State Rep. Greg Smith, R-Heppner, has been executive director of the Columbia Development Authority since 2014. He was recently found to have violated state ethics laws for securing a raise without approval of the authority's board. (Photo by Laura Tesler/Oregon Capital Chronicle/Pool)
An eastern Oregon group charged with redeveloping a former military depot is considering rehiring an influential state lawmaker and giving him a large raise, despite state ethics watchdogs recently concluding he violated state laws when he inserted a $66,000 raise into a grant contract without his employer’s knowledge.
The five members of the Columbia Development Authority board will decide “sometime before the new year,” whether to keep as executive director state Rep. Greg Smith, R-Heppner, according to Emily Collins, a project coordinator for the organization. The authority is an intergovernmental organization meant to redevelop the site of a former military chemical depot in Boardman. Smith has been its executive director since 2014.
The proposed contract for Smith, the longest serving member of the Oregon House who has long added onto his legislative salary with high-paying consulting contracts and side gigs, includes an annual fee of $294,000 a year to serve as executive director through 2028, significantly more than both the $129,000 he earned annually and the $195,000 he told a federal agency he would be paid under a since-revoked grant.
This is despite the Oregon Government Ethics Commission finding Dec. 12 that Smith violated state law by using his office for personal financial gain when he directed an employee in charge of the development authority’s finances to boost his pay in 2024, including retroactively, in a grant application to the defense department’s Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation.
Despite the grant application claiming the Columbia Development Authority’s board had approved a pay increase from $129,000 a year to $195,000 a year, the board hadn’t voted on it. After discovering the pay raise months later, the board reverted Smith to his former salary and ordered him to pay back the excess earnings he had secured without their agreement. Smith has still not paid back the more than $33,000 he owes, according to the state ethics commission.
In response, the federal defense office, which previously granted the Columbia Development Authority about $800,000 a year, announced in February it would end the funding, according to reporting from the Malheur Enterprise.
Smith did not respond to a call and text from the Capital Chronicle on Tuesday.
At the Columbia Development Authority board’s most recent meeting on Dec. 16, Michele Lanigan, a former transition coordinator between the development authority and the U.S. Army, asked the board members during the public comment period: “Why is Greg Smith still employed as the executive director and why would you be increasing his pay?”
The $294,000 the board proposed is significantly less than the $430,000 Smith proposed in his own offer to the board in October, including more than $100,000 a year for his wife, Sherri Smith, to serve as project manager and an annual travel budget of roughly $15,000. Sherri Smith also works in his legislative office, as Oregon is one of only a few states that allows lawmakers to hire family members.
The latest proposal is also contingent upon Smith letting go of a few legal claims he’s filed against board members over the last year, according to reporting from the East Oregonian.
Lanigan, the former coordinator between the army and the development authority, ended her comment by telling the board:
“There are so many reasons to dismiss Smith and I’ve never heard a valid reason to keep him. He’s ripped the CDA off for hundreds of thousands of dollars and you want to give him more?”
Smith has been the subject of four government ethics investigations this year. One, in March, resulted in him receiving a letter of education for failing to list Harney County, where he was a director for a local development authority, as a source of income on the annual economic interest statement he must file as an elected official. Responding to a 2024 ethics investigation, Smith reported that his household’s gross annual income was more than $1 million.
That includes his salary from the Columbia Development Authority, his legislative stipend, his wife’s salary as his legislative assistant and income from his business.
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