Editor’s note: As the governor canvasses the state trying to get the votes for his “grand bargain,” The Bulletin examines the state’s budgeting process over three decades with a view toward where we are headed.

The buzzwords out of the Oregon Legislature, which adjourned July 8, are familiar by now: pensions and revenue, public schools and public safety.

While lawmakers passed plenty of legislation on subjects as varied as hair braiding and teens in tanning beds, what they really worked on was developing a balanced budget, as required by state law. Legislators tried and failed to carve out a “grand bargain” that would have given Republicans more substantial cuts to the Public Employees Retirement System and given Democrats the tax increases they wanted to boost education spending.

In the end, the state passed a $59.8 billion budget that included $6.55 billion for K-12 schools, made limited changes to PERS and cut the growth of the state’s inmate population by scaling back sentences for some property and drug crimes.

But the fact remains: Oregon’s budget is overwhelmingly given over to several big-ticket items and depends predominantly and unpredictably on income taxes, making legislators’ attempts to plan for the future a constant challenge.

In 2011-13, three-quarters of Oregon’s budget was spent on education, human services, public safety and pensions for public employees. More than 30 years ago, when the budget was laid out for 1979-81, those pieces comprised just over 45 percent.

The change is the result of a fundamental shift in what programs the state is responsible for and how much voters have asked the state to provide its citizens. That, combined with a reliance on income and corporate taxes, leaves Oregon with one of the most volatile budgets in the country.

When times are good in Oregon, as they were during the tech boom in the 1990s and 2000s, Oregon’s budget can — and often does — expand to provide more funding for schools, health care and other programs. But when the economy tanks, as it did in 2008, the budget must shrink as citizens lose jobs and stop spending money. And as Oregon grows, and the changing population means more needed and desired programs, revenue is not growing at the same pace, leaving officials to make hard decisions.

Meanwhile, Oregon’s economy has changed significantly over the past three decades, from heavily dependent on resources like timber and agriculture to more manufacturing and technology. Yet, according to a study from the Oregon Center for Public Policy, Oregonian taxpayers’ incomes haven’t increased in the intervening years. In 2010, the median income was $30,839. Adjusted for inflation, that’s 4 percent less than it was in 1980. In 2011, the report states, “the median, or typical, hourly wage was $16.77 — below the $16.90 inflation-adjusted median wage more than 30 years earlier. Similarly, low-wage workers earned just $9.95 per hour in 2011, less than the $10.81 they made in 1979 in inflation-adjusted terms.”

Gov. John Kitzhaber worries about what he calls income stagnation, which he said “erodes the middle class, exacerbates inequality, and for the first time threatens a generation of Oregonians with the prospect of a declining standard of living.” But that challenge, he wrote in an email, comes at the same time the Legislature is forced to pay for “overburdened social systems.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty level has risen in Oregon from 13.2 percent in 2000, when for a family of four the federal poverty rate was $17,050 in yearly income, to 17.5 percent in 2011, when for a family of four the federal poverty rate was $22,350 in yearly income.

“As difficult as it is, we need to control our costs and, instead of paying on the back-end, reinvest our money on the front-end in areas that will improve Oregon for the future,” Kitzhaber wrote. He pointed to attempts during the most recent legislative session to shift focus to prevention and appropriate investment, through reforms in health care, public employee pensions and public safety.

Mark McMullen heads the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, which is responsible for the quarterly revenue forecast. It’s not an easy job, in part because of the volatility of the revenue stream.

“In terms of booms, Oregon’s are bigger, and our busts tend to be bigger as well,” he said. “The underlying economy bounces around a lot, and that can be dwarfed a lot by tax revenues bouncing around.”

McMullen said Oregon’s volatility also stems from its focus on manufacturing, which he described as a boom-bust sector, as well as from migration. When times are good and jobs are plentiful, Oregon gets a great deal of transplants, who bring with them their income and their demands for services.

Ken Rocco heads the Oregon Legislative Fiscal Office, which serves as the staff to the Joint Committee on Ways and Means, the panel responsible for creating the state budget.

That office answers to the presiding officers of the Legislature, while there’s a similar office that works for the governor, the Chief Financial Office.

Rocco said there have been several significant changes to the budget over time. First, he said, is Measure 5, which voters approved in 1990 and “changed the whole way the state’s general fund was used.”

