A Stranger Comes to Town

This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the state.

John Day, Ore. — Who is Nick Green?

For nearly a decade, citizens of John Day, the largest but steadily shrinking town in Grant County, have disagreed.

Is Green, whom the John Day City Council hired as city manager in 2016, a savior who could be the last chance for the resource-rich but economically struggling town? Or is he a self-promoter who set out to exploit the city’s vulnerability?

John Day (pop. 1,617) is so divided over Green that the city’s few bars and restaurants are segregated according to their customers’ views of him: Green’s supporters favor the 1188 Brewing Company on East Main Street. His critics favor the Snaffle Bit Dinner House.

A walk through some of the projects he developed in John Day reveals why people are so split over Green:

On one hand, residents can enjoy 3 miles of new walking trails, access the city’s namesake river from a 90-acre site the city acquired under Green’s management, or choose to live in one of two subdivisions Green spearheaded.

On the other hand, a dusty vacant lot now lies where Green demolished the county’s only public swimming pool, and three industrial-scale greenhouses the city built on his watch in hopes of augmenting the local food supply now stand empty.

John Day and Grant County’s fortunes only worsened in January of this year, when the area’s largest timber mill, Malheur Lumber, closed. It was the latest blow from decades-ago changes in federal policy that permanently reduced the harvest in one of the West’s most timber-rich counties.

The mill’s shutdown cost 76 family-wage jobs in a county that’s long suffered from the state’s highest unemployment rate (7.1% last month, 40% higher than the state average). Today, instead of freshly milled ponderosa pine, the dominant smell in John Day is the pungent tang of juniper trees—pests with little economic value—that swarm the region’s hillsides like a conquering army.

And the bad news keeps coming. In May, Grant County officials announced they might have to close the county’s only public library due to budget woes.

In the face of such challenges, there is fierce disagreement about what to do. And Green, 46, whose Apple watch, golf shirts and closely buzzed hair don’t match local tastes, which run to snap-button shirts, boots and hats, has been at the center of that dispute for nearly a decade.

It’s a conflict that also holds lessons for many rural counties across Oregon that, like Grant County, lack sufficient housing and good jobs and attract less attention from the state Capitol than the larger cities of Portland, Eugene and Bend. Oregon as a whole is entering uncharted waters as population growth flattens and many of the state’s major employers—Intel, Nike and Oregon Health & Science University—face upheaval. But the difficulties facing rural Oregon run deeper.

Peter Maille, a professor emeritus in economics at Eastern Oregon University, has studied the economies of rural counties east of the Cascades, including Grant County.

“When change happens fast—like the timber harvest ends—people will hope for a while that it will come back,” Maille says. “You get somebody from the outside and they might have some good ideas, but they also might get marginalized because they didn’t grow up there.”

Despite being a newcomer, Green excelled at attracting state and federal funding, which he deployed to make John Day a crucible for new ideas. But Green’s projects also cleaved the community into insular clans.

Green’s arrival in John Day gave some people hope—and ultimately drove others to file stacks of ethics complaints, ask the Oregon Department of Justice to investigate, and launch a flurry of recalls (some successful) that divides Grant County to this day.

“Some think he’s the Messiah,” says Grant County’s top elected official, Jim Hamsher. “And others think he’s the Antichrist.”

A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN

From Strawberry Mountain’s snow-capped peak to the John Day River, which rushes past the John Day Fossil Beds, the Painted Hills, and Picture Gorge on its 281-mile sprint to the Columbia River, there are few more beautiful places in Oregon than Grant County. Hikers and cyclists come for the scenery, hunters for elk and antelope, and anglers for the steelhead and trout.

When Green arrived in John Day in 2016, he recognized the difficulties amid the scenic splendor.

One problem: its remoteness. Unlike other Eastern Oregon cities, such as Baker City, Ontario or La Grande, John Day is far from an interstate highway (79 miles to I-84) and not on a rail line. That’s a disincentive for businesses. The nearest Costco or Walmart is 120 miles away in Bend. To visit a big city, residents have to drive 190 miles to Boise or 270 to Portland.

And as with much of rural Oregon, many of the county’s brightest graduates head out for bigger opportunities, leaving behind a population that is the state’s third oldest.

“There was a strong sense of despair in John Day at the time,” Green says. “Why would anyone live here? There’s nothing happening. There’s nothing going on.

“And so we tried to shock the system.”

Green brought an unusual background for a small-town city manager. He studied microbiology at Brigham Young University and worked at a lab that handled anthrax, the deadly bacteria. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he went to work for the federal Defense Intelligence Agency, later moving to Booz Allen Hamilton and Jacobs Engineering, large defense contracting firms.

After a decade, Green switched careers, earning a master’s degree in public planning at the University of Washington. He and his wife moved back to her hometown, John Day, where she worked as a nurse at Blue Mountain Hospital. Green started as city manager in 2016, at an annual salary of $65,000, a fraction of what he made as a consultant.

