Top staffers for Gov. Kate Brown privately worked against a pro-transparency bill that ultimately failed in June, according to records released by Oregon’s public records advocate in the wake of her resignation Monday.

Brown has pledged to increase transparency under her watch since she was sworn in as governor in 2015. Yet memos and emails show staffers and lobbyists working on her behalf opposed a proposal to make state agencies track and disclose information about records requests they receive from the public.

The documents say Brown’s staffers told public records advocate Ginger McCall at least twice that her work to support the bill contradicted the governor’s interests and was a bad idea.

Then, by action or inaction, Brown’s office got in the way of the bill’s progress -- while publicly maintaining its support for transparency and the concept of government accountability. The bill was the first significant policy change put forth by the public records council created at Brown’s behest and made up mostly of members chosen by her.

First, Brown chose not to make the proposal one of her legislative priorities, even after McCall pointed out to one of the governor’s attorneys that the proposal was crafted in direct response to an executive order issued by Brown.

House Bill 2431 would have required state agencies to compile annual reports that disclose how many requests they receive, how many are fulfilled in a timely manner as defined by state law and how many remain unfulfilled after 60 days, in addition to how often agencies receive or grant fee waiver requests.

Supporters described the bill as an important first step to understand the workload state agencies face from providing public information at the request of the public. Although the law creating the advocate’s office required public agencies to cooperate and provide it information, many declined or otherwise failed to do so by deadline when asked to respond to a survey about their handling of records requests, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported. Those agencies included the Early Learning Division, Teacher Standards and Practices Commission, which investigates allegations of educator wrongdoing, Oregon Housing and Community Services, Business Oregon, the Department of Forestry and the Water Resources Department.

The proposal to require disclosure stalled after the largest state agency, the Department of Human Services, asserted that bill’s requirements would be costly to implement because it had no central way to track requests fielded by more than 200 offices statewide. Brown oversees the department and appoints its director.

The agency revised its fiscal stance, adjusting the estimated cost to zero, 17 days before the legislative session ended, but lawmakers never took the proposal back up. The bill -- the key agenda item recommended by the council lawmakers formed to reform the state’s public records system -- died when the Legislature adjourned June 30.

McCall announced less than three months later that she is resigning effective Oct. 11. In her resignation letter, she said that she felt pressured by the governor’s staffers to align with Brown’s stances even if they conflicted with the decisions made by the Public Records Advisory Council or with McCall’s professional judgment of the public interest. Brown said in a statement late Monday that she didn’t know staffers working on her behalf were pressuring McCall.

In response to a follow-up question this week regarding the failed public records bill, a spokeswoman for Brown contended that the governor supported the concept but felt that the requirements should have also been imposed on local agencies.

“She wanted all public bodies, not just state agencies, to be responsible for the same reporting so that resulting information that went to the (public records council) for analysis was more fair, accurate, and complete,” Kate Kondayen wrote in an email Tuesday.

Memos, emails and a timeline of events that starts in September 2018 conflict with the assertion that Brown supported the bill. McCall’s office provided them in response to a public records request.

In September 2018, McCall had emailed Emily Matasar, a lawyer for Brown who handles public records issues, about the Public Records Advisory Council and its key proposal for the coming legislative session.

An editor at The Oregonian/OregonLive sits on body, as do other journalists, a member of the public, state lawmakers, lobbyists for cities and counties and employees of state agencies.

After lawmakers formed the group in 2017, Brown issued an executive order tasking the council with finding a way to track public records requests and metrics. In McCall’s email to Matasar, she noted that the group had found a way to do just that.

“It would be great if the reporting requirements could be included in the governor’s transparency agenda,” she wrote.

That’s not what happened. Matasar informed McCall by phone on Nov. 27, a Tuesday, that Brown wouldn’t include transparency among her legislative priorities, according to McCall’s timeline. Matasar told McCall to find her own sponsors for the bill instead. Brown, a Democrat, was reelected Nov. 6 and released her budget and policy proposals for 2019 through 2021 on Nov. 28.

McCall emailed members of the public records council on Nov. 28 about the development and scheduled a meeting to strategize ways to pass the proposal, as well as a second bill to make the council permanent.

That same week, as required by law, the council also published its first report explaining its work and the work of McCall’s office.

