After the dramatic departure last September of Andrés Portela III, the City of Bend’s equity and inclusion director, City officials vowed to hire a third-party consultant to investigate the allegations Portela listed in his Sept. 12 resignation letter. The allegations include a racially hostile environment inside City Hall, mismanagement of racial incidents by City Manager Eric King and a DEI department stripped of staff and organization.
The results of that report, prepared by Amy Ahrendt, owner of Attorney-Conducted Workplace Investigations, suggest that the allegations of former director of the City’s Accessibility and Equity Department were “internally inconsistent” and portions of them were “implausible” and unsubstantiated by evidence.
The Source received the Dec. 2 report through a public records request with the City. Between Nov. 18 and Dec. 1, Ahrendt conducted in-person interviews with numerous City employees, including those Portela named in his resignation letter. At the crux of the investigation is a Sept. 16 conversation between Portela and King regarding his Sept. 12 resignation letter, which OPB had sought that day through a FOIA request. In interviews, the two agreed that Portela asked if he could give King a hug, to which he obliged. They also agreed that they did not talk about severance pay and that they planned to meet later to talk about Portela’s concerns, according to the report.
Their accounts of the meeting otherwise differ. Portela claimed that King cried through much of the conversation, which King denied, although he admitted to feeling emotional because Portela’s allegations “hit him to the core.” According to Portela, King said that the resignation letter would ruin him and that “readers would only see the worst” in King. Portela contends that he gave King two options: the City could share his Sept. 12 resignation letter with OPB, saying “the City was taking steps to improve, or the City could refuse to give his letter to OPB and treat his concerns as a personnel matter.” Portela claimed that King asked him to write a second resignation letter, one that didn’t include his accusations against several City employees. In King’s interview, he said he asked Portela to write another resignation letter because the first one listed information about employees and wasn’t filed with human resources.
Their accounts continued to diverge: Portela said King stood over him as an intimidation tactic while he wrote and sent the new resignation letter. Yet the investigator found evidence that King was instead in a meeting when he received the email, which he immediately forwarded to Ian Leitheiser, the city attorney, who was also in attendance.
In a phone conversation with the Source on Dec. 15, Portela, who began his role as the City’s equity and inclusion director in July 2023, said he stands by his account of King pressuring him to revise and resend his resignation letter.
“There was a definite shift from someone who was showing a very human side to me, telling me how [the accusations in the letter] could ruin his career,” Portela said. “Then [King shifted to] someone who showed extreme frustration … seeing the letter as something that ultimately could hurt him. He made his decision to attempt to pressure me into writing that. So that is my belief and my truth.”
Jacob Larsen, the City’s community relations manager, wrote in an email that the City took the allegations in Portela’s initial resignation letter seriously.
“When the letter was received, discussions began immediately on conducting an investigation,” Larsen said. “And that investigation was followed through and has been completed. The investigator found that the City took the issue seriously, addressed them appropriately and that the evidence did not substantiate Portela’s allegations.”
The City has not received the final invoice for the report, yet the maximum contract amount for the investigator is $50,000, Larsen added. The City also hired a different third-party group, Kearns & West, to shape the future of its equity work. This work began in November and will finish in January, according to public records received by the Source. The work will cost no more than $25,730, according to the personal service agreement.
Ahrendt, the investigator, noted in the report that including racial allegations against colleagues in a resignation letter “suggests that Portela was insensitive to the potential impact of his letter on other employees, as well as the City, and (surprisingly, given his position) failed to recognize that some of his allegations were in essence personal complaints meriting an investigation rather than mere subjects for discussion.”
Portela received a copy of the report last week. He said he realizes his credibility has been questioned for inconsistent ordering of events, but says that’s because he hasn’t had access to his work email and calendar since Sept. 19, when he signed the settlement agreement.
“I don’t have access to records, I’m on the outside,” Portela said. “So, to say that my story falls apart from timelines, and my not understanding when things played out….the City owns those records. It seems like there was a defensiveness that didn’t need to be there if there was a timeline.”
The investigator also found additional characterizations of events that drew Portela’s credibility into question. For instance, Portela told the Source that he told his colleagues he was traveling to a happy hour for equity directors in Portland on Sept. 9. Yet the next day, a City employee mentioned that she had seen Portela on the same flight from San Francisco to Redmond. In the report, a City employee maintained that when she later confronted him about it, Portela said the Portland meeting went so poorly he flew to San Francisco that morning to get a haircut.
Portela told the Source he didn’t remember telling anyone he’d flown to San Francisco to get a haircut; yet as the report bears out, Portela told the Source he’d traveled to visit his family in Tucson, where they had previously lived and to where he had recently moved his family.
The City’s information security manager scrubbed location data from Portela’s Microsoft account, showing that he was in Arizona instead of Portland on Sept. 9 and at the San Francisco Airport on the morning of Sept. 10.
According to an Aug. 5 letter written on City letterhead, which Portela furnished to the Source, Portela had been approved to work 50% remotely and that it was understood that he would be splitting his time between Bend and Tucson, where he would be buying a house. The letter was written by Stephanie Betteridge, the assistant city manager and Portela’s immediate supervisor, in service of a home mortgage application Portela was putting together.
Asked about the trips, Portela said he would have been happy to discuss the trip with his immediate supervisors, yet that didn’t happen because shortly after returning to Bend Portela gave a verbal resignation, on Sept. 11.
