Trouble at the trough

I wrote a while back about the young Portland politician Cameron Whitten, who lately has taken to running a nonprofit charity, Brown Hope, that was reportedly about to start handing out a guaranteed income to a couple dozen lucky Black households in town. To me, the whole setup raised more questions than it answered.

Well, the questions have now doubled with the news that the head of the organization's board, Greg McKelvey, has placed Whitten on the old "paid administrative leave" for some mysterious reason involving multiple "serious allegations." McKelvey is also well-known in political circles, having recently served as the campaign manager of Sarah Yada Yada Iannarone, who was such a bad candidate for mayor that she lost to the more-than-mildly incompetent incumbent, Dud Wheeler. McKelvey and Iannarone spent a lot of time filing complaints about Wheeler's campaign finances before they lost in a three-way race.

Anyway, what did Whitten allegedly do to get himself canned from the free money dispensary? And did McKelvey have the legal right to sideline him? Will the prospective recipients of the handouts still get paid? It should all make for some interesting reading in the weeks ahead.