Tapping the general fund

Measure 5 was designed to provide tax relief to Oregon’s property owners by capping property taxes for school funding, first to $15 per $1,000 in real market value, then to $5 per $1,000 in real market value.

Before Measure 5, the bulk of education funding came through local property taxes. After Measure 5, the responsibility rested with the state’s general fund.

“There was no allowance for making up that money from anywhere,” Rocco said, noting Measure 5 provided no new revenue to pay for schools.

Former Bend-La Pine Schools’ deputy superintendent John Rexford, who now runs the High Desert Education Service District, said Measure 5 and a subsequent measure that further limited property taxes have left schools constantly wondering about their futures.

“By keeping taxes in check, it places more burden on the state. So we’re either number one or number two in the country in most volatile funding,” he said. “You live and die by the economy.”

He said it’s the volatility that makes school funding such a bear. And, he said, while Measure 5 forced equity in school spending, it hasn’t necessarily increased education funding around the state, just evened it out.

“We’re trying to make the budget more sustainable and wean ourselves off of federal money,” he said. “Without Measure 5, it would be less equal, and students would not get a fair shake. It forced equity to schools in Oregon. The flip side is (mediocre funding). Is that appropriate equity?”

The second significant change to the state’s general fund came through the Oregon Health Plan, which is designed to provide more low-income Oregonians with health insurance while limiting costs. While the health plan also brings in a great deal of federal money to support it, “it still requires an ongoing continuous investment in general fund dollars,” Rocco said.

Beyond Measure 5 and the Oregon Health Plan, Rocco considers Measures 11 and 57 the other most significant cost drivers in the state.

Measure 11 created mandatory minimums on violent or person crimes like rape, kidnapping and murder. Measure 57 added prison terms for certain drug and property crimes. That, he said, has caused a prison construction boom and raised costs for the entire public safety sector.

As a result of those measures and OHP, Rocco said, “the whole thing rose to the point now where I think in our budget, 90 to 95 percent of the general fund goes to education, public safety and human services, and there’s not much left for the other areas like natural resources and administration programs and economic development.”

Meanwhile, the state has tried to increase revenue primarily through tax increases. With Measure 5 placing limits on property taxes and the state resistant to creating a sales tax, that leaves corporate and income taxes.

Oregon’s corporate excise tax is the second-biggest tax source for the state’s general fund and in 2011-13 was expected to provide about 6 percent of the general fund revenue. Traditionally most corporations have been taxed at about 6.6 percent. In 2010 voters passed Measures 66 and 67, increasing taxes on corporations and any households that brought in more than $250,000 and individuals who made $125,000 or more.

Since the 2001-02 fiscal year, Oregon’s corporate tax collections have increased from $195 million to $427 million in 2011-12.

It’s made more volatile by Oregon’s kicker law, which started in 1979. The law requires the state to refund excess revenue to taxpayers if the general fund revenues exceed the forecast amount by more than 2 percent. If corporate income tax revenues exceed the forecast, all that revenue goes only to corporations. If revenue from all the other general fund sources do better than forecasted, all that excess goes to individuals. The law has changed through the years; in 2000 voters allowed the Legislature to vote to suspend the kicker, and in 2007 the Legislature suspended the corporate kicker and put the money into the Rainy Day Fund.

The result of the kicker, of course, is that if Oregon has an unexpectedly revenue-heavy year and the state doesn’t properly forecast that revenue, it must return the funds to the taxpayers.

Beyond tax increases, Rocco said, Oregon also has a number of fees for services that in other states might not exist.

“We used to supply a lot more of the general fund to different departments,” he said. “Then because general fund money was tight they moved more towards charging fees for services. So rather than provide general fund money we get license fees and registration fees and permit fees. We say, ‘If you want to do this you’ve got to pay for it.’ I think that’s one area that we probably have been a little bit more aggressive than other states.”

For example, Oregon has 55 fees associated with angling, hunting and trapping, ranging from a basic hunting license fee to a fee for taking shellfish.

Federal funds

And the state has begun to depend more on federal funds. In 1979, Oregon expected to get about 11 percent of its total budget from federal funds. In the last biennium that was closer to 25 percent.

Rocco said the state has been aggressive about seeking out programs that have a federal match, particularly health programs. He also pointed to stimulus funds, which states received from the federal government during the recession.

