Greg Smith defends actions giving him now-revoked pay boost

Greg Smith has issued his most robust defense yet justifying his actions as executive director of the Columbia Development Authority leading to a now-revoked 50% salary increase.

He released the three-page statement last month as two governing bodies considered a federal decision to end funding for Smith’s agency.

The U.S. Defense Department announced in February it was canceling a $800,000 grant that pays for most of the operations of Smith’s agency. The Boardman-based CDA is converting a former military base into an industrial complex with a wildlife refuge and Oregon Trail preservation.

The federal agency acted after finding that a request for funding contained false information about Smith’s raise. It also found that managers of the grant had not documented why Smith was paid for full work days at the CDA while on duty as a legislator when that was not supposed to happen.

Smith, a Republican state representative from Heppner, is paid $129,000 to run the CDA. He sought more than a year ago to boost his pay to $304,000, settled for $195,000 and then saw even that increase reversed over claims the CDA Board was misled.

In his more recent account, Greg Smith also wrote that he “understood” from the December 2023 meeting that “I had the board’s approval for pay increases.” That conflicts with the account Smith gave in his letter to Puzey.

Smith has largely been silent in public as the controversy has roiled the CDA and the Port of Morrow, which manages the grant funding for the CDA.

In his new statement, Smith provides a confusing account that excuses his actions and suggests it’s a mystery who wrote the lies to the federal government justifying his raise and that of two other employees. He also got wrong the year he started his CDA job.

He offered the statement, he wrote, to get away from “a media spin on facts or a click-bait social media post.”

But the CDA could provide no documentation to back up Smith’s claims in his statement. The Enterprise last month submitted a public records request seeking documentation for key factual claims. An attorney for the CDA responded to the public records request last week with just two documents – Smith’s statement and his email tto a Columbia Development Authority attorney saying it had been distributed.

The veteran legislator contends his pay raise met with approvals all along the way and that “confused” board members led to retraction of false statements to the federal government.

He is silent on an issue that drew sharp federal rebuke – drawing paychecks from both the Legislature and the CDA.

A unit of the Defense Department last month concluded in a review that there was no evidence that time slips Smith is required to complete “accurately reflect the work performed.”

Port of Morrow officials manage the grant. At the time of Smith’s hiring in 2015, they wrote to federal officials that the port would ensure he wouldn’t get CDA wages while in Salem attending legislative sessions.

In February, Eileen Hendricks, the port’s chief financial officer, distilled the federal complaint in notes she took while on a call with federal officials who were alerting her the money would be stopped.

She noted Smith’s time cards under “areas of concern.”  She wrote: “No way to determine hours worked CDA v. legislative.”

Smith didn’t respond to written questions from the Enterprise about why he didn’t address that concern in his recent statement.

Port officials have not released recent time cards requested by the Enterprise in February that would establish whether Smith is still claiming full work days at his Boardman agency during the current legislative session.

The time card issue was cited by the federal Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation in notifying the port last month that CDA funding would be stopped.

Port officials are dropping their management of the grant, but hope to keep the money flowing by handing the duty over to some other local government.

Smith issued his statement in February just hours before the Port of Morrow Commission met to consider the federal cancellation. Commissioners didn’t discuss the statement and neither did the CDA Board, which met the following day.

The statement revolved around laims last year that the CDA Board had approved substantial pay raises for Smith and two other employees. The Port of Morrow submitted a funding request prepared by Smith’s team that set his pay at $238,000. At the time, he was paid $129,000.

“Compensation packages have been approved by the Columbia Development Board of Directors,” the funding request said. “Requested compensation reflects a significant board-approved increase” it said in a second place and then in a third said that the CDA board is “in agreement that compensation for the two top employees through research of other like positions in the Pacific Northwest is approved.”

The federal agency said it approved funding last year for the CDA in part because of the higher cost of big pay hikes claimed to have been undertaken with board approval. Federal officials subsequently found that such a claim was “untrue and inaccurate.”

Port of Morrow and CDA officials didn’t respond to requests concerning whether they are contesting the federal findings.

