Back in 2019, it looked like Oregon lawmakers might finally commit to ending the state’s outlier status on campaign finance.

I had just authored an investigative series for The Oregonian/OregonLive, my previous newsroom, revealing how Oregon’s lack of limits on campaign donations had allowed corporate America to give more to sitting lawmakers, per capita, than anywhere else in the country and led to some of the weakest environmental protections on the West Coast. The state Supreme Court had allowed it to happen by saying campaign donations were protected free speech under the Oregon Constitution.

Lawmakers in Oregon, one of five states without any limits at all, seemed willing to do something about what we’d revealed. They asked Oregonians to change the constitution and explicitly allow contribution limits, something legislators had repeatedly tried and failed to do before. At the ballot in 2020, 78% of voters said yes, one of the widest margins for any ballot measure in decades. All lawmakers needed to do was to write legislation limiting donations.

But for the next four years, no limits were adopted. When lawmakers eventually set caps in 2024, individual donations were restricted to $3,300 per election, well short of caps in the $1,000 to $2,000 range that good-government groups had sought previously. Lawmakers left other avenues for donors to give their time and money. They allowed corporate donations, which many states ban, to continue. They made it so the limits wouldn’t take effect until 2027, after the current race for governor is over.

And now, lawmakers have voted to ratchet the spigot open further — and perhaps, campaign reform advocates say, all the way.

On March 5, Oregon’s Democratic-controlled Legislature approved a bill that supporters described as containing little more than technical fixes to what they’d written two years ago. 

Groups that seek to limit the influence of money in politics said the changes are far more serious than housekeeping. They said the new bill inserted loopholes that, among other things, will allow companies to bypass the limits by giving through corporate affiliates.

Dan Meek, an attorney who for years has been at the center of efforts to curtail money in Oregon politics, labeled it “the bill to destroy campaign finance reform in Oregon.”

Oregon elections haven’t had contribution limits since briefly in the 1990s. Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state who advocated for those caps only to see them overturned in court, described the Legislature’s track record on campaign finance as “one of the most profound public policy failures” in Oregon’s recent history.

“Limits should have been in place decades ago,” he said. “The base problem is that there are powerful forces within both political parties who prefer the system as it is.”

Legislative leaders defended their work.

In a floor speech, House Majority Leader Ben Bowman described the contribution limits the Legislature adopted as delivering on “elections where the voices of everyday people are not drowned out by wealthy and powerful interests making unlimited political contributions.” He described this year’s changes as necessary for the new system to work.

The investigation I worked on seven years ago found that campaign donations in Oregon did more than just help politicians get elected.

They sometimes spent campaign money in ways that benefited themselves, including on luxury hotel rooms, dry cleaning, car washes — even picking up the tabs during dozens of visits to sports bars. One lawmaker used campaign money to buy a new computer three weeks before she left office; another spent it on an Amazon Prime membership, 11 days before resigning.

The money shaped public policy. As a reporter covering Oregon’s environment, I watched the Legislature weaken or stall efforts on climate change, logging practices, industrial air pollution, herbicide spraying, oil spill preparedness and other issues over a decade. One retired regulator told me all it took was a single phone call from a well-connected lobbyist to kill one clean air initiative.

What’s happened since my investigation was published reveals how hard it can be to eliminate this kind of influence when the people expected to rein in donations are the ones whose campaigns have long benefited from them.

After Oregonians overwhelmingly voted to hand lawmakers the power to regulate election money in 2020, lawmakers failed to put restrictions in place in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Tired of waiting, advocates for tight constraints on campaign money gathered tens of thousands of signatures to put a measure limiting donations on the ballot in 2024. Labor unions, a major source of giving to Democrats, responded by threatening to put up their own competing initiative.  A backer of the union measure said recently that it would have encouraged grassroots participation through small donor committees and included public financing for candidates.

Meek, the campaign reform advocate, described the union measure as an effort to create far looser limits, with less disclosure and major loopholes.

Lawmakers stepped in, brokering a deal that was hailed as a historic breakthrough. Unions, the campaign reform advocates and big business produced a bill that Meek described as at least a starting point for controlling Oregon’s political money — albeit with fewer constraints and bigger dollar limits than he and others wanted.

Kate Titus, Oregon director of Common Cause, an advocacy group that was involved in the negotiations alongside Meek, said everyone agreed that some technical fixes to the bill’s language would be needed before the system took effect in 2027. But she said the group, which included House Speaker Julie Fahey, agreed that no substantive changes would be made without everyone’s agreement.

Then came this year’s short, monthlong legislative session — and a surprise.

Titus described seeing Fahey in a state Capitol hallway in early February and asking whether any bills were coming on campaign finance. Fahey’s expression changed to what Titus described as “pure panic.”

“I can’t talk,” Titus said the speaker told her, before hurrying away.

(Fahey’s spokesperson, Jill Bakken, said the speaker was on her way from a floor session to a meeting and didn’t have time for an impromptu hallway conversation, telling Titus she could schedule time through her staff.)

Hours later, Titus said, an 85-page bill was introduced with Fahey’s name on it and a public hearing scheduled early the next morning.

It would push back the deadline that the 2024 legislation set for launching a new website for tracking campaign money, from 2028 to 2032.

The bill would make the $5,000 limit on donations to one type of political committee apply per year, not per two-year election cycle — effectively doubling the amount allowed. A spokesperson for Fahey called the 2024 provision a “typo” that needed correcting because it was inconsistent with limits on other donation types.

The 2024 law prohibited multiple businesses controlled by the same person from each giving as much as the law allows. The 2026 bill would allow it as long as the businesses weren’t created solely to evade limits, a change Fahey’s spokesperson said was needed to avoid a “chilling effect on community-based organizations’ participation in elections.” The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, called it a loophole that renders Oregon’s contribution limits “illusory.”

On top of all that, the bill would remove a long-standing provision in state law that says that money someone spends in coordination with a candidate is a campaign contribution. A spokesperson for Secretary of State Tobias Read said the provision was “redundant” because the law also says “any other thing of value,” beyond money, is a campaign contribution. But the Campaign Legal Center said the change could leave Oregon functionally with “no contribution limits.”

A representative of the League of Women Voters of Oregon, which was involved in the 2024 negotiations, called the bill “a complete betrayal.”

Bakken, Fahey’s spokesperson, told ProPublica that groups including the league “have been part of this conversation for many years” and that they will have opportunities for input as lawmakers consider future changes.

As for why the Legislature hasn’t done more to stem the flow of money into the system, Bakken said that constraining donors too greatly could push them to divert cash from campaign donations into commercials and mailers in support of candidates, something candidates legally can’t control. These “independent expenditures” have no dollar limit under federal law.

Unhappy as Meek and others were with the proposal, they couldn’t do much. They threatened to go back to the ballot, but without the signatures they’d gathered to do so in 2024, they’d lost their leverage. The bill sailed through the Oregon House by a 39-19 vote and the Senate 20-9.

Sen. Jeff Golden, a Southern Oregon Democrat who opposed the bill, called its passage the biggest surprise of his eight-year tenure. Given the potentially huge loopholes, he said in an interview: “I thought my colleagues wouldn’t pass it. And I was wrong.”

The measure sits on the desk of Gov. Tina Kotek, a Portland Democrat. She has until April 17 to decide on it.