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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the state.
During commercial breaks this television season, viewers were likely to spy a Muppet-like beaver leading delighted visitors on a snowshoe hike past Mount Hood or singing the benefits of fishing guides while flycasting in pristine Oregon waters.
These jaunty scenes, produced by award-winning Portland-based ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, grab the attention but are also somewhat puzzling (urging Oregonians to see Oregon?).
The state agency behind the marketing is the Oregon Tourism Commission, also known as Travel Oregon, which exists to promote the state. It’s an important role: Tourism generates $14 billion of economic activity annually and 120,000 jobs.
But an Oregon Journalism Project investigation shows that for years Travel Oregon has operated with little oversight from lawmakers or the governors who appoint its board, even as its budget has ballooned from nothing to more than $45 million a year.
There may be no better example of the lack of oversight than the outsized compensation of Todd Davidson, for decades the executive director of the 73-employee agency.
Davidson, 66, earns a $365,574 base salary and total compensation of $477,000 a year when you add health and retirement benefits, travel allowances, and unused vacation pay. His salary is far higher than that earned by state agency directors who run vastly larger, essential service operations, such as the Oregon Department of Transportation or the Department of Human Services (see chart).
And unlike those state agencies, Travel Oregon does not have to present its budget for legislative scrutiny, nor does it have to compete with other agencies for funding.
That’s because it’s the beneficiary of a 1.5% tax on every hotel bill in the state. That tax, which lawmakers approved two decades ago and have largely ignored ever since, means Travel Oregon’s budget grows with the economy and benefits from inflation. Meanwhile, an OJP investigation shows, nobody appears to be minding the store. Davidson’s pay and lax oversight are symptoms of larger problems with Travel Oregon and how it spends tens of millions of dollars annually to boost tourism.
In a state with abysmal educational outcomes, the nation’s second-highest rate of unsheltered homelessness, and mental health services that consistently languish at the bottom of national rankings, there are far larger problems than a dysfunctional tourism agency. But the governor and the Legislature’s benign neglect of Travel Oregon is, to some critics, evidence of the lack of accountability elsewhere in state government.
Over the past five weeks, OJP has interviewed more than 25 travel industry professionals and current and former Travel Oregon staffers; examined state financial records, audits and work papers; and scrutinized letters from ex-Travel Oregon managers to the agency’s board of commissioners.
One day before a scheduled interview with Davidson to discuss OJP’s findings, the Travel Oregon CEO announced his retirement. He claimed that announcement had been long-planned and was unrelated to OJP’s inquiry, and that he would stay to help Travel Oregon hire a new CEO, which could take up to one year.
OJP’s findings:
- The state agency maintains a workplace that some accuse of management by intimidation. “Travel Oregon has a culture of fearful employees with a bully (skillfully disguised as the world’s best guy) running the show,” Susan Bladholm, the agency’s former chief administrative officer, wrote to the chairwoman of the agency’s board of commissioners last September.
- Travel Oregon failed to allocate $9 million in small grants in recent fiscal years for small businesses, tourism planners, innkeepers, destination guides, and other travel organizations across the state trying to recover after the pandemic. “While these funds sat unused, communities and businesses were left without support at a time when investment was needed the most,” Jill Houtman, Travel Oregon’s former director of operations, wrote in a critical March 14 letter shared with the commissioners.
- Davidson and his agency benefit from loose oversight by its board of commissioners and the Legislature, which sets taxes and scrutinizes other state agencies that rely on nongeneral fund dollars, like ODOT and the Oregon Lottery, while leaving Travel Oregon essentially unmonitored.
In a May 23 interview , Davidson denied Travel Oregon was a fearful workplace. He pointed to results from a recent survey of staff who responded anonymously and generally gave him four stars on a scale of five for the survey questions.
As for the holdover of millions of grant dollars, he said that was caused by a staffing crunch when the Legislature allocated an emergency $10 million in December 2021 for Travel Oregon to distribute by mid-2023 to tour operators, guides and outfitters that had been slammed by wildfires, drought and the pandemic.
“Half of that rollover money is going out right now,” he said.
Problems at the start
Davidson, an avid fly fisherman and native of Iowa, has run Travel Oregon for 29 years. His social media feed shows him at family sporting events and out fishing. It also shows him traveling the world on business trips to Australia, China, Singapore, Europe and the Middle East, often flying in the front of the plane. In 2024, for instance, Travel Oregon paid $13,851 for a first-class cabin ticket for Davidson to speak at a U.S.-China tourism summit in Xian, China.
Supporters and critics alike describe Davidson as “charming” and “charismatic,” and agree he’s been a forceful cheerleader for Oregon tourism.
At the same time, some former staffers and industry officials question whether Davidson’s extensive overseas travels best serve Oregon’s needs when international tourists account for only 5% of the state’s visitors, with most of those coming from Canada. That’s down from 10% in 2019.
Travel Oregon’s funds come from a statewide lodging tax crafted in 2003. The new, dedicated tax supercharged the agency, and Oregon jumped within a decade from 47th to eighth among states for public monies spent promoting tourism. (Only Hawaii and six of the most populous states, like Texas, Florida and California, spend more.) A struggling state commission that once scraped by on $3 million a year in state lottery funds grew into a powerhouse.
