Commentary: Oakridge’s $200,000 couple — a tangle of allegations, secrecy and conflict of interest

By DOUG BATES/Editor Emeritus/The Herald — At least $30,000 to $40,000 in Oakridge tax money has been spent on the fallout from allegations that a city firefighter/paramedic had sex while on duty.

If you haven’t heard about the 2-year-old case, it’s because Christina and Scott Hollett don’t want you to.

She is a city councilor and leader of a council majority bloc that has denied The Herald’s request for records of the investigation. Her husband, the Oakridge Fire Department captain who supervises the fireman who landed in trouble, has been accused by an ambulance driver of ignoring her allegations in the case.

“Basically,  they’ve brushed it under the carpet,” says the accuser, Renee Hartzo, who no longer drives ambulances for the city. “It’s absolutely disgusting.”

Scott Hollett was asked to be interviewed for this story. He declined in an email in which he scolded The Herald for asking.

Christina Hollett has never accepted The Herald’s repeated requests for comment. On July 15 she and the council majority she controls declined to release records of the investigation as requested by The Herald.

Many Oakridge citizens may recall The Herald’s reports that Scott Hollett, who receives extensive overtime pay, has become the city’s highest-paid employee. His wife receives stipends as an EMT. Together, in fiscal 2019-20, the two of them collected nearly $200,000 in pay and benefits such as PERS retirement money and health insurance — all of it from Oakridge taxpayers.

Citizens have yet to learn, however, how they made that much money. Christina Hollett took in $10,160 in stipends. Her husband received $188,399 in salary and benefits, thanks to a massive amount of time-and-a-half pay for overtime worked at union wages.

Why so much overtime? It resulted in large part from the sex-on-the-job investigation.

Why keep it secret? Presumably, the details are embarrassing to Scott Hollett and the accused fireman, who are the two leaders of the local fire department union.

The case itself is sordid and not particularly important. What IS important is that it demonstrates clearly what’s wrong with a city government in which the most powerful elected official — Christina Hollett — is married to the city’s most generously paid employee.

It’s a glaring conflict of interest. And it surfaced not only in the sex case but also in the tangle of events leading to the Oct. 22 resignation, effective Feb. 28, of City Administrator Bryan Cutchen, who dared to consider fiscal cuts to the Holletts’ department.

Bottom line: Cutchen is Scott Hollett’s boss, driven from the job by Scott Hollett’s wife. A chronology is helpful in understanding how this happened.

2017

In a period of considerable turmoil in the Oakridge fire and ambulance services, Christina Hollett was booted from the volunteer fire department association. Veteran volunteers, many of whom have since quit the group, almost universally use the word “troublemaker” to describe her.

Once removed, Hollett began a public-image campaign that led eventually to her reinstatement. She solicited letters of support and sought to burnish her image on the numerous Facebook group sites that she and her allies control in Oakridge.

2018

Hollett ran for a vacancy on the city council. Generous self-promotion on her Facebook sites helped her become the top vote-getter in a field of 10 candidates running for three seats.

July 7, 2019

An Oakridge ambulance, driven by Renee Hartzo, transported a patient from Oakridge to McKenzie-Willamette Hospital in Springfield. The firefighter/paramedic on board was Justin Mock, a lieutenant in the Oakridge Fire Department.

“After the patient was transported, Justin left me in the ambulance and went inside the hospital,” Hartzo told The Herald. “He was gone a long time. I thought we should have returned immediately to Oakridge.”

When Mock finally returned to the ambulance, she said, he thanked her for waiting and said that he had been having sex with his girlfriend, a nurse, in a hospital bathroom. It was the second time he’d done this, she said.

“The first time, I just let it go,” she said. “The second time, I’d had enough.”

She said Mock, on ambulance runs, often boasted to her about his sexual activities involving “random girls.” His comments made her uncomfortable, in part because he was married.

“After the second bathroom episode, he said he was hungry and had me take him to Taco Bell,” she said. “While we were there we got another call,” which they couldn’t take because they hadn’t returned promptly to Oakridge.

“Scott had to take it,” she said of the call.

Upon returning to Oakridge, “I called Scott and told him what happened,” she said. “He did nothing. He didn’t seem to think it was a big deal.”

So she went above Scott Hollett, she said, and complained to Police Chief Kevin Martin, who was acting fire chief at the time.  He listened to her story and took notes, she said, although she never saw a written report or complaint.

July 15, 2019

Bryan Cutchen, a former commander in the U.S. Navy, went to work as Oakridge city administrator.

July 16, 2019

On his second day in the job, Cutchen put Justin Mock on paid administrative leave pending investigation of “an allegation of improper conduct while on duty.”

EMS overtime pay began skyrocketing as others — especially Scott Hollett — began to take over Mock’s shifts, at time-and-a-half union scale.

October 2019

Mock returned to active duty, apparently having been cleared of improper conduct.