“We got tons of stimulus money that we plopped into the budget because we were able to get them, but knowing they were one-time funds and that we would lose them,” Rocco said. “That’s another issue itself in the budget. If you become reliant on federal money then the program all of a sudden has a constituency but no funding to continue it. That never makes people happy.”

Rocco said the federal government is currently paying for 100 percent of all new Medicaid clients for three years through the Affordable Care Act.

“But once again, there’s an end to it, and then the match rate goes down and that will leave a hole in three or four years that we have to fill.”

The federal government sends Oregon money for a variety of other services, including education programs.

What has history taught us?

As Oregon continues to recover from the recession that struck five years ago and trim its budget to be sustainable, there are lessons to be learned from past governors.

Former Gov. Vic Atiyeh, who was Oregon’s last Republican governor and served from 1979 to 1987, knows a thing or two about recessions. When he took over in 1979, things looked all right. That changed quickly: By 1982, 11.6 percent of Oregonians were unemployed. Atiyeh remembers it taking about four years to climb out of the mess. When he left office in early 1987, unemployment hovered below 8 percent and fell further in the coming years to about 5.4 percent.

For Atiyeh, the way to climb out of a recession is simple: “The first step was to get jobs. Getting people to work and pay taxes, that’s one way to get things going.”

He was not shy about forcing legislators to meet in special sessions in order to keep the state budget balanced, including several times in 1982.

“We were making cuts that were necessary,” he said. “Nowadays you hear that we know the economy is going to be bad, but we’ll wait for the next estimate. You can’t save money you’ve already spent. If you wait two or three months, then you’ve spent two or three months of money you can’t save.”

During that period, Atiyeh also created a temporary income tax surcharge that provided the state with more revenue to get through the tough time. But when Atiyeh looks at today’s budget fight, he sees a simple answer: reducing the size of government and making do with less.

“Today we’re short and unemployment is staggering. Can we raise income taxes? Hell no. Can we pass a sales tax? Double hell no,” Atiyeh said. “Can we go back and raise property taxes? No. It’s all politics. So what do we do? What you do is cut. We can’t afford to do (all the things) we’re doing.”

Atiyeh has some tough words for his successor, Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, and how he handled the budget. He said Goldschmidt increased the budget for the governor’s office 60 percent within the first three months he was in office, and said he didn’t help the state plan for the effects of Measure 5.

Indeed, according to budget highlights from the Oregon Legislative Fiscal Office, the governor’s office budget during the 1985-87 biennium totaled about $3.8 million; for the 1987-89 biennium, it had jumped to an estimated $5.7 million.

It may seem like a small thing, Atiyeh acknowledged, just a couple million dollars in a budget of $14.3 billion. But Atiyeh said it’s the little cuts that can add up to big savings.

“It’s hard for me to say, you should cut here, or there, and somewhere else,” he said. “But here’s a good example. You’re reading the newspaper and it’s the governor’s assistant says this, another governor’s assistant says that. … There was no such thing in my administration. I was the one giving the information. It’s the little things.”

Atiyeh is resistant to the idea of the Legislature meeting annually, in part because the governor is allowed to call special sessions when necessary.

The Oregon Legislature meets every year in February. In odd-numbered years, those sessions cannot exceed 160 days; in even-numbered years the sessions cannot last more than 35 days. That started in 2011; before that, the Legislature met every other year.

These days, between each annual session, Atiyeh said, lawmakers meet in interim committees.

“With that comes a per diem,” he said. “It might sound like I’m picking on them but you find that kind of attitude, and it permeates. That’s where you can do things and make cuts without offending the taxpayers.”

Atiyeh acknowledged that some might think he can’t possibly understand how complex and complicated government has become.

“My answer is that it was complicated in 1982. The area and the job situation was no different and it was not easier. So to say things are more difficult than they were then, no. What was major to us was as major as today.”

Goldschmidt, who served the state as governor from 1987 to 1991, thinks the problems of Oregon’s budget lie not in the spending or the tax structure, but in the state’s economy. In the 1980s, he said, areas all over Oregon had vibrant economies because of timber and agriculture. When the forest industry collapsed, that changed. And the result is a state with an economy primarily based in the Portland area and in the Willamette Valley.

