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Last month, the six members of the Portland City Council’s progressive caucus appeared before the Oregon Government Ethics Commission as that body discussed whether to investigate an Aug. 6 caucus retreat that complainants allege violated public meetings laws.
The commission voted 7–0 to open an investigation for each of the six councilors, despite their claims they had violated no ethics rules or state laws during the summer retreat. That investigation remains ongoing.
But something else came out of that hearing: the matter of the attorney for five of the six councilors, a lawyer named Ben Haile.
Haile works for the Oregon Justice Resource Center, a Portland social justice nonprofit that acts as a law firm. As WW reported last month, the OJRC regularly sues the city over alleged police misconduct, and represented a slate of 2020 social justice protesters who received large settlements from the city in recent years. That means Haile works for a firm that regularly has business before the City Council; any settlement city attorneys wish to enter in excess of $50,000 must be approved by the council.
And Haile was working for the councilors pro bono—that is, without compensation. That’s relevant because Oregon law prohibits elected officials from accepting gifts of over $50 from “sources that could reasonably be known to have a legislative or administrative interest in the vote or decision of the public official who holds any official position or office.”
It’s not clear whether free legal services meet the definition of a “gift” under state statutes, but the laws do identify a gift as “something of economic value.”
Tung Yin, a professor of law at Lewis & Clark Law School, told WW at the time that OJRC representation of plaintiffs seeking settlements from the city and subsequent representation of city councilors raised questions about perceived or real conflicts of interest.
“It’s when we have these two things together that we have this appearance of conflict,” Yin says. “It really is a question of: Does it look like the councilors might make decisions on behalf of the public that would benefit the same lawyers who are representing them pro bono?”
Haile’s representation prompted at least one complaint to the OGEC in December, filed by Veronica Lozano. The executive director of the commission, Susan Myers, has subsequently opted to open a preliminary review based on the complaint.
That means OGEC staff will present a report to the commission in two months that lays out it initial findings and recommends whether to open a formal investigation. That report will likely come in front of the commission sometime in February.
The commission is expected to rule on the original complaint about the councilors’ Aug. 6 retreat after February because the body has up to 180 days to conduct that investigation. (One of the complainants about the retreat, frequent council critic Brian Owendoff, got into trouble of his own last month when the Portland Mercury reported he had exchanged racist texts about the councilors he had reported to the OGEC.)
Notably, the one member of the progressive caucus not being represented by Haile is Council President Jamie Dunphy, who was elected to that role last week.
In the meantime, the five councilors—Candace Avalos, Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal, Tiffany Koyama Lane and Angelita Morillo—applied for and received approval from the ethics commission to open “legal defense trust funds.” That’s one way elected officials can report pro bono legal services as in-kind campaign contributions. Copies of each of the five councilors’ applications, filed by Haile and obtained by WW, state: “At this point, the councilor does not plan to solicit or receive any monetary donations through this legal defense trust fund.”
The applications are all dated Jan. 5. All five applications were approved unanimously by the ethics commission at a Jan. 9 meeting.
At that meeting, Haile explained to the body that he had always intended to record his pro bono work for the councilors through such funds. “Ever since the first of them contacted me in early December about this investigation, I’ve been keeping careful track of my time with the intention of reporting it this way. I’ve advised them that this was the most open and transparent way to do it.” Haile submitted the applications three weeks after he first represented the five councilors in front of the ethics commission.
Each of the councilors’ applications also notes that the fund, if and when approved, “will also be used to defray legal expenses in a closely related matter: a complaint that pro bono legal representation of me in the proceedings described in the previous paragraph by Benjamin Haile…violates government ethics laws.”