Some people say the city council’s decision to hire Green was like bringing a Ferrari to a soapbox derby race. “Nick is a brilliant guy,” says Lynn Findley, a former Republican state lawmaker from 2018 to 2025, whose House and Senate districts included Grant County and much of Eastern Oregon.

Findley, who’d served as city manager in Vale in Malheur County, knew the challenges Green faced. “The biggest issue in rural Oregon is, we have nothing to keep young people there,” he says. “Kids go away to college and they don’t come back. The cities are getting older and older, and they are just dying.”

Green produced an early document, saying John Day wanted to attract “digital commuters, active retirees and young, working families,” adding, “the intent of the city’s strategy is to reverse the pattern of population and economic decline.”

One of his first initiatives: establishing an urban renewal district to incentivize new housing. That’s more typically a big city tool designed to redevelop blighted neighborhoods.

It might seem paradoxical that a county that’s been losing population since 2000 would face a housing shortage. But Hamsher, the county’s top official, says that outcome results from predictable family dynamics. As young people graduate high school and leave for college or jobs, a family of four becomes a family of two aging parents. “Then one dies and you have one person living alone in the house on a fixed income,” he says. So even though the population declines, the number of empty houses or apartments doesn’t increase.

In response to the housing shortage, Green obtained a loan from the state and funded the infrastructure for two new subdivisions, yielding 17 new houses so far. (Homes built with 3D printers, which Green touted to considerable media attention, never materialized. “We backed the wrong company,” he says.)

The council also approved other Green initiatives, including the 2017 purchase of 53 acres that formerly contained the Oregon Pine sawmill along the John Day River for the Innovation Gateway, which reconnected the city to the river and freed up developable land for businesses. Green also planned to replace John Day’s aging public pool with an aquatic center.

In 2019, Green persuaded the council to build three greenhouses. “We’re absolutely in a food desert here,” he explains. “We pay Whole Foods prices for week-old produce.”

He obtained state funding to begin replacing a failing water treatment plant that threatened to pollute the river. And he got state and federal funding to create Grant County Digital, a nonprofit tasked with replacing 20th century dial-up service with high-speed internet.

Dave Holland, a former John Day city councilor, says during his tenure, councilors strongly supported Green’s ideas because they believed innovation could reverse the city’s slide.

“In the past, city managers focused on making John Day pretty,” Holland says. “So when people come through, they’d say, ‘Wow, this is a pretty little community.’ But ‘pretty’ doesn’t get people to move here or keep people here. Amenities keep people here.”

Green also began to get pushback against some of his budget choices. For instance, he convinced the council to eliminate the city’s police force in 2021. The idea: to save money by contracting with the Grant County Sheriff’s Office for service.

Green acknowledges he didn’t always relate well to others. “The sheriff called me ‘an acquired taste,’” he says. “I think he was right. Yeah, I can be a bit direct.”

Findley cautioned Green. “I told Nick, ‘What you are doing is spot on, but you are too far ahead of the people in this community,’” Findley recalls. “You have to bring them along with you, and he said, ‘I don’t like to do that.’”

David Driscoll watched the drama growing around Green from his used bookstore in Canyon City, the county seat. Driscoll’s family bought a ranch in Grant County more than 60 years ago, which to some makes him a relative newcomer. “A lot of people here will tell you they are comfortable with the way things are,” Driscoll says. “And they don’t want outsiders.”

THE STRANGER MEETS RESISTANCE

Shaun Robertson, a fourth-generation Grant County resident and one of the founders of the Grant County Conservatives (which has an active Facebook group and a less active political action committee), says he likes things pretty much as they are.

Robertson, 57, a grizzly of a man, lives on his family’s 4,400-acre ranch in Mount Vernon, about 8 miles west of John Day. He and his wife also own a veterinary clinic in John Day and commercial property in the city’s center.

After studying fisheries science at Oregon State University, Robertson worked around the West, including in Grant County, on restoration, such as helping the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs re-create salmon habitat on the John Day River. These days, he works long hours on his ranch, often, he says, from “can’t see to can’t see.”

Robertson served as president of the Grant County Farm Bureau, and that put him in touch with some economic realities. Cows outnumber people in the county nearly 5 to 1. In addition, 62% of the county is publicly owned, much of it federal timber lands and largely off-limits to logging. It’s got more acres of national forest per capita than any county in Oregon or Washington. But Robertson acknowledges the “cut,” or federal timber harvest, isn’t coming back.

Initially, Robertson says, he had high hopes for Green, and participated alongside him in the early development of John Day’s urban renewal district. “I tried to work with him multiple times,” Robertson says.

But Robertson soon came to disagree with Green’s approach. “It was pretty obvious he was trying to develop things that benefited the city, not the private businesses,” he says.

