To my readers and supporters:
First, an apology for two quiet months. When you run an independent investigative operation alone, the trench work sometimes has to come before the writing desk. But the quiet was not rest. It was construction. Here is what we built, and what three government bodies did while we built it.
It is fitting that this lands on the Fourth of July, because every fight described below is about the same founding idea: the people's right to inspect what their government does in their name.
UNION COUNTY PUT AN $802.50 PRICE TAG ON ITS OWN LEGAL BILLS
On April 22, I asked Union County for the records of its relationship with its own outside counsel: the contracts, invoices, billing detail, payment records, procurement paperwork, and conflict-of-interest waivers for attorney Wyatt S. Baum and his firms, going back to 2012. These are the records that show how much public money flows to the county's private lawyers and what taxpayers get for it.
Six days later, the county's Administrative Officer answered my fee-waiver application with one sentence I want you to read exactly as it was written: "Union County does not grant fee waivers for public records requests."
That is not what Oregon law says. ORS 192.324(5) requires a custodian to actually consider whether releasing records "primarily benefits the general public" -- an individualized determination, case by case. A blanket no-waivers policy is a refusal to do the job the statute assigns.
It took the county five more weeks to produce a fee estimate, and when it came on June 2, it told its own story. Of the $802.50 to $1,050 the county wants, $600 to $800 is "legal review and redaction" billed at $200 per hour by the county's "contracted legal counsel." Sit with that for a moment. The records I requested ARE the billing records of the county's contracted legal counsel. The county has not said who will do this $200-an-hour review. If it is the Baum firm, then the subjects of my request would be reviewing their own invoices, deciding what to redact from their own conflict-of-interest files, and billing me for the privilege.
Oregon law is also specific about what attorney time can be charged to a requester. ORS 192.324(4)(b) allows charging for the time spent redacting exempt material -- and excludes time spent deciding what is exempt in the first place. The county's letter says its counsel will "review and redact as appropriate" while admitting that what gets withheld "will be identified as the records request moves forward." In other words, the deciding and the redacting are mixed together in the same $800 line item.
On July 1, the Board of Commissioners -- the same board those billing records would illuminate -- voted to deny my fee waiver. Their stated reasons were that the request is "very extensive" and that a waiver "would require the county to absorb extra legal costs as well as significant staff time." Every word of that is about the county's convenience. Not one word addresses the statutory question: whether the public benefits from seeing how its money is spent.
We are not paying the toll, and we are not going away. The next step is the review path Oregon law provides for unreasonable fee-waiver denials, and every letter in this fight will be published for the public to read.
THE STATE COURTS SAID A JOURNALIST CAN'T "DISSEMINATE"
On a second front, I asked the Oregon Judicial Department for something narrow: the system audit records for two documents in the Russell Bingaman guardianship case (No. 23PR02271) -- who entered them, when, and how they were served -- plus the communications by which appointed counsel was selected. These records are not about me and not about any private party. They are about how the court system itself creates, enters, and serves its own orders in guardianship cases, under a 2021 law (SB 578) that had just taken effect in Union County when the first order issued.
OJD first bounced the request entirely, telling me to go ask the Union County court -- wrong, since OJD's own Office of the State Court Administrator runs the statewide Odyssey system. Twelve days lost before they reopened it with an apology. Then on June 29 came the estimate ($373.75) and a fee-waiver denial I will also quote exactly: "This is because the request is specific to an individual case that you have been involved in and not broadly directed at a matter of public interest. Additionally, you have not demonstrated the ability to disseminate any findings in a way that benefits the public."
Not demonstrated the ability to disseminate. In the past twelve months, Valor's reporting has drawn 419,283 views and more than 27 full days of cumulative audience watch time -- in a region that lost its own daily newspaper in 2024 and now shares one weekly for all of Eastern Oregon. OJD's own correspondence in this very request addresses me as "Investigative Journalist Levi Bakke."
On July 2, I sent the Department a formal reconsideration demand, on the law and on the record, giving it ten business days to issue the individualized determination the statute requires. My own review of Oregon protective-proceeding dockets shows that 78 percent of respondents go unrepresented -- how the courts implement counsel appointments, and whether their systems accurately document the entry and service of orders, concerns every Oregonian who may someday be the subject of a protective proceeding. As I told the Department: a requester does not owe the government a preview of unpublished reporting as the price of a fee waiver. There is no more public subject than the integrity of the court's own record.
ODHS: THE CONSOLIDATED AND FINAL REQUEST IS IN
The biggest move of the summer is aimed at the Oregon Department of Human Services. For over a year, ODHS answered our records requests about the isolation, care, and January 29, 2025 death of Russell Bingaman with the same pattern: partial productions, silent omissions, and procedural arguments that our court challenges were premature because no thread had been formally and finally denied.
So we cleared the field. We let the first lawsuit (Bakke v. ODHS, Marion County Case No. 26CV11493) be dismissed without prejudice, and on July 2 we filed a 35-category Consolidated and Final Public Records Request that gathers every outstanding thread from five prior requests -- plus the two requests Patricia Bingaman filed herself, one of which ODHS denied in full and the other of which it partially answered and then went silent on, blowing through its own promised January 2026 production date -- into one matter, under one tracking number, in three legal capacities: as Patricia Bingaman's authorized agent, as personal representative of Russell's estate holding a full HIPAA authorization, and as a credentialed member of the news media.
One matter. One clock. ODHS's acknowledgment was due within five business days -- July 9. When the statutory response period runs, whatever ODHS has not produced or lawfully justified withholding will be ripe, all of it, at once.