Brown’s top attorney, Misha Isaak, told McCall during a Jan. 7 meeting that he disagreed with parts of the report and opposed the group’s legislative proposal, according to the timeline provided by McCall.

Despite Isaak’s opposition, the bill was introduced in the Capitol on Jan. 14. McCall had lined up three main sponsors, Rep. Karin Power, D-Milwaukie, Sen. Kim Thatcher, R-Keizer, and Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene. Power and Thatcher sit on the records council.

The next day, McCall again met with Isaak and Matasar. At that meeting, Isaak asserted McCall “ought to have considered the governor’s interests before allowing” the public records council to propose the bill, McCall’s notes say.

Isaak told McCall that he specifically disagreed with the group’s decision not to hold cities and counties to the same reporting standards as state agencies. The decision effectively shrank the opposition pool, because lobbyists for smaller local governments wouldn’t speak out against the requirements. That left “the governor in an awkward position of having to potentially oppose bills herself” instead of relying on others, Isaak told McCall, according to her notes.

When McCall said that she pointed out she can’t control the council’s decisions, Isaak “implied that it was my job to control what proposals were put forth to the council and, ultimately, what proposals were agreed upon by the council and in doing that, I should be operating with the governor’s office agenda in mind.”

“He also stated that in the future I should not prioritize creating consensus policy proposals over the political considerations of the governor’s office.”

Isaak referred questions regarding the conversations outlined in McCall’s memos to the governor’s press office.

The bill moved forward any way and passed through a policy committee in April and moved on to the powerful budget committee.

The extra step wouldn’t have been required if the bill had no price tag. But four state agencies told legislative staffers that it might cost them money to implement. Because of that, lawmakers had to weigh the bill’s costs as they tried to pencil out a budget for the next two years.

Three of the four agencies described their potential costs as “indeterminate.”

Although the Department of Human Services said it had no way to track the requests it receives, officials there told lawmakers that they knew exactly how much it would cost to implement the new bill. It would have to spend $180,490 in the next two years and $237,146 in the two years that followed. Officials believed that federal money could cover just less than half of the cost, leaving the state to pick up the rest.

McCall told The Oregonian/OregonLive in June that her she and her deputy Todd Albert worked to reach out to all four agencies to offer their help to drive down costs. McCall’s office met with DHS staffers on April 9, emails show.

After the meeting, Albert emailed DHS a template of a single spreadsheet that, if maintained, would fulfill the requirements of the bill.

Word of the meeting reached Adam Crawford, the top lobbyist at the Department of Administrative Services, the central human resources and budgeting agency for all the departments that work under Brown.

Crawford met with McCall at a coffee shop near the Capitol on April 22 and described her meeting with DHS as “inappropriate” and told her to stop arranging future ones. According to McCall’s notes, Crawford told her, “Agencies were not supposed to question other agency’s (sic) fiscal assessments.”

Yet for DHS, the fiscal outlook was already changing. Days earlier, Brown had declared a crisis within the agency’s child welfare division and installed an outside team to quickly turn around outcomes. Brown specifically cited the agency’s handling of public records as one critical area in need of improvement.

A detailed plan to improve public records was in place within weeks, including a public website that would track requests. The agency launched the new website June 29 and by August had built up a 11-position unit devoted to handling public records requests.

Still, the public records tracking bill went nowhere in the Capitol.

In a May 30 interview, Power acknowledged that the bill had stalled because of its price tag. “Any bill that didn’t cost anything got through much more easily, of course,” Power said.

A reporter from The Oregonian/OregonLive asked Brown on June 13 whether the costs to implement the bill were already covered in the agency’s budget. She said yes.

That same day, the Department of Human Services sent a revised fiscal statement that said the cost to implement the bill would be $0, adding that it might calculate some costs later.

But the revised statement never made it to public light. The budget committee never brought the bill back up in the waning days of the session, so lawmakers never weighed the new DHS fiscal document.

Power said by that point she was not actively working on the bill and was 100 percent consumed by House Bill 2020, a bill meant to address climate change that ground work at Salem to a halt after a walkout by Republican lawmakers.

Thatcher and Prozanski did not respond to messages for comment on Tuesday.

The legislature’s bill-tracking website describes the fate of proposal in four words.

“In committee upon adjournment.”

Hillary Borrud of The Oregonian/OregonLive contributed to this report.

-- Molly Young

myoung@oregonian.com