Robertson also disagreed with Green’s plans to develop new housing. “What we really need is redevelopment of lower-value houses rather than new builds,” he says.

Robertson came to mistrust the city manager, who he suspected was also incurring unsustainable future costs, both as city manager and as the executive director of Grant County Digital.

One example: the city-owned greenhouses, which Robertson says never made sense.

“From the farm bureau perspective, we have a strong interest in private development,” he says. “We have farm bureau members who would be threatened by a subsidized operation.” (The produce the greenhouses yielded proved expensive. The project lost political support, and an effort to secure a private operator fell through.)

Robertson’s group led opposition to the aquatic complex Green planned, twice defeating a ballot measure to fund it.

Things got heated as Green’s supporters and opponents clashed over incendiary social media posts, angry city council testimony, and letters to the editor of the Blue Mountain Eagle, which has covered the conflict over Green for years.

A letter to the Eagle early in Green’s tenure captured a tone that would intensify.

“This man just wants to break the city with his big city ideas. Eastern Oregon, including John Day, does not need reinvented,” wrote Harriet Crum of John Day in a 2017 letter. “The best move the John Day City Council can do now is to give this big spender with his big city ideas a one-way ticket out of Grant County.”

When it became clear in 2022 that a new council would be hostile to him, Green resigned, leaving in June of that year.

Robertson says that was for the best. “His intentions were sincere, but the lack of oversight from the council allowed maneuvering outside of the bounds of routine governance,” he says. “If you can’t tug on the reins, or if you don’t tug on the reins once in a while, then you end up with a runaway.”

For a while, Green continued to work for the city as a private consultant. His critics weren’t done with him.

On Dec. 21, 2022, Paul Sweany—who lives two doors down from Green—filed a stack of complaints with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission against Green and three of his allies, including a complaint that 1% payments Green received for obtaining grants for the city violated Oregon’s prohibition against using a public position for private gain. The complaint also alleged that Green used his positions as city manager and at Grant County Digital to subsequently obtain contracts for his private consulting firm.

Green defended the contracts and the 1% incentive payments, noting in his response to the commission that they were approved by the city council and disclosed publicly. (Over the course of his six years as city manager, he received about $84,000 in incentive payments.)

On March 13, 2023, the OGEC dismissed the complaint against Green. That infuriated Sweany as well as Robertson, who decries what he sees as the “absolute rot inside the ethics commission.”

The acrimony continued, centered on differing views of John Day’s future. In 2024, Green and Shannon Adair, a former city councilor and co-owner of 1188 Brewing, backed a recall against then-Mayor Heather Rookstool, which succeeded, and later a separate recall against three other council members, which failed.

CONCLUSION

Today, the gutters are falling off John Day’s greenhouses, vacant after a deal to lease them to a private company fell through. There’s still no public swimming pool.

But the riverside trails Green pushed for are heavily used, and a construction crew is building a new home in one of the subdivisions he helped create.

Asked to assess his six-year tenure, Green gives himself mixed grades. “As a person who manages a city, I did phenomenally well,” he says. “We cut costs that were not sustainable, our revenues increased, and our financial net position more than doubled.”

But he acknowledges he often did a poor job of explaining his projects to city residents.

“As a public relations person, I would give myself an F,” he says. “We assumed that the projects and the value we were creating would speak for themselves.”

Green still believes he can help rural counties stave off decline. After resigning, he established a consulting firm to share ideas about redevelopment with other counties and cities.

He’s managing a new intergovernmental organization called Regional Rural Redevelopment (R3) Strategies, funded with $10 million from the 2023 Legislature. R3 originally had three sponsoring governments: the cities of Burns, Lakeview, and John Day. Green says R3 is using the state money to promote residential development in eight counties and has more than 400 units in the pipeline.

After the current John Day City Council realized Green would be running R3, it severed ties with the organization. “We didn’t feel like we were being listened to,” says John Day Mayor Sherrie Rininger.

Chris Labhart, a current city councilor, says the real issue is that Green’s name is poison to a majority of the council. “Any time R3 gets mentioned, it’s automatically no, whether it’s good for the community or not, because Nick Green’s associated with it.”

Holland, the former city councilor, typifies that divide. Although he voted for Trump three times and has a large Trump sign outside his home, Holland supports Green and, because of that, says he became persona non grata with the Grant County Conservatives and most of the current city council.

“I would have to say that I’m not an acceptable guy in their eyes anymore,” Holland says. “They came at me with a vengeance.”

Robertson agrees that his nemesis remains controversial. “With Green, there’s kind of a reverse magnetism that drives people away,” he says.

Meanwhile, the city council in John Day has largely abandoned nearly everything Green started, pushing a back-to-basics philosophy. For some observers, such as Driscoll, the bookstore owner, that approach risks an inexorable decline.

“Oregon is full of ghost towns. It can happen here,” he says. “If nothing changes, in 20 or 25 years, John Day will just be a wide spot in the road.”