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In Yet Another Management Shakeup, Oregon Governor Fires Lottery Director

Gov. Kate Brown abruptly fired Oregon Lottery Director Jack Roberts on Tuesday, adding to a list of state agency leaders who've moved on since Brown took office last year.

By Denis C. Theriault

Gov. Kate Brown abruptly fired Oregon Lottery Director Jack Roberts on Tuesday, adding to a list of state agency leaders who've moved on since Brown took office last year.

Roberts, a Republican who once served as Oregon's labor commissioner, had run the lottery since December 2013. He took over in the wake of an Oregonian/OregonLive investigative series that examined the Lottery's reliance on problem gamblers to help keep billions of dollars flowing to state coffers.

Brown appointed a longtime aide, Barry Pack, as interim director until a permanent replacement is named.

Pack has served as Oregon's deputy chief operating office since 2012. Previously he worked for Brown as deputy secretary of state and also served as chief of staff for Senate Democrats from 1999 to 2003, when Brown was a legislative leader.

"I am grateful for Jack's years of service to the Oregon Lottery, but it is time for a leadership change," Brown said in a statement. "As we embark on the search for a successor, Barry will bring the skills and experience necessary to step easily into this role."

Roberts, whose career in Oregon politics included a run for governor and Oregon Supreme Court, didn't return a message seeking comment late Tuesday.

Brown's spokeswoman, Kristen Grainger, pointed to unspecified "management problems" when asked to explain the governor's decision.

Brown has also presided over management shakeups in the Department of Environmental Quality, the Employment Department and the Department of Human Services.

Even under Roberts, the Oregon Lottery struggled to reconcile its role as a revenue stream for lawmakers looking to spend millions on schools and housing against calls from reformers that it stop leaning so heavily on problem gamblers.

Roberts agreed to work with lawmakers last year after opponents' lobbying killed legislation that would have charted the socioeconomics of lottery players. Roberts promised to collect the data without a legislative mandate.

But an audit last summer found the lottery has failed to flag cash-cow "delis" that might be operating as illegal casinos, in part because regulators seem to have shied from doing basic financial checks.

Investigators reviewed records from 20 of the state's 234 food-light "deli" retailers -- including two on Hayden Island's "Lottery Row."

They found more than half earn most of their income from gambling, meaning those retailers could be risking their lottery contracts by operating as casinos. The audit said state regulators had reviewed the finances of just a few of those retailers.

Investigators also found several retailers had overstated non-lottery income, in some cases reporting sales when food and drinks had been given out for free. In two cases, businesses that had seemed to fall under the state's casino threshold crossed it when those mistakes were corrected.

Roberts argued with the audit's premise in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive.

"The whole take is we're ignoring our rules," Roberts said at the time. "We're not. Maybe policy makers ought to talk about what the rules need to be."

Roberts' ouster also landed amid controversy over recent lottery advertising that earned the ire of Native Americans, including the Coquille tribe, which has battled with Brown over a proposed casino in Medford.

The ad campaign invoked the Lewis and Clark expedition, with the explorers "discovering" video terminals in a frontier without any Native Americans. The Coquilles sent a statement earlier Tuesday saying they "welcomed" the lottery's decision to pull the ads.

But Grainger, when asked about the timing, said "this has nothing to do with that."

(c)2016 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.)

Caroline Cournoyer is GOVERNING's senior web editor.
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