“As far as this singular event being a way to completely discredit the reasons why I left,” Portela said, “means no systems-level changes or supports will be in place for future employees.”
On Sept. 19, several days after sending a second resignation letter, free of allegations, the City offered Portela a settlement of $86,302, (half of his annual salary) and payments for health insurance, the city confirmed. That agreement also precluded Portela from suing the City.
He subsequently bought a home in Tucson.
Portela says the report’s baked-in bias is found in the way his and others’ accounts are characterized by the investigator’s language.
Portela said, “It was like they were trying to establish a reasonability standard that wasn’t necessarily applied to the City, but was applied to me. …When you use words like ‘claimed,’ ‘asserted,’ ‘mischaracterized’ when I’m speaking, and then when you use language like ‘explained,’ ‘clarified,’ ‘credibly stated,’ ‘reasonably believed’ with City leadership, you can tell the intent of the report within the text itself.”
The City Attorney’s Office said in a statement that “the investigation found that the City took the issues seriously and did not treat [Portela] differently based on race. The City is committed to making our organization a safe and fair place for everyone and recognizes that this experience has presented learning opportunities.”
At a City Council meeting on Dec. 3, officials announced that Eric King had received a 4.5-out-of-5 performance review and a 5% pay bump. That brings his annual salary from $245,157 to around $257,000, the City confirmed.
Reading from a prepared statement at the meeting, Mayor Melanie Kebler said: “The City Council feels fortunate to have the leadership, experience and perspective of Eric as our city manager. Eric continues to lead the City forward during challenging times, with a focus on opportunities to both better the organization as well as help our community succeed. By providing steady leadership and creating a strong City team, Eric helps the Council meet the needs of our community now and in the future. We are grateful for Eric’s service to the people of Bend.”
[Correction: In a previous version of this story, Andrés Portela’s settlement was incorrectly reported. The Source regrets the error.]
This article appears in the Source December 18, 2025.
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Thank you for this story. I have also read the report. The white guy got a raise. The Black man got thrown under the bus. –Michael Funke
Comedy
This Source news article provides Andres Portela the opportunity he wasn’t given by consultant Amy Ahrendt in her $18,685 investigation. Source reporter Peter Madsen and editors provided the balance and gave Mr. Portela the ink to personally address some of the accusations lodged against him in the investigation. Thanks go to the Source.
Purportedly to look into Mr. Portela’s allegations of racist behavior in Bend City Hall, the Ahrendt investigation, instead, looks more like the typical anti-whistleblower hit piece you would expect from any powerful and well-funded institution.
The initial 10 pages serve as a hairsplitting treatise meant to exonerate City Manager Eric King. (Complete with expressions of adoration for Mr. King from his underlings in a burst of emotion reminiscent of a Trump cabinet meeting.) The remaining 3 pages of the report actually purport to deal with Portela’s allegations, but without evidence and with plenty of hearsay.
I believe there is more to the story. Unfortunately, the headline of the Source article parrots language from the investigation and validates the Ahrendt report as the final say on what happened. I believe there is more to the story. I base my misgivings on years-long personal opposition to numerous City Hall policies and actions. I am, as well, personally referenced in this report.
Ms. Ahrendt begins her opus by quibbling over Mr. Portela’s version of the timeline for the Sept. 16 meeting with City manager Eric King That and other inconsistencies she cites include such trivial matters as who stood where during the meeting and the circumstances leading up to a hug between the 2 men (initiated by Mr. Portela). Petty hairsplitting like this leads Ms. Ahrendt to discredit the entirety of Mr. Portela’s narrative.
But is what good for the goose good for the gander?
On page 4 Ms. Ahrendt writes that at the time of his Sept. 16 meeting with Mr. Portela, Mr. King had been made aware of a decision by the city attorney to investigate allegations of racism at City Hall brought by Portela.
However, on page 6 she writes, “King was apparently unaware” of this decision.
To be sure, this is a trivial inconsistency on her part in her report (I won’t say “sloppiness”). Using her standards is this cause for throwing into doubt everything she subsequently writes?
(As someone personally on the periphery of one of the incidents cited by Ms. Ahrendt, I can say with some certainty that Eric King’s version of what happened in this case is largely inaccurate. Sadly, Ms. Ahrendt chose to interview only City Hall insiders, whose careers depend on the good will of their boss, Eric King. Why not a chat with, for example, the chair of the Human Rights and equity Commission (HREC), who in OPB reporting called Andres Portela’s resignation “a big disappointment “ and went on to say, “He is such an integral part of the life of DEI here in the city, and I was very surprised”? Ms. Ahrendt could have inquired, as well, into the circumstances leading to the resignations of 2 previous directors in the city’s civil rights departments.)
So, 10 pages of investigation seemingly designed to exonerate Eric King from all charges of misconduct–followed by 3 pages of relentless evidence-free attacks on Mr. Portela’s character by co-workers, instead of dealing directly with the allegations he raises.
Some of these same City Hall staffers, as FOIA documents attest, participated in a crudely conducted pile-on to discredit and oust an HREC member in the spring of 2024.
I can cite numerous incidents of other definitely racist and inequitable Bend City Hall conduct over the years. Along with my efforts, others have attempted to call into question these lapses in honorable government and abuse of power. But, in no sense has City Hall ever had to answer for its conduct. For now I will simply satisfy myself by calling attention to this latest example.
In the Dec. 18 OPB report on the consultant’s investigation, Mr. Portela writes, “This investigation wasn’t for me. It was to make leadership feel absolved.”