Abuse Type: Media.

LA GRANDE, Ore. — Russell and Patty Bingaman were together sixty-two years. In July 2024, the La Grande foster home where he lived locked its front door with Patty standing outside it. Hospice records show Russell went from one hundred sixty-eight pounds to one hundred thirty-two that summer, in five weeks. He died in January 2025, two days after the Oregon Department of Human Services closed its neglect investigation as not substantiated.

Since September 2024 I've been asking DHS for its records on how it handled his care, and on how its own records office works. DHS has told me the appeal I mailed never arrived, though the state's mail service logged it delivered to DHS headquarters and photographed it. It told me no text messages turned up, though its own files show a supervisor forwarding one of mine. This summer it promised to name any price before it started, and to finish by August 14. Instead, two weeks after I sued the manager of its records unit in federal court, it shut my requests down. When I took that to the Attorney General, DHS backed off and reopened them. Then it wrote a new date on them, as if they'd just arrived, and put a price on them: $48,150, paid up front.

On Thursday morning I asked the Attorney General to step in again. Nearly every piece of what follows comes from DHS's own records.

On July 2 I sent DHS one request with thirty-five items. Some were about Russell, who lived at Nadine's Nest, a licensed adult foster home here in La Grande, in 2024 and died in January 2025. Others were about DHS itself: how its records office logs and searches, how many requests it gets, the manuals for its systems, and the entries it keeps on media inquiries. With it I sent a statement explaining why the records serve the public. DHS had accepted that same kind of statement from me before. In November 2025 it approved my fee waiver on this matter and wrote that it "has met the public interest threshold."

On July 9 DHS wrote back that if it required a fee, it would let me know the amount before starting. On July 24 it wrote, twice, that it expected to finish by August 14. Nobody mentioned money.

On July 28, Patty and I filed a civil rights complaint in federal court. It names three DHS employees. My own claim is against one of them, Mallory Kenney, the manager of the unit handling my requests.

On August 12, two days before DHS's own finish date, Caroline Burnell, who runs the Department's legal affairs and public records office, closed my requests. Because I represent Patricia and myself in active litigation, she wrote, I could get the records through discovery instead.

I don't represent Patty. She represents herself. I help her with records requests, and DHS's records manager had said as much in writing on July 7. Two days after the closure I demanded a correction. DHS confirmed it got my demand. It has never made the correction.

I asked the Attorney General to review the closure on September 10. The law gives the Attorney General seven days to decide.

On day five, DHS's lawyer told the Attorney General's office that DHS would keep working on the requests, starting with my fee waivers. On day six, DHS withdrew the closure and said it needed more time to decide the waivers and work out the costs. It was the seventy-sixth day since I'd filed, and the first time anyone at DHS had mentioned a fee. On day seven, with nothing left to rule on, the Attorney General dismissed my petition and told me I was free to file a new one once DHS decided.

A week later DHS sent new acknowledgments under new reference numbers. They say DHS received my requests on September 16. I hadn't sent anything new. The text under each new number is word for word what I sent in July and August.

On October 7, at 3:46 in the afternoon, DHS sent me seventy-one pages about Nadine's Nest, answering a request I'd filed on August 10, and wrote that there was no cost. Fifty-two minutes later it sent its fee decision on the other two requests. One paragraph covered both. It denied my fee waivers and attached the bills: $522 for a smaller request I'd filed the same day as the free one, and $48,150 for the July request. Payment, the estimate says, is required before commencing work. If I don't pay by December 6, the requests close.

Counted from July 2, the big request was ninety-seven days old that afternoon. Counted from the date DHS wrote on it in September, it was twenty-one.

The denial doesn't name a single item I asked for. It's about me. The requests, it says, appear primarily tailored to my personal interests and to those of a related party in the same private lawsuit. The records may be available through discovery. And my articles appear to have been researched in my capacity as a licensed private investigator on behalf of my co-plaintiff.

The state issued my private investigator's license on August 12, 2026, after I'd filed both requests. Neither request mentions it. DHS's own records show its staff watching my Facebook posts and my website in August 2025, a year before the license existed. Nobody has paid for any of this reporting.

Between November 2025, when DHS said my requests met the public interest threshold, and October 2026, when it said they didn't, nothing changed about me, the newsroom or the reporting. Two things did change: the federal lawsuit, and the license. The denial rests on both.

DHS attached one more thing to the denial: its own copy of my July request, the version it entered into its tracking system. All thirty-five items are there. On the last page are the fields where the system records whether the requester asked for a fee waiver, how the records will be used and who they'll benefit. Every one of them is blank. My public interest statement was on page five of the request DHS received on July 2. It never made it into the system.

DHS says the request is about my private interests. The items it priced are about how DHS answers people, and most of them are there because of answers DHS gave me that its own records don't back up.

In September 2025, DHS told me the formal appeal I'd mailed in March "was never received." The Department of Administrative Services, which signs for DHS's mail, logged that envelope delivered to a secure location at DHS headquarters and photographed it. So the July request asks how DHS logs and routes the mail it gets.

In December 2025, DHS told me it had "reached out to staff and no responsive text messages were found." Its own investigation contact log records a text message contact on October 4, 2024. A month later the local supervisor, Aaron Lenox, emailed a colleague "a recent text from the investigator assisting consumer Russell B's wife Patty B which he sent to Erin." I'm the investigator. Erin Smith is the licensor. I still have the text I sent her, and her answer. So the request asks which phones DHS searched, and how it decides whether to search one.

