mark Wiener warned the governor the Voters' Pamphlet statement Kitzhaber submitted exceeded the strict word limit enforced by then-Secretary of State Kate Brown. 

“Looks good, but we are 7 words over (like OEA, Kate Brown will cut us off),” Wiener wrote. Kitzhaber trimmed his Voters' Pamphlet statement but he and OEA never reconciled.

After helping Kitzhaber win in 2010, the teacher union withheld its support in 2014, denying him both its money and its endorsement. 

Kitzhaber won anyway.

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