Smith in his statement didn’t directly challenge them. He wrote, though, that the board in fact long ago approved his pay raise, directed him to negotiate with the federal government on that pay level, and that he did so.

Asked for documentation to support such claims, the CDA last week provided none.

Smith’s account goes back to December 2023, when the CDA Board convened in executive session to review his performance.

Smith’s statement said the board in that meeting “instructed me to investigate the compensation of comparable positions” and “to research market pay.”

CDA Board minutes reflect no such directive, and one board member said there was none. Smith said in his recent statement that the directive was given in an executive, or closed, session of the board and “no meeting minutes reflected the directive specifically.”

Oregon law requires public bodies to keep minutes of such closed-door sessions. The CDA last week could provide no such record.

Smith provided a markedly differing version of that December session in a letter in January 2024 to Kim Puzy, the CDA board chair.

He didn’t reflect any directive that he was to perform a comparison of his own pay.

“There was a question of hiring a compensation consultant and creating a new compensation policy,” he wrote.

Board meetings in January and February of 2024 were canceled and compensation comparisons didn’t come up with subsequent meetings, according to board minutes.

In his more recent account, Smith also wrote that he “understood” from the December 2023 meeting that “I had the board’s approval for pay increases.”

That conflicts with the account Smith gave in his letter to Puzey.

“I came before the board requesting a discussion of Columbia Development Authority salary adjustments,” he wrote in his January letter to Puzey. He said that “this conversation stalled.”

That letter underscored the board had not acted on any pay raise in December. In it, Smith wrote, “I respectfully request you call for a motion” before the board to raise his pay to $238,000.

He drafted the motion, never considered by the board.

CDA records show that days after the canceled board meeting, Smith’s staff pressed ahead to create pay raises. Debbie Pedro, Smith’s administrative assistant, prepared documents for federal consideration that raised Smith’s pay to $238,000.

How that figure was reached isn’t documented in available public records.

Smith, though, wrote in his recent statement that his board in that December 2023 meeting “directed” him to negotiate his pay rate with a federal official.

The CDA could provide no records from Smith or the agency documenting such a directive or negotiations involving Smith.

The agency did release emails from last year, but they were between Smith’s administrative assistant and Tim Robert, at the time the federal agency’s manager of the CDA grant. The emails don’t reflect negotiations over Smith’s pay, but rather federal guidance generally on pay levels.

In an interview last year, Robert said his only role was to alert the CDA and the Port of Morrow that the federal government would only fund a salary up to a certain limit.

He said he explained to CDA staff that “the board can decide to pay Greg anything they want. All we can pay is up to $195,000.”

 Smith had shared with his board that another executive director at a similar agency in Colorado was paid $261,000 – far above the federal cap.

Robert said he didn’t know how Smith’s salary was ultimately set.

“How that all came about is not necessarily our concern. The initial records said the board had approved the salaries,” he said.

That record of board approvals later derailed Smith’s pay raise, revoked by the board in September 2024. That action came in a meeting where board members questioned Smith about why the federal government had been told pay raises had been approved.

“I wish that statement wasn’t in there,” he said last September.

In his recent statement, Smith suggested that the claim was acceptable even though “it is currently unknown who drafted this.” He acknowledged for the first time reading the final funding request before it was signed by the federal government and the Port of Morrow.

“I reviewed the document prior to submitting it to the Port of Morrow for signature and do not recall this statement,” he wrote. He said that if he did read it, “it may not have caused me to pause” because he had board approval for the pay raise from months earlier.

Pedro, his assistant, thought otherwise, writing to a Port of Morrow official in January 2024, “I know we still need board approval on the wage increases.”

But Smith said that CDA board members who questioned him over false statements instead were “confused” about what they had approved and when.

He suggested in his statement he could have explained better how the statement got into the document, but only in a closed-door session to discuss “the work performance of other CDA employees.” He said he asked for but was denied such an opportunity.

Smith said in his statement that after the board confrontation in September 2024, he contacted the federal agency. He said an official immediately “edited” one sentence in the funding request to indicate the pay raise was pending board action. The editing happened earlier.

Smith displayed the revised version during that September meeting.

Contact Editor Les Zaitz: [email protected]

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