Who is funding Go Portland Go?

Methodology & sourcing

How this page was built, what it includes, and what it deliberately leaves out.

Where the data comes from

Every figure on this page is derived from a single export of the Go Portland Go committee's transaction filings with ORESTAR, the Oregon Secretary of State's campaign finance system. Oregon law requires committees to report each contribution and expenditure, and that record is public. Nothing here is private or leaked material.

The export contained — transactions. Of those, — are contributions (money in) and — are expenditures, reimbursements, or accounts payable (money out). The donor table counts contributions only.

How donors were combined

Contributions were grouped by the contributor name exactly as it appears in the filing, so a donor who gave more than once shows a single combined total. Names were not merged across spelling variants — if a person appears under two spellings, they are listed twice and flagged rather than silently merged, because guessing at identity is how tallies like this go wrong.

Contributions of $100 or less are reported by the committee as a single aggregate line rather than by name, as Oregon law permits. Those appear here as one row and are excluded from the named-donor count.

Employer information — and its limits

Oregon requires contributors to state their occupation and employer, and that is the source for the employer data here. Each value carries a label showing where it came from:

• Filed — the employer the donor themselves reported on the contribution record.
• Self-employed — the donor checked the self-employed box rather than naming an employer.
• Not employed — the donor reported that they are not employed. ORESTAR stores this as a flag rather than as employer text.
• Not disclosed — no employment status in the filing. This applies only to organizations and the aggregated line, which do not report one.
• In the filing — a connection between donors that the filing itself discloses, such as a business and its owner both contributing.
• Public record — a note added from published sources outside the filing, always with a citation.

That last category was applied narrowly and on purpose. It covers organizations, and individuals whose business role is already a matter of public corporate or press record — named executives and former officeholders. No attempt was made to research the employment of private individuals who did not disclose an employer. Campaign finance records are public; assembling an employment profile on a private citizen who gave a small contribution is a different thing, and this page does not do it.

Where an outside affiliation is historical — a founder of a company long since sold, a retired executive — it is labelled as such rather than presented as current employment.

How industries were assigned

Industry is not a field in the ORESTAR filing. It is a classification added here, and it is the only substantive thing on this page that is not taken directly from the public record. It is offered because "SKB" and "Melvin Mark Brokerage" tell most readers nothing, while "real estate" tells them something.

Each donor is placed by one of three routes, in this order: the donor is an organization and is classified by what that organization does; the donor's filed employer has an identifiable line of business; or, where the employer is generic — "President", "Manager" — the donor's filed occupation supplies it. Every employer used was checked against a published source. One donor whose employer could not be identified is left Unclassified rather than guessed at, and donors who reported themselves not employed are shown as such rather than assigned to an industry.

Two caveats worth holding in mind. Grouping by dollars and grouping by people give different answers: the largest industry by donor count is not the largest by money, and both are shown. And a category is a summary, not a fact about a person — a nurse employed by a school district is counted under health care, which is one defensible reading of two. The mapping lives in scripts/build_data.py so any classification here can be checked and disputed.

A note on the "not employed" donors

Oregon requires a contributor's occupation, and their employer where applicable, once that person's contributions exceed $100 aggregate in a calendar year. This filing meets that bar for every individual donor. — of them reported that they are not employed, together accounting for — in contributions.

That status is easy to misread from a spreadsheet export. ORESTAR records "not employed" as a flag in a separate column rather than as text in the employer field, so a naive read of the export shows those donors as having disclosed nothing. They had. On the ORESTAR website the same records display plainly as "Employer Name: Not Employed."

An earlier version of this page made exactly that mistake and described these records as incomplete filings. They are not, and that claim has been removed. Where outside sources are cited for these donors, they describe what the person did before retiring; the filing's own answer for what they do now is that they are not employed.

What was deliberately left out

The ORESTAR export includes each contributor's full residential street address. Those addresses are omitted here. They serve no transparency purpose that city and state do not already serve, and publishing home addresses of named individuals invites harm. Donor city and state are shown; street addresses are not.

Known caveats

• Purpose totals split a transaction evenly when the committee listed more than one purpose code on it. Treat those as approximate.
• Two payees, Steve McCallen and Steve McCallion, are likely the same person filed under different spellings. They are shown separately, as filed.
• This reflects one export taken on the date shown. Committees amend filings; the live ORESTAR record is always authoritative.
• Amounts are as filed and have not been independently audited.

Corrections

If you are named here and something is wrong — particularly an employer or affiliation — that should be fixed. Open an issue on the repository linked below, and cite the filing or public source that shows the correct information.