"A Huge Disservice to the Public."

Ninety-six minutes into the department's recording of a video call on January twenty-eighth, a representative of the state Long-Term Care Ombudsman's office finally got a raised hand noticed and said what no one would say again before the rule took effect.

It was the only meeting of the committee the Oregon Department of Human Services assembled to advise on rewriting the rules for Adult Protective Services, which investigates abuse and neglect of older and disabled adults. Fifteen people sat on it. Nobody from a newspaper, and nobody there to speak for the families who call in the reports.

The ombudsman's office had found the line that said the department would no longer tell a person it was opening an investigation.

"I think that's a huge disservice to the public for many reasons," the representative said, and less than a minute later, "And I think it can be harmful to a victim."

The line stayed in. On Thursday, October fifteenth, it took effect.

"All APS reports and records compiled under these rules are confidential and are not accessible for public inspection," the rule now says. Unless the rule itself makes an exception, the department "must not acknowledge to the public the existence of any open or closed APS reports." It's the answer spy agencies give: neither confirm nor deny. The line that used to let anyone ask for redacted copies of abuse investigations at the care homes the state licenses is gone. Questions from the press now go to "Department executive and communications staff."

And if you're the one who called in the abuse, the department doesn't tell you what came of it. That started May first, under a temporary rule.

Adult Protective Services took in fifty-nine thousand four hundred fifty-two reports last year, and more than twenty-one thousand of them concerned licensed facilities. The nurses, neighbors, daughters and wives who made those reports now have no right to be told what the state found.

The department's July notice to the Secretary of State says the confidentiality section was "Reorganized and strengthened the content for clarity and ease of use." It says the update "ensures APS continues to provide transparent access to APS processes to Oregonians." Its summary says nothing about closing the facility files. The only trace is a struck-through line on page twenty-one of the forty-six-page redline.

Five people commented before the comment period closed. None of them said a word about confidentiality, the families who make reports or the public's access to the records. You can't object to what you weren't told was happening.

The committee video tells a different story.

The draft the department sent its committee about two weeks before the call went the other way. It would have required investigators to tell the person who made a report about the screening decision within one business day, and it let local offices tell the reporter how the investigation came out. On the call, staff announced they had already taken both out.

The official who answered the ombudsman's office explained why. Department staff had met with the state Department of Justice a little over a month earlier. "So we were shocked whenever DOJ came back to us and said, no, you should not be releasing reporter information without the alleged victim's consent," the official said. DOJ "advised us to make that statement that we've made here, and that is the way that is gonna be."

That advice isn't in the temporary rule, the permanent filing or the response to public comments. The April memo to field offices, authorized by Corissa Neufeldt, the deputy director who oversees Adult Protective Services and facility licensing, says only that the change is "based on a recent decision that Oregon Revised Statute (ORS) does not provide authority for this action." It doesn't say who made the decision.

The ombudsman's office raised a second problem on that call, and it's still in the rule. State law says the ombudsman "shall have access" to the records of abuse reports, a second representative said, and the draft had put the ombudsman in the wrong category. They should work it out "with your DOJ attorney so we can get it right." The final rule still lists the ombudsman under limited disclosure, where the department shares what it deems appropriate.

The rule covers every report, whether the abuse happened in a private house or in a licensed care home. The state law the department leans on is real for the first kind. Oregon's elder abuse statute makes those reports confidential and lists who can see them, and the person who made the report isn't on the list.

The licensed homes are a different matter, and Oregon wrote a different law for them. An adult foster home, a licensed house caring for five or fewer adults, has its own chapter in the statutes, and that chapter says the opposite of the new rule. "Any person has a right to inspect and photocopy the complaint files maintained by the licensing agency," it says. "The complaint and the investigation report shall be available to the public," it says, and the agency "shall mail a copy of the investigation report within seven days" to the person who complained.

The department's own adult foster home rules still say completed complaint reports are available to the public. The state's long-term care licensing website, as of this week, still says it shows "substantiated abuse violations." The new rule's gag allows an exception only when the exception is "specified in these rules," not when it's specified in a statute the Legislature passed. And it covers closed reports, too. Whatever the case for silence while an investigation is open, it doesn't explain refusing to say, years later, that one ever happened.

If the person who reported the abuse never sees the investigation, how do they appeal it? And who checks the department's work?

I reported Russell Bingaman's abuse to DHS. DHS closed its investigation as not substantiated two days before he died, and when I appealed, it said my appeal never arrived and that I had no right to appeal anyway. This is the agency that failed to protect Russell, protected the care home instead, and assisted in the abuse. I can prove that, and I stand by it. Now it has written itself a rule that keeps the next family from ever seeing what it did.

It's almost as if this rule was written because of what I've done the last two years in response to the agency's own actions. I can't prove that. But I can tell you this is not good, and I will be challenging the rule immediately.

In 2017, The Oregonian's "Kept in the Dark" found the department had left nearly eight thousand substantiated complaints about care facilities off the website families used to choose a home. The Legislature passed a long-term care oversight law the same year.

In November 2024, when DHS put six Oregon care facilities on a public list for "additional oversight," Neufeldt said a list like that would let families say, "Here are the facilities I might want to think twice about before I admit my family member or myself." One of the six was Wildflower Lodge, in La Grande.

A family can't think twice about what the state won't confirm exists.

I sent the department twelve questions and asked for answers by five p.m. Tuesday. Elisa Williams, the department's communications manager, left me a voicemail Tuesday evening, after the deadline, saying she had just seen the emails and would get back to me by email. By the time this was published, she hadn't. If the department answers, I'll post its answers here as an update. The federal case I mentioned is pending, and so are my records petitions against the department. The lockout is part of that case. Everything else above is in the department's own filings and its own video.

The rule took effect on a Thursday. DHS issued no press release and no public notice. Its only posted explanation is a one-page staff memo that says the changes "strengthen confidentiality provisions to better protect individuals involved in the APS process." The ombudsman's office said on video the rule could hurt victims. The department kept it anyway. The families who call in abuse don't get told what happened. The public doesn't get the files. And when someone asks whether a report was ever made, the state of Oregon now has a rule that tells it to say nothing at all.