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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.

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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.
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AI-generated editorial illustration: abstract flat line and rising curve representing a frozen tax rate and growing assessed value — not an official chart
Institutional AccountabilityLatest

The Rate That Never Moved

Union County's Permanent Rate Stayed at 2.9668 While Taxes Imposed Rose 37%

Nine official assessor summaries show Union County government's permanent billing rate fixed at $2.9668 per $1,000 from 2017-18 through 2025-26. Aggregate tax imposed under that line rose 37.34% as the tax roll changed. That is not proof that every parcel's bill rose or that commissioners increased the permanent rate.

More to read

The Bingaman Case
Article card: a chained and padlocked care home door posted with No Access and All Visitation Suspended notices, beside filed federal court complaints and a stat panel of allegations stated in the federal filings -- lockout period July-September 2024, visitation-restriction surcharge $1,000 per month -- AI-generated editorial illustration

A Widow's Two Federal Lawsuits Say the Lockout Was Approved, Then Billed

Filed in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon: a civil rights case against two state employees, a records manager, a care home operator, and her company, and a racketeering case against a hospice, two law firms, and the lawyer the widow once paid to help her.

Patricia Bingaman of Imbler filed two federal lawsuits in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon in late July: a civil rights action alleging a sixty-seven-day lockout that state employees authorized, and a racketeering action against a hospice, two law firms, and the lawyer she once paid to help her. No defendant has answered yet, and everything the complaints say is, at this stage, allegation.

The Records War
The front porch and door of Nadine's Nest adult foster home, seen from the street

The Porch

She was locked out, escorted off by police and billed for visiting. Then she came back for his records.

On July 30, Patty Bingaman drove to Nadine's Nest and waited on the porch while a caregiver's calls to the operator went unanswered, then left without seeing a page of her late husband's care records. The rule she was invoking is one sentence long: Oregon requires an adult foster home to keep a resident's records "readily available" to their representative, and Patty has been asking for 474 days. Sixteen days before she stood on that porch, the state had inspected the home over her complaint about those very records and certified it in compliance.

The Records War
Article card: a clawfoot bathtub with a towel over its rim, an off-hook telephone handset, and a paper folder stamped Federal Contractor Confidential -- AI-generated editorial illustration

What Two Months of Quiet Actually Bought

A bathtub, a phone call, and a federal contractor's paper trail

The records fights weren't the only thing happening. A family got a working bathtub. A congressional inquiry into a CMS hospice contractor turned up matching handwriting on both sides of a quality review.

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