“Travel Oregon is one of the premier state travel organizations,” says David Blandford, executive director of State of Washington Tourism. “It does a great job. The scope of offerings are impressive.”
Mike Thelin, a marketing consultant and co-founder of Feast Portland, a festival highlighting the region’s food culture, praised Travel Oregon: “They are good partners; they care about building things, not just promoting things.” (Thelin currently has a $93,000 contract with the agency.)
But some observers OJP spoke to felt the agency had muffed chances to grow tourism in the state.
Jeff Alworth, a consultant to the beer industry as well as author and longtime host of the podcast Beervana, expressed disappointment that the agency hadn’t done more to promote craft beer. Travel Oregon “is missing an opportunity” to boost tourist dollars by partnering with Oregon’s diverse $8.9 billion beer sector—breweries, tasting rooms, its specialty hops harvesting, and other celebrations. “We’re akin to Bavaria in the Czech Republic,” he says. “Beer is a big part of our personality. I wish they had done more.”
Alworth says he urged the agency to build on the industry’s attraction and freshen its website’s features on beer, which were outdated.
“I tried to connect with them and didn’t have a lot of luck. They seem real insular and hard to crack,” he says. “Beer is one of few things that you can promote statewide.”
What is indisputable about Travel Oregon is the autonomy it enjoys.
Most state agencies, such as the Oregon Health Authority or the Oregon Department of Human Services, work with the governor to prepare a preliminary budget, which the governor then presents to the Legislature. Lawmakers take it from there, tweaking and adjusting to arrive at a final budget, to which they then hold agencies accountable.
As a semi-independent agency, Travel Oregon’s budget, however, is not subject to review by the executive branch. Nor is its budget subject to approval or modification by the Legislature. Once the tens of millions of dollars in public funds flow into Travel Oregon’s hands, Davidson enjoys financial freedom greater than that of other agency directors and, OJP has found, other state travel organizations.
Travel Oregon is also exempt from state budget laws; personnel, salary and expense laws; and purchasing and procurement laws. In other words, the agency has been Davidson’s fiefdom—for decades.
In practical terms, that means Travel Oregon doesn’t have to put large contracts out for competitive bids, which have been shown to hold down costs. It paid ad agency Wieden+Kennedy more than $24 million from 2013 and 2019. Its bespoke brochures, guides, and advertising and marketing campaigns are eyecatching. But Wieden+Kennedy was not subject to competitive bidding from 2010 to 2020, when Travel Oregon awarded the firm a new seven-figure contract.
“Everything is not hunky-dory with Travel Oregon,” says former state Sen. Betsy Johnson (D-Scappoose), the longtime Joint Ways and Means Committee co-chair and 2022 candidate for governor. Johnson wanted lawmakers to have more control over semi-independent agencies during her time in the Legislature. She says Travel Oregon is a prime example of why: “It is frustrating to see an agency that is not very efficient or expeditious.”
“I was always chapped,” Johnson adds, when over the years “the [Legislative Fiscal Office] asked the agency for data and Travel Oregon said, ‘We don’t have to adhere. We are different.’” And in her typically blunt manner, she says, “I thought Todd Davidson was overpaid.”
House Minority Leader Christine Drazan (R-Canby), who ran against Johnson for governor in 2022, agrees with her former opponent. “To see a director’s salary at this level,” she says, “that needs to change.”
Top dollar for Davidson
Davidson’s compensation is the responsibility of Travel Oregon’s nine-member board of commissioners, who are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. One commissioner comes from the public at large. The other eight come from the lodging and tourism industries, which benefit from the public monies commissioners oversee.
The issue of Davidson’s compensation has come up in the past. His pay has long outstripped the paychecks of other directors running far larger state agencies, but just like those directors, Davidson—and his staff—accrue pension benefits in the Public Employees Retirement System. Because he started at Travel Oregon in 1994, Davidson is what’s known as a Tier 1 employee, meaning he’s eligible for the highest possible pension formula.
In 2020, the Secretary of State’s Office released an audit that focused on his outsized salary and that of his key staff. Over the previous 10 years, Davidson’s salary had jumped 129%. From 2012 to 2019, his managers received a 76% boost. (In other state agencies, similar managers saw a 16% increase over those years.) In 2017 alone, Travel Oregon’s commissioners rewarded Davidson with a 29% raise.
The pandemic choked tourism to a trickle, slashing Travel Oregon’s revenue from the lodging tax. In mid-2020, top executives agreed to salary cuts, with Davidson’s set at 25%. Thirty percent of the staff was let go.
In late 2023, as travel resumed after the pandemic, records show Travel Oregon’s board awarded Davidson a payment of $99,783 to compensate him for the one-time salary reduction three years earlier during the pandemic.
When state auditors questioned his compensation in the 2020 audit, Davidson said a third-party consultant had conducted a competitive salary analysis in 2016 and provided salary ranges that supported higher pay across the board.
