Becoming Absurd: Jaquiss Blows ANOTHER Johnson Story

Lord, how we have tried. We have given reporters and editors at both The Oregonian and Willamette Week numerous opportunities to correct their work, explain how or why they missed crucial details, and to look askance at further "tips" on Betsy Johnson before putting together another half-researched set of accusations and innuendo like the ones they have already produced.

And yet, whether it's because they think our voices are still too quiet in the mass media to endanger theirs, figure they can outlast the indignation, or--apparently like the President--sense that their public credibility is already so poor that little chance exists that things will get worse if they keep doing dumb things, they persist. Carla explained on Monday how The O screwed the pooch on their most recent smear attempt, failing to verify the claims of a rejected suitor for Scappoose Airpark privileges while repeating previously admitted debunked claims of profit for Johnson.

As for Willy Week, after Nigel Jaquiss' embarrassment of a column linking Brookings Airport with Bandon Dunes (check the map) which necessitated a full retraction, we figured the Pulitzer Prize winner would flinch before touching the stove again (unless something beyond pure journalistic pursuit was pushing their efforts on the story.) In last week's edition of the paper, however, Jaquiss not only touches the stove he sticks his whole hand into the lobster pot:

Several people familiar with the value of metro-area industrial land say a property deal state Sen. Betsy Johnson brokered last September represented an extraordinary bargain for the buyer.

In the transaction, records show Stanley Wagner, now 80, sold 232 acres on West Lane Road in Scappoose to developer Ed Freeman for $2.385 million.

Johnson, a Scappoose Democrat whom political insiders call a top contender for her party's 2010 gubernatorial nomination, says she earned no money in the deal but merely acted as a go-between.

Mistake #1--saying that Johnson "brokered " the deal. In most other contexts I wouldn't say anything, but in a real estate transaction to "broker" something has a definite and specific meaning--for example, "An intermediary who receives a commission for arranging and facilitating the sale of a property for a buyer or a seller." At BEST Johnson 'facilitated' the sale, but she neither arranged it nor received payment for it, and Jaquiss fairly well acknowledges that in the last sentence I quoted. So was he just being sloppy to say she brokered real estate when she's not a broker? Or was the intent to imply more than what really occurred?

Also:

SB 680 created a program for three rural airports—Scappoose is one—that would promote development and ease runway access for adjacent property owners such as [developer Ed] Freeman. SB 807 would create taxing districts to funnel property taxes back into airport-related projects for 25 years.

Wrong. SB680 couldn’t have increased the land value as "through the fence" permits already existed at Scappoose Airport prior to its introduction by Johnson. And Freeman denies any knowledge at all of 807 prior to his purchase.

Would that these were the only kinds of errors Jaquiss made, but they become much more serious as you progress through the article. The main contention is that Johnson set up a deal for Ed Freeman (the developer in both this story and the original story about another land deal involving the three parties) whereby he would reap an enormous windfall by getting the land for far less than its actual worth, and then reselling it for much more:

"That's a hell of a deal for the buyer," says Bowlus Chauncey, who operates a company called Beaver Bark on 30 acres about a mile from the Wagner property.

Chauncey and Dave Molony, who separately owns 34 acres of industrial land along West Lane Road, say industrial property inside Scappoose's city limits and urban growth boundary is worth about 10 times the per-acre price of about $10,300 Freeman paid Wagner.

Those familiar with industrial land agree that it is a valuable commodity.

What Jaquiss says here about industrial land inside Scappoose and within the UGB is in fact true--it's pretty valuable turf. But there's one problem: the land was neither zoned industrial nor within the UGB when Freeman bought it. Even in its current formulation, less than half of the original parcel is zoned for industrial use. At a bare minimum, the flurry of comparative value calculations should have accounted for that.

Regardless, Jaquiss' framing reflects a core dishonesty in presentation, just as surely as if I claimed outrage that New Seasons Market is charging me $4 a pound for pineapple, when a farmer in Hawaii sells his to Del Monte' for 50 cents a pound. Wouldn't you think it pertinent to mention that a) New Seasons is paying for an organic pineapple rather than one treated by pesticide, and b) somebody had to pay to bring it to Oregon so I could buy it? If so, the fact that the land was agricultural rather than industrial when Freeman bought it should mean something to you.

