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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
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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.
The Bingaman Case · OpinionLatest

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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