“Nobody was sitting there thinking the long-term future of our state was that it was going to get poor,” he said. “What we’ve got here is a day of reckoning between what our economy is producing and our capability to pay taxes and what we want to collect from (Oregonians).”

Aside from the economy, Goldschmidt believes the biggest problem with Oregon’s budget is K-12 education.

“K-12 is absolutely devouring the budget,” he said, because of Measure 5 and, in Goldschmidt’s opinion, because school boards get to decide what aspects of education get paid for.

To Goldschmidt, the most damning aspect of Measure 5 was its effect on community colleges and higher education. He supports universities separating themselves from the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, as the University of Oregon and Portland State University successfully did in the most recent legislative session.

“(Measure 5) essentially truncated our ability to do what we say we want to do with 40 percent (of Oregonians earning a bachelor’s degree, 40 percent finishing with a two-year degree and 20 percent with a high school degree),” he said. “It cannot be done with what the state budget has.”

Goldschmidt believes Oregonians might be more likely to pass a sales tax if all proceeds went to higher education and community colleges and those line items were no longer part of the state budget.

But even if that plan worked, Goldschmidt said, leaving $1.5 billion behind in the state budget, “K-12 will take every penny and say they don’t have enough.”

While he thinks tax reform is necessary, Goldschmidt believes it should come from a citizen-based organization before it goes before voters.

“It cannot be done by letting it wend its way through the halls of Salem,” he said. “…There’s been no continuity at all, so people keep saying, ‘Oregonians won’t pass this’ and ‘Oregonians won’t pass that.’ That’s a damn sure prediction if you never go to them (with reforms) in the first place.”

And he doesn’t think raising taxes is going to benefit the state.

“You look at these people who came in and the only answer to every question is, ‘You’ve got to raise taxes,’” Goldschmidt said. “You keep doing this enough and we’ll drive business out of Oregon.”

Goldschmidt believes in order for the budget to work and for the state to accomplish meaningful reform, it requires selecting projects, then making contracts with the departments that get the money to make those projects a reality. First, he said, state officials and legislators should create a list of what the state wants, like a better-educated population and certain types of job opportunities for Oregonians.

“You find a list of things you would invest in and get a contract with people who get the money. … And you pay for something specific to happen.”

And he thinks voters should approve taxes for some of Oregon’s capital improvements, similar to how the Legislature adopted a 6-cents-per-gallon gas tax in 2009 that paid for the Oregon Jobs and Transportation Act, including the project on Murphy Road in Bend.

“When you’re done building these, you’re going to have a more explosive platform from which to build the state’s revenue,” Goldschmidt said. By pointing out the exact projects that would be completed, it would prevent voters from seeing “bureaucrats decide after they get the money. … These are not going to change the tax structure but they are going to infuse the economy with a sense of optimism, of getting something solved.”

Voting on projects, Goldschmidt said, will allow the entire state to grow instead of the Portland metro area alone.

“What I’d like to do is change the thought process into this: Our job when we get together is to give Oregonians some choices,” Goldschmidt said. “They can vote yes or no, but you give them choices and if they say yes they will get exactly what they voted for. It will not be a billion more for K-12, not a new blank check for prisons or universities. It will be some very specific stuff and ultimately from that, I think the scale of what we can do with the voters will go up.”

Barbara Roberts, who was governor from 1991 to 1995, agrees with much of what her predecessors say currently plagues Oregon’s budget.

Her tenure started inauspiciously, featuring the federal listing of the spotted owl as an endangered species and the subsequent demise of the timber industry. On the night she was elected, Measure 5 passed. The measure, implemented over a five-year period, capped property taxes for school funding to $15 per $1,000 of real market value, and then lowered that amount to $5. Other property taxes were capped as well, leaving the property tax rate capped at 1.5 percent. The result was that school funding switched from being primarily funded by local taxes to being paid for by the state.

“The way the measure worked, even though it took over five years to do that, each session of the Legislature we came back and took an additional amount out (of the general fund),” she said. “So in the first budget that we had to take money out of for Measure 5 was $500 million worth of cuts.”

The 1991-93 budget had $5.6 billion in its general fund, out of a $17.1 billion total budget. The general fund provides funding to agencies that don’t generate revenue, get federal funds or generate enough other funds to support their programs. In addition to the general fund, Oregon’s budget also includes a lottery fund, which comes from lottery games and is constitutionally required to go to economic development, education and some other specific programs; other funds, which come from revenue collected by agencies and can be spent in a variety of ways; and federal funds, for uses dictated by the federal government.