Obliquely, Jaquiss admits that the property Freeman bought is not the same property he's trying to sell; he had to get it annexed into Scappoose and rezoned. But the very clear intent of the article is to suggest that this was a simple, inexpensive process that the original owners (octegenarian Stan Wagner and his wife) could have undertaken themselves before selling, thus locking in that profit for themselves:

Getting the land annexed, which automatically brought a zone change to "industrial," is a process Scappoose city manager Jon Hanken says is "not difficult at all." Annexation is something the Wagners' trustee, Murray-Lusby—or a higher-paying buyer—could have accomplished.

Apparently however, "difficult" is in the eye of the beholder--particularly if that beholder wants to selectively quote a source to suggest conditions for scandal. We talked to Hanken ourselves and got a much different picture. According to him, the process of annexation requires a lot of oversight/shepherding by a property owner. Once a parcel is identified for the UGB by a municipality as a part of their planning, they must designate its potential land use. The property owner then requests annexation and plans are submitted to the city. A series of steps then takes place at the city level via the planning commission and the city council. Then the city council votes. After they vote, it then goes to a vote of the people whether to annex the property inside the UGB.

Are you clear on that? Getting the property rezoned and annexed is EASY--all it takes is putting your request on a referendum ballot after a series of lengthy and complex steps! Freeman estimated to us that he spent about $30,000 in planning, engineering and surveying fees, along with a bunch of his own time, in order to get the land included as part of Scappoose. Oh, and did I mention the sewer line? As Freeman put it, “the property isn’t worth anything without sewer on it,” and so he forked over about $2 million to have that taken care of.

Jaquiss implies that the Wagners could easily have taken care of this themselves before selling to Freeman, thus reaping much greater profit. It's true that the Wagners likely could have covered the application fees and prep costs for annexation, and with proceeds from another recent sale of land they held in North Portland the couple might have been able to pay upfront for sewer extension to the property as well. But financial cost is only one consideration; you'd have to ask yourself whether babysitting your annexation proposal through City Council and onto the ballot is how you want to spend your time when you're sick and 80 years old.

No, the Wagners were not interested in becoming the Trumps of Columbia County. What they were concerned with was that their property not fall into the hands of people who wanted a gravel mining operation on their land, which is why they dealt with Johnson--who had promised she wouldn't let that happen. But what about this long-time acquaintance of the Wagners?

Tom Heckman, a West Lane Road property owner who says he's known Stan Wagner for more than 50 years, disagrees.

"Stan got screwed on the deal," says Heckman. "When I was over at their house helping them pack up, I told Mrs. Wagner, 'You got robbed.' She said, '[$2.385 million,] that's enough for me and Stan.'"

I said 'acquaintance' for a reason, because while Jaquiss tries to make Heckman into a lifelong friend, sources in Scappoose say that Heckman tried to buy the Wagners property and was rebuffed because he wanted to sell it off to be mined. That would have been useful information to have, wouldn't it? Yet again, someone cited by the papers as a source claiming dirty dealings turns out to have an axe to grind (cf Pete Williamson, Greg Jenks, Tim Bero.)

If you're still with me, one other way Jaquiss tries to impugn the sale is by using sources who suggest that the supply of industrial land in the area is nearly nonexistent:

Port of St. Helens operations manager Kim Shade says the Port has only 40 acres of industrial land for sale. That land is more fully developed but five miles farther from Portland—which lessens its value—than the property Freeman bought in Scappoose.

The Port's asking price is $4 per square foot, or about $175,000 per acre—17 times what Freeman paid Wagner. "There's just not a lot of industrial land for sale," Shade says. "We're getting a lot of inquiries for our property."

Shade says the Port based its price on a November 2006 appraisal that evaluated recent property sales in cities such as Canby, McMinnville, St. Helens and Ridgefield, Wash.

Andy Kangas, an industrial-property broker at CB Richard Ellis in Portland, recently closed the sale of 14.23 acres of land in Gresham for $204,000 an acre. He echoes Shade's assessment.

"There's basically no industrial land left in the metro area," Kangas says.

We're not clear on what land Shade is talking about; we've gone to the airport and identified about 30 industrial acres for sale by the Port...on land immediately adjacent to Freeman's parcels, not any '5 miles away.' As for Kangas, "full of crap" is the best way to characterize his knowledge of the area. This study of regional industrial land availability from Metro in 2001 {pdf} includes a table on page 16 of supply and demand projected to the year 2025. Columbia County's estimated demand is for 50 buildable acres; in 1999 the number of vacant acres for development was 883...and 70 of that was ready-to-develop. Even if many of those buildable acres have since been utilized in the intervening 7 years, remember that when Freeman bought from the Wagners NONE of those 232 acres were development-suitable, so the appropriate comparison would be to 883 acres, not 70. Some shortage.

