One of the main players in the Legislature’s recent gutting of the 2024 campaign finance reform law was Eugene’s Julie Fahey, Speaker of the House of Representatives. House Bill 4018, negotiated by Fahey with unions and business lobbyists but without the good government groups involved in writing the 2024 legislation, not only delayed full implementation until 2031, but altered key provisions of the 2024 law to allow big money to continue flowing to politicians.

Here is what I wrote to Governor Kotek shortly after the legislative session ended:

I strongly urge you to veto House Bill 4018, the bill modifying the 2024 campaign finance reforms.

The bill made substantial changes to the 2024 reforms, once again opening the floodgates of big money to Oregon campaigns. The changes were written in secret meetings with business and union interests, excluding the good government groups that participated in the 2024 negotiations. The result is a shocking breach of trust not only with the good government groups, but with Oregon voters, who overwhelmingly voted for reform in 2020.

It is patently obvious that the process of creating HB 4018 was corrupt and designed to undo reforms. Many will now feel as I do, that union and business interests never had any intention of allowing the 2024 reforms to go into effect. Inaction during the 2025 long session, followed by a hurried and secret process this session, points to a coordinated strategy between Julie Fahey and money interests.

Egregious as the undoing of the 2024 reforms is, even worse are the narratives put out by supporters of HB 4018. An Oregonian editorial described them perfectly: gaslighting. Supporters of HB 4018, with straight faces, claimed that the bill provided nothing but technical fixes and more time for the Secretary of State to implement reporting, claims that are clearly untrue.

If you sign this bill, we can confidently predict the following. The Honest Elections group will mount a ballot measure at its first opportunity. It will be a constitutional amendment, immune to legislative meddling. It will impose even stronger curbs than the 2024 bill. It will not involve union or business interests. It will pass overwhelmingly. And the Secretary of State will once again ask for millions to modify its reporting system.

Vetoing HB 4018 would make a statement to voters that there is at least one elected official who sees this issue as they do.

Here is Rep. Fahey’s response to my email expressing my opposition to the bill.

Thank you for contacting me about your opposition to HB 4018.

I was proud of the campaign finance reform bill the legislature passed in the 2024 session (HB 4024) – that bill both implemented campaign finance limits in Oregon and it introduced additional transparency and technical requirements for our campaign finance system (e.g., a campaign finance dashboard).

At the time the 2024 bill passed, we knew that the implementation timeline would be challenging for the Secretary of State (SOS). After taking office last year, the new Secretary of State raised alarms about his ability to implement the legislation on the original timeline. One major implementation hurdle is that Oregon’s online campaign finance system (ORESTAR) is already more complex and antiquated than most states’ systems, so adding contribution limits would require a major, costly rebuild on an accelerated timeline. For example, the system needs to reliably identify and track donors across multiple contributions to prevent people or organizations from evading limits by using different variants of names (Ben vs. Benjamin) or addresses (work vs. home). It also needs other upgrades to improve the transparency around independent expenditures (also known as dark money) that HB 4024 required.

Given that context, my priority was that we implement the campaign contribution limits on the original timeline in the bill, even if that means that some of the other components of HB 4024 might need to have a phased implementation timeline. That is one of the main things that HB 4018 does. There has been some misinformation and disagreement about what HB 4018 actually does, so I want to take a moment to clarify its contents:

• • It protects the on-time implementation of campaign contribution limits on Jan 1, 2027, by phasing in some of the more technically challenging pieces of the bill to a later date. As I mentioned earlier, the SOS has been clear that they don’t have the time or resources to fully implement all the aspects of the 2024 campaign finance legislation (e.g., the campaign finance dashboard). This bill gives them time to ensure that the Elections Division can find a software vendor, create a solution that meets Oregon’s unique transparency needs, engage in robust testing, and train practitioners before it all goes into effect.
  • When HB 4024 was drafted in the 2024 session we knew that there were technical ambiguities that would need to be addressed in future legislation and through rulemaking. Many key details were left to the SOS to address in rulemaking, which allowed the legislature to move forward on the bill without having to answer every last detailed question. Unfortunately, that also meant a year of stakeholder debates in the rulemaking committee, with no consensus on many of the important details. The SOS office did their best to draft the rules, but they lacked a record of legislative intent on many questions. HB 4018 provides clearer direction on several technical points.
  • HB 4018 also clears up ambiguities that became apparent during the SOS’s rulemaking process on HB 4024, from questions of whether independent expenditures (IE) should be reported out of a committee or just an organization’s bank account (HB 4018 answers that by creating an IE committee type, which didn’t exist before), to how to define and enforce membership organization proliferation (to avoid someone creating many different organizations just to get around contribution limits), to what the SOS’s role should be in policing all of these new rules. If you’d like more information or have any questions about any of these specific technical changes, my office is happy to provide more information.
  • HB 4018 also makes some policy improvements to the previous legislation, chiefly by expanding the ability of local candidates to receive limited in-kind staff support from community organizations. Previously, this was only available to state and legislative candidates. This change is a matter of fairness and supports the kind of grassroots campaigning we need more of.

I’ll be the first to admit that delaying some elements of HB 4024 is far from ideal. However, I believe this proposal honors the core goal of that bill—implementing real campaign contribution limits in 2027—and responsibly balances the reality of significant technical challenges to implement the remaining components.

I also want to be clear that good government groups have been part of this conversation for many years. They helped draft HB 4024 in 2024, had many meetings with legislative staff following the passage of HB 4024, and provided significant input into the SOS rulemaking process (which led to many of the pieces in HB 4018).

During the legislative interim this year (time between sessions), legislators will be convening a work group to tackle other technical questions and ensure the implementation timeline stays on track—that process will include robust stakeholder engagement, and good government groups will have additional opportunities to share their perspectives.

Thanks again for writing – I know we may not agree on this issue, but it’s important to me that my constituents know where I stand. As always, please feel free to follow up if you have any additional thoughts or questions, on this topic or any other.