“Once Measure 5 passed, I had to implement it,” Roberts said. “I didn’t tell voters it was a wise decision; I just said we’d make it work. And I made cuts and didn’t propose any new taxes and began to make state government efficiencies, downsizing the workforce and committing to reinventing state government to show voters we had taken the message seriously.”

To achieve those cuts, she at one point asked the Legislature to approve a budget with 10 percent fewer state workers. The Legislature made a smaller cut.

She pointed to a number of small commissions and boards that all had small staffs, many of which she eliminated.

“Those expenses, when you kept adding them up, it really did make a difference,” she said.

In an attempt to solve her state’s budget problems, Roberts wanted to pass a sales tax.

She traveled the state discussing the state budget process with Oregon voters. When that was complete, Roberts hoped her constituency would understand why cuts and taxing changes were necessary. Then she approached the Legislature with a tax reform package that kept the low property tax rate, lowered income taxes for nearly everyone, and added a 3 percent sales tax. It was somewhat extraordinary that Roberts came to support a sales tax. In her early years in politics, she was treasurer of a group called the No Sales Tax League. But her distaste for the idea softened during her time on the House Revenue Committee in the early 1980s.

“What I clearly learned in that period of time was it’s not the name of a tax that makes it good or bad; it’s the design that makes it good or bad in terms of fairness,” Roberts said. “I learned that we could have a good or bad property tax or income tax or sales tax. So I began to understand a sales tax wasn’t inherently evil; it was a tool just like any other tax to fund services and that it could be designed with fairness and equity without having be regressive for the poor and low-income.”

What appealed to Roberts about the tax package, she said, was that it balanced three types of taxes and encouraged all people to pay their share, including visitors and tourists.

“The intent was to have a nice, balanced system. I never assumed it would be an easy sale to the voters of Oregon; I understood it would be difficult,” she said. “But I thought there was credibility of my having been a strong opponent in the past.”

But because of political infighting, Roberts’ tax package never went before voters. Instead, in 1993 voters resoundingly defeated a 5 percent sales tax, the ninth time Oregonians had turned down the idea.

Through the years, Roberts said, legislators have approached her wondering how to balance the budget more easily.

“What I always tell (them) is that there is this perfectly good tax plan if you go down to the state archives and you’re welcome to use it,” she said. “But truthfully the tax system has been damaged over the years with a piece here and there and it really probably needs a major restructuring.”

Former Gov. Ted Kulongoski declined to comment for this story.

While Kitzhaber agrees that cuts are key to crafting a feasible budget, he worries that isn’t enough.

“When Ballot Measure 5 passed, we knew it was going to squeeze other state spending. For good or bad, the impacts of that decision were not immediately felt because the economic growth in the 1990s covered the cost increases,” Kitzhaber wrote. “It took the recession in 2001 for the reality to sink in that the spending levels were not sustainable.”

Faced with that unsustainable spending, Kitzhaber believes the state needs a combination of savings and new revenue in order to reinvest in education, particularly K-12, which was cut from $6.3 billion in 2007 to $5.7 billion in 2011. He said reforming PERS and the education system are part of that savings, but it’s not enough.

“We need savings and new revenue to really prime the pump for a sustained reinvestment in education built on a solid budget that includes no one-time money.”

Although the 2013-15 biennium provided nearly $1 billion in additional funds to education, Kitzhaber thinks more education funding is necessary and wants a version of the “grand bargain” to get there: a combination of new taxes and additional cuts to PERS.

“Revenue or PERS on its own is inadequate to reverse years of disinvestment in education — but together, they would be a game changer from early learning to college and career training,” he wrote in an email.

Striking that “grand bargain” of tax hikes and pension cuts could be the start of Oregon’s comprehensive tax reform, something Kitzhaber said he’s long wanted to implement.

“It’s going to take time, it’s going to take a strategic approach, and it’s going to take discipline,” he said. He’s met with labor groups and businesses to try to figure out new ways to add revenue. “It is easy to aggregate the billions of tax dollars now going out in credits, incentives and deductions. It is more difficult to find opportunities for significant revenue.”