Some among the readership consider our partisanship to be the driving force behind the continued defense of Johnson. No amount of protest to the contrary is likely to convince those folks otherwise, but our interest has long since surpassed merely defending a politician against unsubstantiated charges and allegations. At this point, we are far more concerned with the professional atrophy of what are supposed to be the premier daily and weekly papers in this state. We considered Nigel a friend, and still do--to his credit, he has at least retracted a piece that didn't meet journalistic muster, and took a considerable amount of time to defend his work to us privately.

But we're still concerned. We can no longer trust what comes from Jaquiss' keyboard, because we have run out of plausible explanations for the repeated missteps...save one: someone desperately wants to see Johnson hurt, and/or wants to block legislative efforts that would hurt them financially, and has convinced WWeek and The O that there really is something there. And by repeatedly failing to check and seek the motives of the sources for their reportage, they are at best doing that someone's bidding, at worst actively contributing to it. And dammit, that makes us mad.

Must We Say "Told You So?"

What did we say? We said if more stories on Betsy Johnson come out without any seeming reason for their appearance, start believing that it's not a coincidence of newsworthiness that's behind it. Yesterday The O (along with other outlets at least including KATU by personal observance) ran a short brief noting that Standards and Practices agreed to conduct an investigation into the filing of Johnson's required forms; we're not talking about that--there's a completely legitimate reason to run that story. The fact that this is almost literally the only thing Johnson has admitted fault for makes it a rather unexciting story overall, but it's certainly worth reporting.

The one we're talking about is a six-page (online) retrospective and review of the allegations against Johnson, also displaying further reportage on the pass-through issue and land-sale circumstances in the context of the airport's development history. They make a new allegation--that a previous developer with a similar plan as Ed Freeman's (the Johnson buyer), had his application denied because he wouldn't play ball with Johnson in opposing a gravel mine venture on the same land she would come to sell a decade later. We'll have more on this next week, but the Johnson family denies that threat was made, and contend that the applications compared were not the same either in purpose or quality. In fact they claim the denied application wasn't even clearly aviation-related, so that should give you an idea of the quality of this new charge by the paper.

But again, pull back from the nuts and bolts of the story--if only because the various charges and deals or bills under scrutiny make this such a complex case to discuss. The O's editors are not deaf and blind; they know very well what we've written and what deficiencies we've made clear in their reporting. They also have watched the WWeek's coverage--and one theory given by a longtime Oregon political reporter is that this all started with The O's panic at being scooped yet again by WWeek--and surely saw the latest attempt to push the story retracted in embarrassment. Do they really think this new allegation, or the continued strength of the existing ones, merits six more web pages? Or is someone expressing a strong desire to see this set of non-stories continue?

Ask yourself, for instance, why reporters from The O continue to refer to a "fast $119,000," noting both some element of speed and that it was at least $100,000 that Johnson made. Now we've said this many times: the costs of rezoning, replatting and resurveying the land over the years by Johnson reduced actual profit to the $45,000 range--a little less than 6% on the sale, certainly nothing outrageous even in three months. And The O knows it too; in the broad retrospective piece the reporter mentions deep in the story the $45,000 figure. But up front, above the fold as it were, he calls it a fast $119,000.

And guess what? So did the blurb announcing the investigation, the one that we linked above. But as you'll see now, the $45K figure has been inserted there. The cached version--the one we saw yesterday--doesn't have it. Curious, that they just can't seem to remember to make that qualification so as not to mislead people. (Julia Silverman of AP can, by the way--here's her piece, and she's got both figures there.)

Oh, one other thing Silverman mentions is that "she reported the sale of the property...in April of this year," which The O doesn't seem to want to relate to people either. In the profile piece they call it "a land deal with a developer she has repeatedly aided. She then failed to disclose the deal as state law requires." Well, not quite--unless you make sure to interpret the phrase as "not disclosing it as state law requires," rather than "not disclosing it, as state law requires." Even then, the truth as we'll discuss this week is that the sale was in fact disclosed, although the holding was not at the time. And we'll also go into our discussion with state ethics employees who admit the system is extremely hard to follow properly at times.

