On Tuesday, Sheriff-elect Kent Vander Kamp was back in court. This time, he is seeking payment for attorney fees from Deschutes County for a lawsuit he filed in October to stop the county from releasing his La Mesa Police Department employment records to news organization Oregon Public Broadcasting and, in a related issue, defending the temporary restraining order he requested against OPB and its reporter Emily Cureton Cook in the October suit.
Vander Kamp’s initial suit against OPB and the County was filed on Oct. 9, after he learned that the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office planned to release his personnel records from the mid-1990s that the office had obtained from La Mesa during a public lawsuit in the months leading up to the election. Vander Kamp’s October suit and TRO were dismissed with prejudice by Vander Kamp’s legal team on Oct. 11 after the records were inadvertently released in the temporary restraining order Vander Kamp’s lawyers filed to block their release.
Tuesday’s remote hearing was brought before Deschutes Circuit Court Pro Tem Judge Dan Bunch, the same judge who ruled in the initial TRO suit. The hearing was initially scheduled as an opportunity for OPB’s lawyers to ask the court to find in their favor that the temporary restraining order was “an unsupported prior restraint on the press and wrongfully enjoined and restrained the OPB defendants,” that Vander Kamp “lacked an objectively reasonable basis to seek injunctive relief and attorney fees against OPB” and that OPB was the prevailing party in the action.
Such findings would set OPB up to request reimbursement of legal fees from Vander Kamp and, OPB’s lawyer argued, would honor the precedent that prior restraint of the press is only done in extreme situations, such as to protect the location of the military during wartime.
On Nov. 27, Vander Kamp’s legal team filed a request for attorney fees from the County for the October lawsuit – bringing the County back into the ongoing litigation and into Tuesday’s hearing. David Doyle, council for the County, stated at the beginning of the proceedings that he felt he was in an uncomfortable position in relation to Vander Kamp.
“For the record, this is an awkward position, Doyle said. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve never been an opposing party to someone who’s going to be my client in four weeks. So, it’s kind of a unique situation, him being the sheriff-elect.”
Doyle later said he did not see a basis for the county to pay attorney fees in this case. “I think that the plaintiff elected to try to block the disclosure and file the lawsuit,” Doyle said. “The lawsuit could have just been versus the County, but for whatever reason, they included OPB and the OPB defendants, and I think in trying to extricate themselves from the impacts associated with that, they’re trying to have the county share in some of the hurt, and there’s no legal basis for that.”
In arguing about the basis for the lawsuit and Vander Kamp’s attorney’s claims that the TRO was meant to protect Vander Kamp’s privacy and the sensitive nature of police personnel records, council for OPB, Chris Swift, said that given that Vander Kamp claimed he already showed the records to other journalists and had written about them in a post on his campaign’s website, the restraining order was a political move.
“For the record, this is an awkward position,” County Counsel David Doyle said. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve never been an opposing party to someone who’s going to be my client in four weeks. So, it’s kind of a unique situation, him being the sheriff-elect.”
“It wasn’t about privacy; it wasn’t about confidentiality. It was about a feud with a political rival,” Swift said. “Half of the arguments that we heard today are complaints about the conduct of the Sheriff or other members of the Sheriff’s office or County council’s office or these other political enemies that plaintiff feels that he has. Yet plaintiff chose to hold OPB and Ms. Cook personally into this political battle.”
Likewise, political motivation is what Randy J. Harvey, Vander Kamp’s lawyer, argued kicked off the initial records search and internal investigation into Vander Kamp by retiring Sheriff Shane Nelson in the first place. Harvey said that the office operated in bad faith and he was concerned for the potential precedent.
“I believe this is an appealable decision at some point, depending upon how this goes, depending upon the ruling here,” Harvey said, “if these records are releasable by an Oregon jurisdiction, it creates a highway for protected records in one sister state to be delivered to another state and then released under the more supple jurisdictional rules that would allow otherwise protected and viable records to be released to news agencies in a more favorable jurisdiction, which is what happened here.”
Judge Bunch then asked Harvey if he wanted to address the fact that according to Vander Kamp’s earlier public statements, Vander Kamp had no intention of protecting the records.
“I have to ask, one of the things that struck me early on when this landed in my queue, so to speak, as visiting judge here, is the idea that your client really had no intention of protecting these records,” Bunch said, “The suggestion being he’s speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Do you want to address that?”
“I do think it’s important to address that question,” Harvey said, describing the events that led up to the release of the records and the public 10-month-long internal investigation into Vander Kamp by Nelson.
“A request for public records, became known to the press, and then he, as a candidate, Vander Kamp, is being barraged with questions about his being investigated for dishonesty, a convenient leak for political purposes, and now all of a sudden, he’s being asked, plagued by questions about actions that have occurred down in California,” Harvey said. “So yeah, he showed those records to a couple of reporters who were hounding him to show us, to show them, what the charges were, and that you know, he wasn’t a maniacal character, as he was being assaulted by everyone.”
At the end of the proceedings, Bunch said he would need time to issue a written decision. Reached later, Doyle, Deschutes County’s council, said he expects a ruling within the next couple of weeks. Vander Kamp said he was unavailable for comment on Tuesday.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect the correct name of OPB’s council at the hearing, Chris Swift. It was not Jon Bial as previously stated. We regret the error.
This article appears in The Source Weekly December 5, 2024.
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What a piece of shit! He’s a crook and a liar. Leave it to a person that worked for La Mesa. I know I’m from the area and they are worthless. Hope those of you that voted him in like the results
Attacking the media and a local reporter is a bad way to start as Sheriff. I did vote for Vander Kamp because I think Nelson is a terrible Sheriff and Bailey would be more of the same. I am glad I did not contribute to his campaign now. This is bullshit. Close to Trumpy.
Kamp got my vote Nelson is a joke according to my neighbor Kay walters she said he has not done anything as sheriff but collect a check Bailey is a crook and he abused the power of the badge on the street even helping himself to women and letting them off you lady’s know who you are so kamp would be better than either one of them being the man in charge all I hope for is they step up on busting criminals kidnap cases murder cases drug dealers stuff like that im sick of seeing 5 cops messing with a. Homeless dude and his shopping kart
What Nelson and Bailey were doing and saying was BS, both are cowards behind badges.
And the Deschutes County Deceiver of the Year award goes to Mr. Vanderkamp!
Voters, you’ve been played!
I do not regret for one minute my vote for Kent and my time volunteering for his campaign. That being said, it is troubling to see still another member of DCSO succumb to protracted litigation. Emily Cureton-Cook is a fine reporter and is willing to cover stories shunned by local media. (The Source also provided excellent coverage and–to the credit of its editorial board–did not allow outside interests to interfere with its endorsement of Kent for Sheriff.) More than ever, with the takeover of the Bulletin by a Mississippi hedge fund, we are going to need pugnacious, independent journalism.
Kent should have realized early on that voters were so grateful for his reform-minded candidacy that they would be more than happy to forgive his youthful indiscretions. And they did in a landslide. He really should have set aside personal resentment and let the journalistic chips fall where they may in the interest of full transparency. The candor would have been refreshing.
So egregious were the failures and abuses of the old guard at DCSO. I count among them the hiring of Kevin Dahlgren to discredit the valiant work of service providers and the hiring of a cop fond of extremist paraphernalia with involvement in the prolonged beating of a handcuffed Latino man during a June 14, 2014, traffic stop in Medford. (Local media allowed DCSO to skate by on both of these stories.)
I will count on Kent Vander Kamp to lead us into a new era of just law enforcement; God knows we will need it the next time President Trump sends ICE agents to invade our city in a repetition of the events of August 13, 2020.