This time last year, the City Council’s Leadership Committee was looking to have the full council oust one of its own, Ward 5 City Councilor Charlyn Ellis. Monday night, this term’s newly elected council voted her onto that committee as Council Vice-President.
Fellow returning Councilor, Paul Shaffer from Ward 7 was elected President – from the beginning last year, he had been an outspoken critic of the committee’s attempt to remove Ellis.
Ultimately, Ellis filed a federal suit to curtail the committee’s actions – and the court enjoined the city. In the interim, she was reelected, rendering the ouster attempt moot. So far, the city has paid over $200,000 in legal fees on the matter.
Also, last night, all the councilors were sworn in for their new two-year terms. Newly elected councilors included Allison Bowden, Jim Moorefield, Carolyn Mayerrs, and Ava Olson. Returning councilors included Tony Cadena, Briae Lewis, Jan Napack, and as captioned above, Shaffer and Ellis.
Meanwhile, statewide leaders were also sworn in…
Corvallis’ Dan Rayfield Becomes Oregon’s Attorney General
Oregon’s new attorney general took office a few days early on New Year’s Eve, repeating his oath of office before the same federal judge who presided over his criminal mischief and reckless endangerment case nearly three decades earlier.
Democrat Dan Rayfield, elected in November with 53.5% of the vote, replaced retiring fellow Democrat Ellen Rosenblum, who chose to step down earlier than planned. Newly elected Secretary of State Tobias Read and Treasurer Elizabeth Steiner, both Democrats, are set to take office Jan. 6.
Rayfield, a 45-year-old civil attorney from Corvallis, has spent the past 10 years in the state House, including a stint as speaker in 2022 and 2023. He also spent four years as co-chair of the budget-writing Joint Ways and Means Committee.
But before he found his way to public service and practicing law in a courtroom, Rayfield spent time as a teen on the wrong side of the law. He was cited at 18 for reckless endangerment, criminal mischief and driving under the influence of intoxicants in two separate incidents. All charges were ultimately dismissed.
Senior U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez, who administered his oath of office on Tuesday, was the Washington County District Court Judge who presided over the 1997 case for criminal mischief and reckless endangerment, which Rayfield previously acknowledged stemmed from shooting BB guns at cars.
“I am a firm believer that your worst moments in life don’t have to define who you can become,” Rayfield said in a statement. “Twenty-seven years ago, I was 18 years old, standing before Judge Marco Hernandez as a young defendant in his courtroom. Judge Hernandez spoke sternly to me. He told me he never wanted to see me in his courtroom again. Today, I stood before the same man and took the oath of office to serve as Oregon’s 18th attorney general.”
After his first encounter with Hernandez, Rayfield went on to graduate from Western Oregon University and earned his law degree from Willamette University. He primarily worked on consumer protection cases after joining the Oregon Bar in 2006.
Oregon’s attorney general advocates for residents on consumer protection and against scam artists and leads the Oregon Department of Justice, with nearly 1,500 workers and an annual budget of about $444 million. The attorney general is also responsible for defending state agencies against lawsuits and choosing whether to sue companies or the federal government to protect Oregon laws — the latter is expected to garner more attention as President-elect Donald Trump returns to White House later this month with a suite of initiatives on immigration, the environment and reproductive health that conflict with Oregon laws.
Rayfield last month named a dozen prominent Oregon advocates, health care professionals, labor leaders and environmentalists to his federal oversight cabinet, a panel that will advise his office on how to respond to potential threats from the Trump administration. He also appointed a top Justice Department attorney to a special counsel position leading the department’s federal litigation efforts.
And Gov. Tina Kotek’s proposed budget for the next two years includes an extra $2 million for Justice Department attorneys to defend state laws against federal regulations, as well as an extra $2 million for Oregon’s Bias Response Hotline, run through the Justice Department.
“The significance of this responsibility could not come at a more meaningful time in our state’s and our nation’s history,” Rayfield said. “There is no other job I’d rather have the opportunity to take on. As Oregon’s Attorney General I will always do my best to never lose sight of the trust and responsibility given to me by Oregonians. That trust will serve as a guiding light for me and my team as we navigate the day-to-day challenges of this work.”
New Oregon Secretary of State, Tobias Read, Takes Oath of Office
n an auditorium on his alma mater’s Salem campus on Monday, Tobias Read took his oath of office as secretary of state with a promise to spend the next four years working to make Oregon better.
