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The Day of the Mothers

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Records Withheld — Clock Stopped

Tempie Bartell / Nadine’s Nest Adult Foster Home

withheld the care records of Russell H. Bingaman for

475Days
:
14Hours
:
00Minutes
:
00Seconds

The clock started April 15, 2025, when Russell's family asked Nadine's Nest Adult Foster Home for his care records. It stopped at 2:00 PM on August 3, 2026, when the records were finally produced -- 475 days. We fought beside Russell's widow the whole way, and we helped her get them. The family is reviewing them now.

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The Union County Transparency Project

I mirrored Union County Board records spanning 2008–2026 and all 79 monthly reports published for January 2020 through July 2026. The local corpus now holds 1,016 evidence files and 17,051 parsed payment lines, supporting 150 machine-verified findings. The District Attorney issued a fee-review order on August 6; this fund supports the next targeted records, publication, and any warranted access enforcement.

Support the fundSee what's already public
Records engineAsk 284 indexed leads anything -- answers cite the supporting lead and expose verification links.Follow the budgetNine fiscal years of county budgets, contracts, and the disclosure gaps.Map the connections20 documented roles across county government, the hospital, its foundation, and legal-service records.
Read investigationsLong-form stories, public-records reporting, and documented case timelines.Use free toolsSelf-advocacy generators for records requests, complaints, and agency filings.Support the workTax-deductible support for records fees, infrastructure, filing costs, and research.
24 months
of records work
442k files
in searchable evidence systems
22 free tools
for public self-advocacy

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Two Baker County court records: the January 19, 2024 court visitor's report for Jayne Colleen Peters marking Yes to whether she objects to a fiduciary, and the February 5, 2024 judgment stating no objections have been made or filed
Institutional AccountabilityLatest

She Objected. The Judgment Said No One Had.

In five Baker County guardianships, the court's own visitor wrote down an objection. The judgments attorney Darcy Kindschy submitted said no objections had been made or filed. The Oregon State Bar dismissed my complaint as premature.

In January 2024 the court's visitor wrote that Jayne Peters was adamant she did not want a guardian, and marked yes beside the question of whether she objected. Seventeen days later a judgment submitted by attorney Darcy Kindschy said no objections had been made or filed. Jayne died before the court appointed her a lawyer. Hers is one of five Baker County cases in Levi Bakke's complaint to the Oregon State Bar, which dismissed it as premature and later described its own decision differently.

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The Records War
Oregon DHS Report of Serious Event form APD 0307: under the heading Abuse type, the check boxes Legislative request and Media, outlined in red

Abuse Type: Media.

Oregon DHS's form for reporting serious events lists "Media" among its abuse types. In February, the agency logged me under it. In October, it billed me $48,150 for records on how it works.

Oregon DHS sent Levi Bakke 71 pages about a La Grande foster home for free. Fifty-two minutes later it billed him $48,150 for records that reach into how DHS itself works: its mail, its staff's phones, its manuals and its backlog numbers. The agency had promised to name any price before starting and to finish by August 14. Two weeks after he sued the manager of its records unit, it shut the requests down, then reopened them under a new date and priced them. On October 15 he asked the Attorney General to step in.

The Bingaman Case · Opinion
AI-generated editorial illustration: a caricature of Judge Boyd addressing a widow beside a probate door, with institutional labels and chains symbolizing the article’s criticism.

A one-way street.

Patricia Bingaman, Judge Boyd, and the fight to preserve her husband’s estate claims

Patricia Bingaman asked the judge for the law. The court records, consent papers, and hearing explain a widow’s fight to keep pursuing potential recoveries for her husband’s estate.

Institutional Accountability
Official records, local newspapers, an audio recorder, and data notes arranged on a county meeting-room table. AI-generated editorial illustration created with Higgsfield.

The Sentence Local News Left Out

The ethics case left open before the primary is now over. The Commission used a routine remedy—and said the evidence would support two violations.

The ethics case open when Union County voters received their ballots is now over. Matt Scarfo received a common education-only resolution, but local coverage omitted what the order said about the evidence.

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