Among the 35 categories, three give you the flavor.
The appeal ODHS says doesn't exist. In March 2025 we sent ODHS a formal appeal and reinvestigation demand by certified mail. The state's own DAS mailroom tracking shows it delivered to ODHS headquarters on March 17, 2025. ODHS later certified it had "no responsive records" for that appeal. We are demanding the mailroom logs, scanning metadata, and internal routing records showing exactly whose hands that envelope passed through.
Who pulled the whistleblower's file. At the September 2024 guardianship hearing, court-appointed counsel cross-examined whistleblower Lisa Nice about her own caregiving history. We are demanding the records and query logs showing what ODHS pulled about Ms. Nice, who pulled it, and how it reached the attorney who used it.
The Baum channel. Complete records of communications between local Adult Protective Services staff and attorney Wyatt Baum and his firm -- the same attorney whose county billing records Union County wants $802.50 to look at. Patricia asked ODHS for these communications herself in 2025. That part of her request was dropped without explanation and without a privilege log.
WHAT THE MONEY TRAIL ALREADY SHOWS -- AND WHY THEY GUARD IT
People ask why a county would put an $802.50 price tag on its own legal bills. Here is what our review of the records we could get for free -- board minutes, audited financial statements, published payment registers -- has already found.
A $375,361 overrun nobody voted on. On January 22, 2025, the Board of Commissioners unanimously awarded Mike Becker Construction a $1,132,810 contract for airport hangar construction. The county's own payment registers show Becker was paid $1,508,171.56 through February 2026 -- $375,361.56 over the awarded bid, a 33 percent overrun. We read every set of Board of Commissioners minutes from January 2025 through March 2026. Not one change order, contract amendment, or budget modification for that project was ever brought to a public vote.
The contractor was being paid before there was a contract. Payment registers also show the county paid Becker $196,993.24 from the County Fair fund in February and April of 2025, labeled "CAPITAL IMPROVEMENTS" -- eleven months before the fairgrounds project's formal groundbreaking and months before the lottery bond that was supposed to fund it was executed. The county's FY2025 audit shows the Fair fund's entire capital outlay was $200,454, matching those pre-contract payments almost to the dollar. No public vote authorized them.
A $34,188 bid that got paid $104,320. In December 2024, Commissioner Matt Scarfo requested adding golf cart paths at the county-owned Buffalo Peak Golf Course to the federal ARPA budget -- $108,540 allocated before a single quote existed. In July 2025, Hampton Paving won the work with a low bid of $34,188, beating competitors at $37,100 and $112,862. By October 2025 the county had paid Hampton $104,320.50 -- three times the winning bid, a 205 percent overrun, and within $4,220 of the ARPA ceiling set before the bidding ever happened. Once again: no public change order, no vote. And that pandemic-relief-funded golf course? It lost $195,904 in fiscal 2024-25 by the county's own audited statements, propped up by $252,321 in quiet transfers from governmental funds.
The contractor is also a rancher -- and the county pays him twice. Oregon Secretary of State records confirm Michael A. Becker is the registered owner of Bar V Cattle Co, which shares its physical address and PO Box with Mike Becker General Contractor, Inc. County expenditure ledgers show Bar V Cattle received $90,823.47 in county-administered wolf depredation payments between February 2024 and January 2026 -- payments matched line-by-line to the ledgers, the board minutes, and reporting in the East Oregonian and La Grande Observer.
And about that January 22, 2025 meeting. In a single session, Commissioner Matt Scarfo moved to approve a wolf depredation payment to Bar V Cattle AND moved to approve the $1,132,810 construction contract to Mike Becker Construction -- two payments to the same man at the same sitting, with no conflict of interest declared on the record for either. That same meeting designated the East Oregonian -- a paper printed 65 miles away -- for the county's legal notices, and approved utility easements across the county-owned golf course benefiting a private developer's adjacent property. Three months later, the county's lawsuit to void voter-approved term limits was noticed in that faraway paper, and nobody appeared to contest it.
That is what sits in the records the public can already reach. The contracts, itemized invoices, and conflict waivers of the county's own outside counsel are the records they want $802.50 to unlock -- with up to $800 of it billed at $200 an hour for "legal review" of what are, at bottom, bills and account numbers a records clerk could redact. Taxpayers are entitled to ask what, exactly, in a county's business with its own lawyer needs to be hidden from the people paying for both.
WHAT COMES NEXT
To take this work to the next level, I am pursuing my Private Investigator license through Oregon DPSST. The credential means formal, licensed investigative capacity volunteered directly to Valor's nonprofit casework -- a stronger, legally recognized voice for families fighting guardianship and elder abuse -- and a sustainable professional structure to fund the public-interest work long term.
Every request we file, every fee they demand, and every denial they sign will be published on this site. We will analyze what they produce, expose what they withhold, and map the networks their records reveal.
If you believe public records belong to the public, this is the moment to stand with us. Every dollar donated goes to the hard costs of prying records loose: filing fees, records fees, and the free tools this site gives away. Donations are made through Donorbox via the Donate link at the top of the page; Valor Investigates is an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 41-4718382), and contributions are tax-deductible.
If you have information about any of this -- Union County spending, guardianship cases, ODHS conduct -- the fastest way to reach me is to call (541) 655-3157 and set up a phone appointment, or use the tips page on this site.
Thank you for standing with us. We take sides here, because neutrality only ever helps the oppressor.