Read, a Democrat who spent the past eight years as treasurer, was elected secretary of state in November, easily defeating Republican state Sen. Dennis Linthicum. He was sworn in at Willamette University, where he graduated in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in politics and economics and had his first political experience working at the state Capitol across the street.
And now the Beaverton Democrat is the state’s chief auditor and chief elections officer and next in line for governor should Gov. Tina Kotek resign or die in office. He’s inheriting an office that has seen significant turnover — Oregon has had six secretaries of state and two acting secretaries during the past decade — and is still reeling from the political scandal that ended former Secretary Shemia Fagan’s career two years ago and years of threats and unfounded conspiracies targeting elections.
“As your secretary of state, I’ll work every day to make sure that Oregon isn’t just a place where democracy survives, it’s a place where democracy flourishes,” he said. “We’re lucky in Oregon. We’ve inherited enormous advantages and tremendous opportunities, and we owe it to the people who came before us and the people who will come after us to leave this place better than we found it.”
He cited late U.S. representative and civil rights leader John Lewis, who in his final, posthumously published essay in 2020, wrote that democracy is not a state but an act, and that each generation must do its part to nurture and strengthen it.
“Our obligation, yours and mine, is to honor the generations who worked to establish it and to preserve it, and to serve those who will inherit it from us,” Read said. “That is not an abstract union. It’s a daily act of commitment. The way we contribute to a more perfect union, or in our case, a better Oregon, is by serving the people who put their trust in us — not by defending government for its own sake but by ensuring that government delivers real, tangible results that improve the daily lives of Oregonians.”
Oregonians deserve a government that earns their confidence, Read said, but recent years have seen increased cynicism and eroding trust. He said his top priority is to fix that, with special attention paid to elections, government accountability and participating in government.
Changes planned
He said he’ll start by hiring election staff with experience and expertise in election administration — the state’s most recent elections director, Molly Woon, was a longtime Democratic spokesperson who previously served as deputy director of the Oregon Democratic Party and a spokesperson for the Senate Democratic caucus and Democrat Kate Brown when she was secretary of state. Read announced just before Christmas that he would replace Woon with Lane County Clerk Dena Dawson, who worked in election offices in Colorado, Nevada and Multnomah County before running elections in Oregon’s fourth most populous county.
“Oregon has been a pioneer in vote by mail and expanding access to the ballot,” Read said. “These are good things, and we must defend these achievements, as well as the dedicated election workers and county clerks who make them possible, but we must also work to rebuild trust in our elections by ensuring that the Secretary of State’s Office is, and is seen by voters as being neutral, unbiased and nonpartisan.”
He also plans to change how the Audits Division identifies which agencies and programs to audit to avoid politics or personal agendas. An audit of the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission’s marijuana regulations ended Fagan’s tenure as secretary of state, after reporting from Willamette Week revealed she was working a $10,000-per-month side gig for one of the state’s most prominent marijuana retailers.
Drew Johnston, a former Read aide who now works as government affairs director for the Seattle Seahawks, introduced him. Johnston’s father, Bryan, was a Democratic state representative from Salem who gave Read his first political job: a $35 weekly stipend in 1995 to help with filing bills, a process that required a lot of paper in those days.
A little more than a decade later, Read returned to the Capitol as a state representative, and his old mentor’s son joined him as a legislative aide. Read served five terms in the state House, including a stint as majority leader, before being elected treasurer in 2016.
“Political slogans are kind of like refrains and echoes, and so this 30-year-old Tobias had the subtly brazen political slogan of ‘For the long run,’” Johnston said. “And so it is amazing that he has been able to make good on that promise and we are here celebrating not only his eighth general election, but his third statewide election.”
Oregon Historical Society Executive Director Kerry Tymchuk rehashed some notable and notorious previous secretaries of state, including the state’s first: Lucien Heath, who came to Oregon on the Oregon Trail and served simultaneously as mayor of Salem and secretary of state before departing for California. Two other early secretaries, Stephen Chadwick and Frank Benson, would go on to serve simultaneously as secretary of state and governor — ignoring that such double-dipping was entirely unconstitutional.
Read also will make history, Tymchuk said. Not only can the 6-foot-7 Read steal the title of tallest secretary of state in Oregon history from the legendary Gov. Tom McCall, he’s the first secretary of state to have previously held another statewide elected office.
Attorney General Rayfield and Secretary of State Read by Julia Shumway of Oregon Capital Chronicle. City Council by Advocate staff.
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