“It was very ridiculous,” Hartzo said. “They swept it under the rug. I was disgusted and gave up on it.”

Despite being off the job for nearly three months, Mock collected his full pay for the year, receiving $134,939 in wages and benefits. He declined The Herald’s request for an interview for this commentary.

November 2020

Christina Hollett organized a slate of four candidates to run for four vacancies on the city council. In a field of nine candidates, Hollett’s slate won all four seats in the Nov. 3 general election.

Two of her acolytes — Dawn Kinyon and Melissa Bjarnson — are co-administrators of her most popular Facebook group page. Kinyon controls yet another page. The other two clique members, Michelle Coker and Audy Spliethof, aren’t co-administrators but have been dubbed part of “the Facebook Five” because they vote almost 100 percent of the time with the three women who control the social media sites.

As a group, during a news vacuum exacerbated by the demise of the community’s weekly newspaper, they used their Facebook sites extensively to sweep into office.

January 2021

The new majority bloc took office. In their first action, they elected Christina Hollett to be their council president.

March 2021

In a closed executive session of the city council, some members of the new majority — just weeks after taking office — discussed the idea of terminating Bryan Cutchen by voting against renewing his contract. Though popular among Oakridge business leaders, Cutchen had incurred the wrath of Christina Hollett.  His sin: Daring to consider austerity measures that could mean cutting city spending on fire and ambulance services.

After The Herald revealed these secret discussions, Mayor Kathy Holston — an outspoken supporter of Cutchen — organized a March 11 town hall meeting in which nearly two dozen citizens spoke up in his favor and condemned the idea of terminating his contract. It was soonafter renewed — but just for one year, not the standard two years.

April 2021

As the budget cycle began, the “Facebook Five” seemed to embrace a new strategy: Getting rid of Cutchen by undermining his credibility and making his job so miserable that he might resign.

July 2021

Christina Hollett bitterly chastised Cutchen in a public meeting for changing his recommendation on the fireworks show she was organizing for July 4 at Greenwaters Park. He had originally supported granting a permit for the pyrotechnics, but after a historic “heat dome” arrived and turned the entire Pacific Northwest into a tinder box, he reversed his recommendation because of the fire hazard. Her council majority rejected Cutchen’s recommendation, and the fireworks show went ahead as planned.

On July 7, in response to The Herald’s reporting on the Hollett couple’s nearly $200,000 in compensation for 2019-20, Councilor Dawn Kinyon posted a lengthy entry on the council bloc’s Facebook site defending Scott Hollett’s extensive overtime pay. In that post, she disclosed that one of the city’s four firefighters/paramedics “had to be out on paid leave for about 2.5 months” last year.

The Herald immediately requested all public records from that case.

Cutchen promptly provided a copy of his letter putting Justin Mock on paid administrative leave. All other records were protected by attorney-client privilege, he said, and could be released only by approval of the city council. He recommended that the council approve release of the documents.

On July 15, the council rejected the records request by refusing to vote on it. The council’s two members in the minority — Mayor Holston and Councilor Bobbie Whitney — could have moved for a vote but didn’t, apparently weary of being on the losing end of so many votes, such as the ill-advised fireworks permit.

Oct. 21, 2021

Throughout the year’s budget cycle, as The Herald reported on Christina Hollett’s conflict of interest as well as that of Councilor Bjarnson, who is also an EMT, Hollett became less and less vocal in public meetings. Meanwhile, Councilor Kinyon emerged as her proxy, challenging and belittling Cutchen and City Finance Director Eric Kytola at every opportunity.

It all came to a head in a tumultuous meeting on Oct. 21 when the council majority refused to pass a supplemental budget proposed by Cutchen as a means of belt-tightening while preserving current levels of public safety services. Councilor Kinyon angrily left the meeting, then posted on Facebook that she thinks “something fishy” is going on at City Hall.

Oct. 22, 2021

Cutchen announced that he is resigning, effective Feb. 28, as a result of “a working relationship lacking in trust and respect.” The Facebook Five prevailed.

The upshot

By The Herald’s calculations, the allegations against Justin Mock and the subsequent investigation cost Oakridge taxpayers at least $30,000 to $40,000 in overtime pay and legal expenses. The real loss was quite possibly more than that, but it’s hard to know without seeing the records that are being kept under wraps.

Whatever the real figure is, it’s nothing compared to what the city is losing with the departure of Cutchen, who has roped in millions of dollars in grants for the city during his short tenure.

The secrecy in the Fire/EMS department, coupled with the attempted smearing of an excellent city administrator, ought to show Oakridge residents what’s toxic about having the town’s most powerful politician being married to the town’s highest-paid employee.

It’s hard to see what her vision is for Oakridge, other than to look out for her family’s interests.

Doug Bates is a retired newspaper journalist who lives in Oakridge. He retired as editor of The Herald on Oct. 26, his 75th birthday.