DHS told me its records system "is not capable of releasing Outlook email files in their native format," so I asked for the manual. It has pushed back my deadlines again and again over what it calls a significant backlog, and it told the Attorney General last December that it had two thousand one hundred ninety-eight requests pending, so I asked for the intake log.

Those are the records DHS priced at $48,150. In more than forty years of the Attorney General's published orders, nobody else had gone to the Attorney General to see how DHS itself works: its manuals, its intake numbers, its mail logs, its file on the press.

The bill itself is two lines and a total. Twelve hundred hours for the records office at $40 an hour, two and a half hours for IT at $75, minus half an hour. Twelve hundred hours is thirty weeks of one person working full time. The bill doesn't say which item takes how long, whose files get searched, or how many pages anyone expects to read.

The $40 rate is the top of the scale, the one for a manager's time. The state's own fee policy says clerical work gets billed at $25 an hour, even when a manager does it. DHS billed all twelve hundred hours, the locating and gathering and organizing along with the review, at $40. The same policy tells an agency to help the requester narrow a request once the estimate passes $250. DHS didn't offer.

The July bill is ninety-two times the August one, and DHS set both in the same email. The free request asked for the foster home's complaint and inspection file. The two that cost money reach into DHS: its mail, its staff's phones, its manuals, its backlog numbers and its handling of a complaint.

I know how DHS files me because its files came back with my name in them.

DHS keeps a registry of what it calls serious events. In October 2024 it filed an email thread about my questions under the subject line ROSE 5417, Nadine's Nest, Media. An entry from August 2025 says staff "have submitted a couple ROSE referrals regarding what the investigator has published." And on February 2 of this year DHS logged another entry, coded Legislative Request and Media. It begins, "Reporter Levi Bakke alleges." Staff were submitting it, the entry says, "because reporter identified themselves as an Investigative Journalist and has made contact with the Governor's office and Oregon Senator Gelser-Blouin."

In February, DHS's registry called me a reporter. In October, its records office called my reporting a private matter.

I filed the new petition at 5:32 Thursday morning, October 15, through the Attorney General's web form: one hundred twenty pages, with forty-four exhibits. It asks the Attorney General to waive the fees, or at least cut them, because DHS blew the deadlines in the public records law and because the records serve the public. It asks the Attorney General to make DHS explain how it got to twelve hundred hours, and to count the delay from July 2, not September 16.

The Attorney General's office has published its public records orders going back to 1981, more than twenty-seven hundred of them, about two hundred twenty against DHS. Between us, Patty and I have five orders against DHS, all in the last ten months. In all those years, nobody else has more than four. Three people got there: a reporter for The Oregonian, and two others in the early 2000s and 2010s. I'm the fourth. Since January 2025, only one other person in Oregon has as many orders against state agencies as I do, and nobody has more. When the Attorney General rules on Thursday's petition, I'll have more orders against DHS than anyone in the published record.

I put a one-page cover statement on top. Patty filed records requests of her own, it says, because records I was seeking for my reporting, records she knew existed, weren't being released to me. Her records are in the petition to show DHS acting in bad faith, not, as somebody decided to put it, because she got more records than I did. "This petition is long because ODHS's conduct has been long," the statement ends. "The burden of this record was created by the agency, not by the requesters."

Three hours after I filed, David Pitcher, a lawyer at the Department of Justice, wrote back. The law gives the Attorney General seven days. He asked for more. "We're just not going to be able to review a 14-page filing with 44 exhibits and get an order out on it next week," he wrote. I said October 30 was fine. The order is due on or before that day.

The Attorney General's office usually won't second-guess the size of a fee. What it will ask is whether a fee is so large, compared with the request, that its real purpose is to deny the request rather than to cover the cost of the work, and to answer that, the agency has to explain how it got its number. DHS hasn't explained anything. The office has ordered fee cuts before, and when an agency misses the law's deadlines it can waive the fee for the delay alone. That's the first thing I asked for.

The same Thursday I filed, a new version of one of DHS's own rules took effect. Through Wednesday, the rule said redacted copies of adult protective services investigations at the facilities DHS licenses, homes like Nadine's Nest, could be made available to the public. Starting Thursday, every adult protective services report and record is confidential, and unless one of the rule's exceptions applies, DHS must not even acknowledge to the public that a report exists. A member of the public who asks a local office for those records now gets sent to the records office that priced my request. Inquiries from the media go to the Department's executive and communications staff. The next time somebody outside the family asks how DHS investigated a home like Nadine's Nest, the rule says DHS can't even confirm there was an investigation.

The form DHS uses to report a serious event has a list of check boxes under the heading Abuse type. The boxes include death, elopement, financial abuse, neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse. Two of them, between involuntary seclusion and neglect, say Legislative request and Media.

On February 2 of this year, DHS put me under both.

How I reported this. I've been asking Oregon DHS for records about Russell Bingaman's care and about the agency's own records office since September 2024. This story rests on DHS's letters, emails, estimates and acknowledgments, its registry entries, the state mail service's delivery log, the Attorney General's published orders and the petition I filed October 15. I have a personal stake: I'm suing one DHS employee, the manager of the records unit handling my requests, in federal court, and I help Patty Bingaman with her records requests as her agent. Nobody pays me for this reporting.