Some changes he would consider are capping total deductions and credits on taxes, limiting the senior medical deduction, which currently allows Oregonians over 62 to claim all medical expenses on state income taxes, and limiting how many expenses Oregonians can deduct on state taxes that could not be claimed on a federal return.

“Tax reform is an issue that needs full participation from all sides — the labor and business community, the Legislature, and input from all Oregonians,” Kitzhaber said. “It’s not an issue where we should commit ourselves to any single approach — in fact I think that’s a recipe for failure. We need to be thoughtful and strategic about it for Oregon’s long-term fiscal stability.”

The next two stories examine some of the state budget’s biggest cost drivers, and a third explores prospects for a sales tax as a revenue raiser. A story in Monday’s paper delves into the 2013-15 biennium and what the future might hold for Oregon’s budget.

Understanding Oregon’s budget

• Oregon budgets on a two-year, or biennial, basis, from odd-numbered year to odd-numbered year.

• Adjustments to the budget can be made by the emergency board or the Legislature, in a special session or in the next regular session.

• Oregon’s budget has four funds: the general fund, lottery funds, other funds and federal funds. Lottery funds are dedicated to education, parks and salmon habitat, and economic development.

• If revenue exceeds the estimated amount by more than 2 percent, all money above the forecast goes back to individual taxpayers as a “kicker.”

Where’s the revenue come from?

Oregon collects personal income taxes, corporate income taxes and a few others, like cigarette taxes. With property tax rates capped by law, the state depends on income and corporate taxes for most of its revenue.

• More residents, rising revenue: As would be expected, income tax collection has increased with Oregon’s rising population, though revenue as a whole is not growing at the same pace, which makes for a tighter budget.

In the words of Oregon’s governors:

For this story, The Bulletin interviewed three former governors and the man currently in office. Here’s what they had to say, and what they’re doing now:

Vic Atiyeh — Republican

In office: 1979-87

Age: 90

Where is he now? After years in the same downtown Portland office, Atiyeh recently gave up the space and has donated his papers and other mementos from his years in public service to Pacific University, according to The Oregonian.

What he says: “Today we’re short and unemployment is staggering. Can we raise income taxes? Hell no. Can we pass a sales tax? Double hell no. Can we go back and raise property taxes? No. It’s all politics. So what do we do? What you do is cut. We can’t afford to do (all the things) we’re doing.”

Neil Goldschmidt — Democrat

In office: 1987-91

Age: 73

Where is he now? After The Willamette Week in 2004 revealed that Goldschmidt sexually abused a teenage girl during his time as mayor of Portland, Goldschmidt resigned from the Oregon State Board of Higher Education and other positions, and has kept a low profile ever since. In December 2012 Goldschmidt suffered a minor stroke, according to The Oregonian.

What he says: “What I’d like to do is change the thought process into this: Our job when we get together is to give Oregonians some choices. They can vote yes or no, but you give them choices and if they say yes they will get exactly what they voted for. It will not be a billion more for K-12, not a new blank check for prisons or universities. It will be some very specific stuff and ultimately from that, I think the scale of what we can do with the voters will go up.”

Barbara Roberts — Democrat

In office: 1991-95

Age: 76

Where is she now? Retired from a position at the Portland State University’s Hatfield School of Government’s Executive Leadership Institute, Roberts wrote an autobiography that was published in 2011. She has been involved in numerous boards and serves as a public speaker, according to PSU.

What she says: “What I clearly learned … was it’s not the name of a tax that makes it good or bad; it’s the design that makes it good or bad in terms of fairness. I learned that we could have a good or bad property tax or income tax or sales tax. So I began to understand a sales tax wasn’t inherently evil; it was a tool just like any other tax to fund services.”

John Kitzhaber — Democrat

In office: 1995-2003; now serving his third term, since 2011

Age: 66

What he says: “It’s going to take time, it’s going to take a strategic approach, and it’s going to take discipline. It is easy to aggregate the billions of tax dollars now going out in credits, incentives and deductions. It is more difficult to find opportunities for significant revenue.”

Former Gov. Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat who served 2003-11, declined to comment for this story. In an email, he wrote that the current governor “has made policy choices with information that I don’t have” and as a result believed his responses to questions “would not be very helpful to or appropriate for Governor Kitzhaber.”