Curtis Robinhold
A Q&A with Kitzhaber’s new chief of staff
by Camilla Mortensen
G
ov. John Kitzhaber is back for a third term and his new chief of staff,
former Eugenean Curtis Robinhold, is back as well. Previously
a natural resources adviser to Kitzhaber, Robinhold worked for
BP before returning to Oregon politics this month. Charming, funny and
Oregonian to the core, Robinhold also brings a little Big Oil slickness
to the governor’s office. Robinhold says the governor is currently
interviewing people for his old job in natural resources. The goal is to
have agency and staff appointments completed by Feb. 10, he says.
Of his own position, Robinhold says, “It’s really exciting. The first
three or four days after accepting the job and before starting, I was
working with my existing company to get myself extracted and find a
replacement and just thought ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’ But after
the first day on the job I just thought, ‘this is fantastic, he’s terrific.’” He
adds, “I’m feeling great about it right now.”
I understand that you are from Eugene. Can you talk
a little about your Oregon background?
I’m a lifelong Oregonian. My parents moved
here when I was 2 so I grew up in Eugene; I went
to Edgewood Elementary School and Spencer Butte
Junior High and South Eugene High School. My dad
was a physician at Sacred Heart, a cardiologist, and
my mom worked for the Teen Parent Project out in
Springfield. So indeed I grew up fishing the McKenzie
and grew up an Axman. I went to California for
college and came back to work for Peter DeFazio for
about three years.
I know Peter well and actually just saw him last
week. I’m a big fan, always did the parade; Peter loves
to pick up the slime. He always has the thing where
he pushes the wheelbarrow around. Until recently he
was still using my parents’ wheelbarrow after all these
years, but I think he’s probably found a new, lighter
wheelbarrow in his dotage.
So I joined Kitzhaber’s campaign in 1993 and
essentially worked for him from 1993 through1999.
Primarily, other than that small window where I
left to run the campaign, I was the natural resources
advisor working in the governor’s office on issues like
community right-to-know, Willamette water quality,
and Steens Mountain preservation — a lot of land and
water stuff — and just had a great time.
What moved you from politics to the business world
and a job at BP?
I went to school for three years (at Yale) and did
a joint degree in environmental management and an
MBA and was hired out of that program essentially by
BP.
In the governor’s office I had really been frustrated
with our inability to get very much done. We were
really trying to be revolutionary. In one program
in particular working on green permits, there are
companies that have requirements about reporting
effluents into our waterways. Companies that always
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EUGENE WEEKLY
performed above the standard, and could do more,
essentially always complained: “You have me
reporting every day. I’ve had 14,000 consecutive days
of compliance. Why don’t you tell me to report once a
month and ask for a higher standard?”
And so we did some legislation in the 1997 and
1999 sessions to try to do that and it was just really
frustrating. Through that experience I met a bunch
of people in the private sector who were doing really
interesting things at Intel, at Weyerhaeuser of all
things, and at GE. I felt like I wanted to see what was
happening on the private sector side and see if I could
do some of the things I was hoping to do on the public
side, and I essentially shifted gears after school and
joined BP for seven years.
In 2005 our then-CEO John Brown wanted to create
a new renewable energy business within BP and I
joined the team that was setting that up in June 2005.
We set up a business that became what was called
BP Alternative Energy, and still is. It’s morphed a little
in the meantime but we had five core businesses —
wind, solar, hydrogen — and I worked through the set-
up and launch of that business in 2005 and joined one
of the businesses as a commercial manager in 2006. It
was the wind business in Europe and Asia and I stayed
with that for the ensuing four years. It was both wind
and natural gas-fired generation, and in end I was
running that business and became the CEO.
What got you to step away from the business world
and come back to politics?
I started talking with folks here in Portland about
energy efficiency and treating energy efficiency like
power generation. In fact, when you think of efficiency
at scale — when it’s a large building or even your
own home — if you’re able to save say 100 kilowatts
at your home, it’s the same as creating, if you could
imagine, a little 100 kilowatt wind generator or
thermonuclear power plant on your front porch; it
looks the same to your utility.
These guys at Equilibrium Capital were trying to
come up with the business model where you could
make that work — selling savings back to a utility and
creating a financial structure to make energy efficiency
work at scale
I joined what is now Energy Resource Management
in July of last year and had been doing that for six
months when the governor called.
I’d kept in touch with the governor over the years,
and had been talking with some of the folks in the
transition about people who I thought would be good
and some ideas I thought might be helpful in the new
office. At some stage, right around Christmastime,
some folks in the transition said, “You should probably
talk to John about these ideas.”
So I did and it turned out they were the same sorts
of things he’s been talking about — transformation,
and how can you be more efficient in your day-to-
day business of government and how can you take
— without getting too arcane here — some of the
delivery mechanisms for health care and education
and restructure them to make them essentially deliver
better service for less money.
It just seemed like a great opportunity, and given
our long personal relationship, it seemed like a good
fit and a good, exciting place to be for the next couple
years, at least.
What does this background in energy and business
bring to the table?
I have always heard you need to treat government
like a business, and it just doesn’t work that way.
Government is not a business. You can’t sell off the
non-producing schools. It’s not the same structure.
That being said, the way you address problems
can be very similar. The governor has talked a lot
about moving from addressing problems after they’ve
developed to preventing them in the first place, and
that’s very much a “six sigma” kind of business
approach. Why wait to fix the problems after, when
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