Asked for detailed documentation of the consultant’s work, Travel Oregon could not provide it.
And when OJP asked for a copy of the contract with the consultant, Travel Oregon said it hadn’t required one because the work cost $9,450, which fell under the agency’s threshold of requiring competitive bids for contracts of more than $10,000.
After the 2020 audit, news outlets across Oregon ran stories with variations of the headline “High salaries for Travel Oregon execs called out in audit.” Editorials called for reform.
In early 2021, state Reps. Paul Evans (D-Monmouth), Marty Wilde (D-Eugene) and others responded, introducing a bill in the regular session that called for state agencies, including semi-independent ones, to limit top salaries to $250,000, unless an agency provided the public with justification online of why it needed to pay more. The one-page bill even mentioned the Oregon Tourism Commission by name.
At a June 2021 meeting of Travel Oregon’s commissioners, the agency’s former chief strategy officer, Scott West, told them in a letter that “plain and simple, the bill would not exist” were it not for Davidson’s lavish pay. West, ex-head of the Oregon Lodging Association, who was key in getting the statewide lodging tax passed in 2003, knew the ways of the statehouse.
“I suggest the Commission reduce the current CEO’s salary to $250,000 immediately,” West wrote to the commission. “Not acting invites the Legislature deeper in Travel Oregon’s business.”
The bipartisan bill overwhelmingly passed the House, but then died in the Senate in the waning days of the session. Evans says he’s not sure why the bill failed.
Since then, not much has changed.
A 2016 law that raised the lodging tax also required Travel Oregon to provide a more detailed financial picture to the Legislative Fiscal Office, which tracks state expenditures. But that exercise now appears to be perfunctory.
In 2024, for example, Davidson did not tell the LFO about the $99,783 payout he was given to make up for his cut in pay during COVID.
His take-home pay for fiscal 2024 was at least $472,000—not the $365,574 listed as his base salary.
Davidson says he merely followed the questions in the LFO’s reporting form: “We’re asked to provide salaries, we provide salaries. If we’re asked to provide compensation, we’ll provide compensation.”
The LFO told OJP it may ask for total compensation in the future.
Behind the facade
Travel Oregon’s autonomy doesn’t seem to have helped morale within the agency itself.
According to her letter to the commissioners, Susan Bladholm was “absolutely elated” when she took the job as chief administrative officer at Travel Oregon in November 2023, even though she had been warned that her two predecessors had been fired and that “all is not as it seems.” Bladholm had held executive positions at the Port of Portland, Travel Portland, Business Oregon, and Greater Portland Inc.
She quickly learned that Travel Oregon was a mess, she recounted in a September 2024 letter to Lucinda DiNovo, chair of Travel Oregon’s board and sales director at the Coquille Indian Tribe’s Ko-Kwel Casino Resort in North Bend.
Bladholm wrote that she found contracts and procurements backlogged, discovered the agency failed to track a key metric (spending for small and BIPOC-owned businesses), and that only four of 14 positions reporting to her were full-time employees.
In February 2024, Bladholm had a 90-day review with Davidson. At that meeting, according to her letter to DiNovo, he accused her of talking poorly about him behind his back. She denied it, but he ghosted her for weeks, she wrote.
In July, Davidson fired her without warning, she wrote. Asked for a specific reason, he replied, “I don’t have to give you a reason. The law is clear. Oregon is an ‘at will’ state,” Bladholm wrote.
Davidson, who had read her letter, said he could not comment on any personnel matter.
DiNovo said the commissioners took Bladholm’s complaint “very seriously” and conducted “a thorough five-month review process of Susan’s letter.” She shared a document May 23 that noted “no formal disciplinary action was taken.” Davidson did not get a merit raise that review period.
Bladholm’s account of a fearful workplace, disorganization, and system flaws matches two other letters from former senior staff about Davidson and Travel Oregon’s culture that were shared with the commissioners as recently as this March.
Jill Houtman was interim operations executive from August 2023 to August 2024, and left when the job was filled. She recounted similar problems in a March 14 memo to the commissioners. She also wrote of “a culture of fear” under Davidson that prevented staff from advocating for needed improvements: Information systems were outdated and didn’t interoperate; IT security was lacking; and millions in grants had not been distributed to needy small tourism businesses and associations.
“I see Travel Oregon as a beautiful house with fresh paint, clean windows on a manicured lawn,” she wrote. “The inside, however, is a different story. After 20 years of neglect, the structure is no longer sound.”
With Davidson now leaving the agency within a year, the question looms: Is the Legislature interested in devoting more attention to a program that should be key to the state’s economic rebound? That answer is important both in rural Oregon, where timber and other natural resource jobs are gone, and in urban centers, where Intel, Nike and Oregon Health & Science University are struggling.
Drazan says Oregonians deserve greater oversight of an agency that should play a critical role in the state’s future. “The most important issue for me is that these dollars—intended to grow and sustain Oregon’s economy for tourism—are well spent,” she says.
“And certainly the governor has the duty to make sure the agencies are well run. You can’t set it and forget it.”