When a love affair begins with shared dreams of solar panels and fantasies of switchgrass, it shouldn’t surprise us that it leads to tears, resignation and federal investigations.
Such is the love story of Oregon’s former governor John Kitzhaber and his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes.
“Their relationship, from its beginning in 2002,” the New York Times wrote Feb. 15 after Kitzhaber announced his resignation, “was based, friends said, on a shared passion for a low-carbon energy future.”
The Department of Justice last week issued subpoenas to Oregon state agencies, as part of a federal investigation involving Kitzhaber and Hayes.
Some of the investigation is into matters of petty patronage — Hayes possibly enriching herself by selling her closeness to the governor as something she could provide to clients.
Hayes, unlike most first ladies, used her position as first lady to steer policy. Willamette Week, as part of its excellent reporting on this case, reported in 2014 that Hayes “keeps a desk in the governor’s office, attends senior staff meetings and communicates regularly with agency directors.” She described herself as a “policy adviser to Gov. John Kitzhaber on the issue of clean energy and economic development.”
Hayes simultaneously ran a consulting firm called 3E Strategies. One of her clients was a liberal nonprofit group called Demos. Hayes often blurred the lines as to which role she was occupying at a given time. As Willamette Week reported, at one sustainable development conference arranged by Demos, Hayes “was billed as first lady of Oregon, even though she was appearing as part of a contract” with Demos.
Demos was pushing governments to use a new measure of the economy — the Genuine Progress Indicator — in place of Gross Domestic Product. They hired Hayes to aid in this push. Soon, Kitzhaber adopted GPI as a new measure for state policies.
But this sort of story probably teaches us only a narrow lesson, about the ethical standards of Kitzhaber, Hayes and Demos.
Other storylines in this scandal teach us broader lessons. For instance, federal investigators are looking into Hayes’s work for companies that profited from Kitzhaber’s green policies. This is a reminder that green energy and the environmental movement deserve far more scrutiny than they are receiving.
First, we need to remember that Big Green is an industry like others. When investors and lobbyists come calling on government officials, we usually see them for what they are: profit-seekers making self-interested arguments that should be taken with a grain of salt. If those businessmen and lobbyists come in a green cloak, however, many politicians and journalists drop their skepticism. They shouldn’t.
But we can take it a step further. Green energy deserves more scrutiny than the average industry, because so many of its technologies, being unprofitable and inefficient, depend on government subsidies for their very survival.
One Hayes client was a California-based company called Waste to Energy Group. Hayes picked up Waste to Energy as a client in 2011 — after becoming first lady — as the company sought a contract for converting landfill gas into energy.
The Source, a local newspaper in Bend, Ore., reported, “Cylvia Hayes of 3E Strategies introduced the company, which has yet to bring a project online, to Deschutes County officials. Hayes, a longtime Central Oregon resident, is the girlfriend of Governor John Kitzhaber.” The project required approval of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality.
How all of this came together is now of interest to federal investigators. The DOJ subpoena requested “all documents, records, email communications, meeting minutes and/or notes relating to” many issues Hayes worked on, including “Knott Landfill and waste-to-energy projects.”
Public records reported by Willamette Week give us a peek. Mary Rowinski, a governor’s office employee, worked for Hayes. Hayes used Rowinski to set up her meetings with Waste to Energy.
By 2013, Oregon’s Energy Department was calling waste-to-energy projects a “priority for Governor Kitzhaber,” and sending subsidies to these projects. In 2014, the local government approved the deal.
Federal investigators probing the Hayes and Kitzhaber case are also seeking state agency contacts with the Oregon Business Council. The Business Council is a corporate lobby group, and a client of Hayes. In fact, the Business Council hired someone to work as Hayes’s spokeswoman. Considering that Kitzhaber often adopted many of the Business Council’s recommendations as policy — including an ill-fated attempt to expand a bridge across the Columbia River.
The interesting lesson out of this story isn’t about Kitzhaber, Hayes or any of Hayes’ clients. The important lesson is that the more you intertwine business and government, the more opportunities you create for cronyism. And green energy is fertile ground for such problems.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
