Governor Kotek,

Six months ago I asked you a question. It's still the only thing I've ever asked you for.

Does a gay volunteer who documented retaliation and identity-based targeting by state employees deserve an independent investigation? Yes or no?

You haven't answered. Your office hasn't answered. Your commissioners haven't answered. So let me tell you what's happened while I've been waiting.

Sixteen months ago I was dismissed from the Oregon State Parks volunteer program six days before my term ended, by phone, with no documentation. When I documented it publicly, your agency expelled me permanently from every state park in Oregon, in writing,
on letterhead, and named my public speech as the reason. That letter has never been withdrawn. It stands today. I am, as of this morning, still barred from volunteering in a single Oregon state park because I spoke about how I was treated.

I sent your agency's director, Lisa Sumption, the complete record. She reframed evidence in therapeutic language I have never once expressed, and that would not survive scrutiny. I sent your program manager a formal notice of constitutional violation. The deputy
director, JR Collier, wrote back to tell me where to direct my correspondence and warned me that any legal filing would be forwarded to the Department of Justice. I sent your office everything, from the beginning. I sent directly to your campaign manager,
Marissa Sandgren. Nobody has ever disputed a single fact in the record. Not once, in sixteen months.

Then, on March 24th of this year -- the one-year anniversary of my dismissal, to the day -- three armed men came to my door. Behind a locked gate. On restricted federal land, where I live and serve as a volunteer caretaker for the United States Forest Service.
They told me they were concerned about what I was posting online. I declined to speak without an attorney and closed my door. Twenty minutes later, one of them called me and told me the matter was not going away, after I had already invoked my constitutional
rights.

I asked your state police for the record of that visit. They told me none existed. Then they told me there was a fee. Then they went silent for three months.

Yesterday they released it.

It's their own dispatch log, written by their own officer, that morning, before they arrived. Here is what the State of Oregon wrote down about what it was doing:

No call type selected. Priority: low. Unit disposition: no action taken.

No crime. Not then, not now, not ever. Their own system says so.

The unit dispatched was designated Criminal. I am logged in it under Role: Other -- not a suspect, not a witness, not connected to anything. They sent a criminal unit at a man their own record connects to no criminal matter, and drove more than an hour each
way to do it.

And in the comment field, where the officer stated his purpose, it says the visit was conducted "for the Forest Service."

Governor, the Forest Service did not need the Oregon State Police to speak to me. I am their volunteer. I live on their land. They have my gate, my phone number, my email, and more than a year of relationship with me. If they'd wanted a word, they had every
ordinary means to have one, and they've always used them.

So that record does not explain the visit. It documents that there was nothing to explain -- no crime, no call type, no action -- and that a reason was written into the file anyway.

That is your state police targeting a citizen over their protected constitutional rights. And you remain silent.

They lied in their own documentation of it. That's not my characterization. That's what's left when you read what they wrote.

I've asked your state police who gave that officer my date of birth, which I never provided to them and which sits in your parks agency's volunteer file. I've asked who gave him the name of an internal Forest Service facility as my address, since I don't have
a street address. I've asked what request from the Forest Service that comment refers to. I don't expect answers. But the questions are on the record now, and they don't have innocent answers.

Here's where this stands.

I'm not asking you for money. I've never asked anyone for money. I released the only claim I had against an individual, unconditionally, wanting nothing, and I did it in writing. I'm not building a movement. I'm not running to the press, though I welcome a
competent journalist reporting every fact about this case because that's the very thing your state government tried to take from me, my first amendment right.

I have had federal complaints drafted for months. I'm a federal volunteer, on federal land, and everything I'd be reporting happened there. I have standing to file them and I have chosen not to -- for six months -- because Oregon claims to be a progressive
government and I am waiting to see if they live up to the image they project.

That's still what I want. But I need you to act, Governor. With integrity.

You've been able to end this since the day it started. One sentence from your office opens an investigation. One sentence lifts an expulsion that your own agency imposed for protected speech and that stands, today, sixteen months later, because you have not
said it.

So here's my next question.

How much more does this have to cost before you do the right thing?

Robert Samuel White

oprdvolunteerabuse.org