Some background info on my upcoming race for US Rep, District 3, Oregon:

This race is a little personal for me. I joined NW Natural Gas in year 2000 as measurement engineer. I was in charge of all things that maintained the accuracy of converting the volume, temperature, pressure, and quality of the natural gas used by the customer into the dollars on the customer's monthly bill. Right from the start, I quickly surmised that the Company was lax in fulfilling its duty of accurately and fairly billing its customers. And then I found out that they were deliberately disregarding their obligations to the Oregon Public Utility Commission in spending the money necessary to ensure an acceptable level of billing accuracy. Indeed, a senior vice-President told the manager in charge to not budget for the removal of inaccurate (and billing too much) meters because he didn't think the OPUC was watching. (Saving money in this way increases the company's profit, and with this, executives get bigger bonuses.)

I tried to work in the background to get the Company to do the right thing, and catch up in all the areas it had neglected. In my persistence, I started losing the office-politics war, and developed the persona of a rogue and non-Team Player. In one of the areas that the Company was neglecting badly, the OPUC finally caught the Company in the act, but my boss threw me under the bus and placed the blame on me. I barely survived, but my career was flatlined. Finally, one of the most credibility-lacking components of measurement that the Company was employing -- that I had been advocating for years to be replaced -- was failing miserably for the two big paper mills near Oregon City (causing up to 7% overbilling). Much effort was made by management to cover up this fact after the paper mill inquired as to why they seemed to be using a lot more gas than normal. Shortly thereafter, Blue Heron Paper Mill (using $tens of millions of natural gas yearly just like other paper mills) went bankrupt, and 180 employees lost their family-wage jobs. (And adding insult to injury, the Manager of Credit told me that NW Natural was illegally hiding a $35,000 deposit (that the paper mill needed to escape Chapter 11 bankruptcy) from the Chapter 7 bankruptcy court.) This caused a personal crisis for me, as I came to realize that my efforts in the background to get the company to correct its measurement standards and practices were failing, people were being hurt, I was fearing the loss of my ability to adequately provide for my family, and NW Natural and its executives were profiting off its malfeasance. It was also becoming increasingly obvious that the Company was slowly but surely reassigning me away from measurement so as to remove the irritant and shut me up. One of the projects they assigned to me was to help expand the system (that was sending low-quality gas to those paper mills) to all of east Portland, and they were just finishing a project to send that same gas down to Salem. No money was being spent to improve the measurement system so that it would fairly bill this low-quality gas. I was getting very angry at this on the job, and was taking this anger home with me, causing concern from my wife and children. Finally, when I realized my anger had reached the point that I was at risk of doing something stupid, I took family medical leave, removing myself from the workplace environment. While on family medical leave, I realized that I needed to get this stuff off my chest, so I filed complaints of ethical misconduct internally, enumerating all of the ethical violations I had seen the Company commit over the years. I decided to do this even though I believed that this would cost me my job, and career in engineering -- trying to prod a hopelessly corrupt organization to change for the better just wasn't worth the harm it was causing me and my family anymore.

Here's where the tie to US Rep District 3 comes in: NW Natural was compelled by law to investigate my allegations of ethical misconduct. That investigation was overseen by Margaret Kirkpatrick, Executive vice-President and Chief Legal Counsel for NW Natural. She is also the wife of Earl Blumenauer, incumbent US Representative, District 3! Her investigation came to the conclusion that no laws were broken, and there were no ethical violations. She did not explain why there were no ethical violations, saying it was against the law to disclose this information to me. I was thanked for reporting my concerns, told that I had performed my duty, and told to go away.

I didn't go away. I decided to write emails -- distributed to managers, directors, and vice-Presidents -- that made sure nobody could claim they didn't know what the Company was up to. I even disclosed an email in which a manager hoped that NW Natural would not "get caught" by the OPUC that we were significantly overbilling our customers because of our gross billing negligence. I was also pressing hard to have Kirkpatrick explain to me why the obvious ethical violations were not violations of the Company's Code of Ethics. With the Company not responding to my internal complaints, I took the matter to the OPUC. And when the OPUC seemingly deferred, I informed the union steward of the shutdown paper mill of what NW Natural had concealed, and he turned it over to Senator Jeff Merkley's office. Finally, in my final push to try to understand how NW Natural could conclude that nobody had violated its Code of Ethics, I alluded in an email to how important it was for me to get closure on the issue, as evidenced in my having to take family medical leave months earlier. With this, Kirkpatrick seized on these words, and had me escorted out of the building, citing that my reference to my family medical leave constituted a "risk of violence to fellow employees".

I was put on paid administrative leave while they tried to figure out what to do with me. They paid a psychologist to purposely do a hatchet job on my character to validate that I posed a risk of violence in the workplace. The end came three months later with a letter of termination citing the reason for firing a 12-year employee being that I had used my personal email account to transfer Company information, and that I shared Company information with a person (the union steward) that had no valid business purpose. (This is how they got around the illegality of firing a whistleblower.)

The CEO at NW Natural at the time was the former press secretary for Neil Goldschmidt's last gubernatorial campaign. Before that, the CEO was Mark Dodson, who was a college buddy of Neil Goldschmidt, and whose wife was Goldschmidt's personal secretary during the time of Goldschmidt's rapes. All these well-connected people (and many others) have enriched themselves by being operatives in Oregon's vast and dominating political machine. Why were these people -- no technical brilliance, no business brilliance, no experience in utility operations -- placed within the executive ranks and then CEO at NW Natural? Because the best way for NW Natural -- the regulated monopoly -- to make profits is not through innovation or efficiency, but with making deals with the OPUC in Salem. A member of Oregon's political machine can do this very well. Just ask Ron Eachus. Good ol' boys (and girls) and their family members of the political machine get enriched and are proclaimed pillars of the community; dupe engineers like me get ostracized, demoted, and pushed out the door. That's the way it is in our country and government, and that's the way Earl Blumenauer and his wife like it. I don't.

Well, if you'll excuse me, I've got a campaign to run, and an axe to grind.