LET’S MAKE A DEAL
B Y B O B WA R R E N
The Long Con
OREGON GOVERNMENT AND THE LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE
M
y son Chris recently gave me a post-
er from the 1973 movie The Sting,
starring Paul Newman and Robert
Redford, as a couple of conmen in
the 1930s who pull off a compli-
cated con on their mark, a ruthless gangster played by
Robert Shaw.
It’s one of my favorite movies, and it’s a nearly per-
fect parable for my time in the Governor’s Regional
Solutions Center.
The movie was inspired by the 1940 book The Big
Con by David Naurer. It documents a time in America
during the Great Depression era when big cons, not un-
like the one portrayed in the movie, were not uncom-
mon. There was a “con” subculture employing thou-
sands of people across the country. Every big city had
its own semi-permanent “store,” the make believe lo-
cation where the con takes place. These “stores” were
rented for the expressed purpose of pulling off “big
cons,” also called “long cons.” In the movie, it was a
phony off-track betting parlor.
Toward the end of my career in the state’s economic
development department, I was forced to suspend real-
ity and move my office to a “store.” It was the Gover-
nor’s Regional Solutions Center in Eugene. A totally
make-believe state office. It was the equivalent of the
phony off-track betting parlor in the movie.
Shortly after Gov. John Kitzhaber started his third
term in 2011, the director of Business Oregon, Tim
McCabe, told a gathering in Portland that we would
all be required to move our regional offices into the
new Regional Solutions Centers. McCabe told us, “We
all know this is ridiculous, but it’s what the governor
wants, so we will do it.”
This phony state office was hidden away on the
Need
or
third floor of a nondescript
office information,
building on 13th Av-
assistance
enrolling
enue near the University of Oregon campus. This was
health
a legitimate state agency for
office
the way insurance?
Pioneertown,
the old movie set in Southern California, is a legitimate
Western town. It was like I had moved my office into
the Twilight Zone, into an alternate reality.
There was no useful purpose for me, or any of the
other state agency reps, to be located in the “store.” In
fact, it got in the way of doing our real jobs because it
was not a real state office. No one would ever come
there looking for any of the five state agencies forced
to be there. It was all about smoke and mirrors and ap-
pearances, nothing about reality or doing anything real.
Every Regional Solutions “store” had a coordinator
assigned from the governor’s office, who functioned
much like the Paul Newman character in the film,
Henry Gondorff. The only people who ventured into
the “store” were the marks invited in by Gondorff:
mostly city, county, and state officials and their staffs.
Gondorff would bring them in for make-believe meet-
ings, in a make-believe meeting room, surrounded with
white boards with make-believe flow charts, showing
make-believe projects.
The Regional Solutions Center was created to solve
problems that did not exist. After forcing the relocation
of state agencies into a make-believe state office, each
center then needed to create “projects” so they could
say the team was working on, well, something. Which,
of course, we weren’t. We had real jobs to do instead.
The Oregon Department of Transportation staffer
was constantly traveling across town to the real ODOT
office for real ODOT business. The Department of
Environmental Quality staffer needed to be out in the
field, and in the real DEQ office, in order to get real
DEQ work done, not sitting in the “store.”
I worked in three counties, and I needed to be in
those counties, not sitting in the “store” waiting for the
next mark. But, since the “store” existed outside of re-
ality, the governor’s office insisted that we be in the
“store,” and Gondorff would complain to our directors
when we were out doing our real jobs.
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Fourteen years earlier, in 1997, Kitzhaber created
the Community Solutions Team (CST). The CST con-
sisted of the directors of the same five state agencies:
Economic Development, DEQ, Land Use Planning,
ODOT and Housing. The agency heads would meet
as a group with the governor monthly, while regional
teams also met monthly, hosted by a different commu-
nity each month. There was no co-location of agencies
into make-believe offices.
The CST, renamed in 2003 to the Economic Revi-
talization Team (ERT), was replaced by the Regional
Solutions Centers nonsense even though it was work-
ing just fine. I suspect the team in the governor’s office
that dreamed up Regional Solutions was clueless as to
the existence of the CST/ERT. Maybe it was a “Hey
guys, wouldn’t it be cool if … ” moment.
How could this have happened? How could Gov.
Kitzhaber, someone I respected and admired, someone
as savvy with government as he was, create something
as dishonest and dysfunctional as the Regional Silly
Centers? I don’t think he did.
I believe it was someone with no government expe-
rience and no history with regional economic develop-
ment or knowledge about how state agencies actually
functioned. Someone so close to the governor, a self-
proclaimed expert in all things green and sustainable,
that his or her ideas would be treated as brilliant and
followed without question.
It was probably my worst experience in state gov-
ernment in more than 20 years. Such a silly waste of
everyone’s time. And it left me with two questions.
How could so many seemingly smart people spend so
much time pretending it was real? And why didn’t Kate
Brown just pull the plug on this nonsense?
Bob Warren retired in 2012 as the regional business development officer
for Business Oregon for Lane, Lincoln, Linn and Benton Counties. Prior to
that he was a political advisor to state and federal offices.