New (and shallowly explained) allegations, rehashes of old ones, accusatory language and avoidance of exculpatory evidence--where's the line? When does it stop being simply lazy reportage, and starts becoming active attempts to fulfill and agenda?

Will The O and WWeek Quit While They're Behind on Johnson?

I won't bore you with a long rehash of all the stories we've done the past three weeks on L'affair du Betsy Johnson*, but if you're totally out of the loop you may want to peruse Carla's primer on our coverage before coming back here.

Since the stories first began to appear May 30 in Willamette Week and then The Oregonian, each has done several updates and further references to the controversy, generally expanding the story rather than retrenching on it. WW's Nigel Jaquiss in particular has continued to pump out stories--at least five that we count--that allege conflict of interest and influence peddling for her aviation friends. The O has been slightly less prolific, with what appears to be three more stories since the original one that deal specifically with her, and then another one Sunday discussing the broader question of conflict in the Leg, using Johnson as one example and focusing on her involvement in SB807. (Interestingly, an op-ed on June 10th called attempts to pin SB30 on Johnson's personal interests "cynical"; Jaquiss has been more of the reverse, exploring the SB30 angle in more depth but not burrowing as much into the SB807 part.)

While both outfits have staunchly stood by their stories in our conversations with them, it seems to us that they are no longer as aggressively investigating and reporting on the issue. Neither outlet has either publicly acknowledged LO's findings or criticisms, but after the initial flurry of stories nothing new has emerged in their pages to further support their positions, despite the obvious previous attempts to do so--such as The O's unearthing of a video where Johnson berates Port of St. Helens commissioners on behalf of developer and land-sale partner Ed Freeman, or the "disclosure" that they'd had dealings before, or the news that Johnson had written a letter on behalf of a failed candidate for the Oregon Board of Aviation.

The final straw of embarrassment may have occurred late last week, when Jaquiss attempted to extend the story to Johnson's influence over the Brookings Airport and its potential impact on Bandon Dunes Resort. Adept readers immediately commented that Jaquiss needed a new map of Oregon if he thought the airport was anywhere near Bandon (it's not), and WWeek was forced to pull the piece entirely. It's certainly not often you get to call out a Pulitzer winner for failing to do his homework, and while they did the right thing in yanking the piece (but leaving the comments up) , you know taking that step had to be extremely painful. If I'm Jaquiss' editor, I might say to him privately, "ENOUGH please on Johnson, OK? This shit we clearly do not need."

In fact, although I'm not anyone's editor, I'm willing to wager that among actual, sensible editors this would be the likely response. After all, while they've defended their work in public, they have each tacitly admitted making errors by dint of removing reference to those errors in future copy. As the famous saying goes, "if your mother says she loves you, get a confirmation before you print it"--in other words, nothing's worse than fucking up the facts. And after all the work we've done on this story, there's just no way to phrase it much more delicately without euphemizing...they fucked up the facts.

So, given that context do I think the stories are really over? Well, yes and no. If the genesis of the story was relatively normal, I'd say they are probably finished trying to run the Johnson corruption scandal up their respective flagpoles. They got a tip, they ran it, they got pushback, they defended themselves but subtly started changing their subsequent stories--done.

But what if this isn't any ordinary story tip? What if, as we are coming to believe, this was an orchestrated attempt to bring trouble to Betsy Johnson's doorstep? What if there are those who would either like to a) develop on the Metolius, b) kill Johnson's gubernatorial aspirations before they gestate, or c) both--and they are continuing to push more allegations on the media? In other words, what if their sources aren't taking no for an answer, and WW or the O aren't necessarily predisposed to tell them no?

So watch the papers over the next week or two. If nothing more comes out on this story, The O and WW will have licked their wounds in private and moved on, hoping by their non-acknowledgment of error they can escape with reputations mostly intact. But if they keep bringing her up one way or another like The O did in Sunday's piece on legislative conflict in general, we think there's gotta be some other reason behind it--some other reason being pushed by some other entity. Papers don't print stories they know may get them into trouble unless they have other reasons for doing so. While we can't show them to you because they're behind a firewall, The Bend Bulletin has also gone nearly apoplectic in their editorials about Johnson and SB30; they're wingnutty at the Bulletin but I'm not convinced they got that way on their own.

Will they quit while they're behind? We'll see. And if they don't, ask yourself--"why are they still running these stories? Shouldn't they at least try to close up the holes in the ones they've already run, before they ask us to swallow more?"

Better yet, ask them.














*don't bother correcting my French; I already confess ignorance