Part Two: The “Unsponsored” Forum Became a Candidate-Recruitment Platform
Washington County would not allow CPO 8 to sponsor the April 2024 UGB forum. The event went forward anyway—and Galas-Merten used it to describe a committee, recruit candidates and lay out a plan for an aligned four-person City Council slate.
Part One showed Washington County trying to pull CPO 8 back from political advocacy.
Part Two goes to the tape.
In April 2024, weeks before North Plains voters rejected an 855-acre UGB expansion, Linda Galas-Merten announced that Washington County would not allow CPO 8 to sponsor a referendum forum.
The event went forward “unsponsored.”
Then Galas-Merten took the microphone and described something much bigger than a land-use discussion: a committee to recruit and vet City Council candidates, a plan to run four aligned people as a slate and a charter change the group could pursue “if we can get a city council.”
Six months later, four aligned candidates sat together at a CPO 8 candidate forum and told voters exactly why electing all four mattered.
Four votes.
A Council majority.
Galas-Merten's April blueprint had become an October campaign.
The forum began under the CPO 8 banner
Washington County had already drawn an election-year line for its CPO program.
In an April 5, 2024 email to CPO and Committee for Community Involvement leaders, County Chair Kathryn Harrington said election forums could continue only if they remained educational, inclusive, impartial and fair. Both sides of a ballot measure were to be invited and treated equally. CPO leaders and County staff were not to become advocates.
The County was not banning election forums. It was protecting the difference between voter education and campaign organizing.
An April 10 announcement on the Hillsboro Herald, a local blog managed by realtor/activist Dirk Knudsen, promoted the April 20 UGB event as a forum “being held by the neutral CPO 8.” The message, signed by Friends of North Plains Smart Growth organizer Aaron Nichols, said both sides had been invited and called for a “fair presentation.”
Before the event, Galas-Merten posted an important update beneath that announcement. She identified herself as CPO 8 chair and wrote:
“I was informed by the County, yesterday, that we will not be allowed to sponsor the Forum on Saturday, 20 April. However, we will proceed with the Forum, unsponsored.”
If Washington County had prohibited CPO 8 from holding the event, who is the we?
Then Galas-Merten described the political plan
A 2-minute, 17-second recording preserved from the forum captures Galas-Merten addressing the audience.
She began with the number that mattered:
“Four seats are coming available on the City Council out of the seven-person Council.”
Then she described the committee:
“We formed a committee to look for good, healthy, young, viable candidates. We have two. We need two more.”
We again.
She invited audience members to join the group that would be “vetting and selecting” candidates. She also invited people who lived inside the city to run.
Then came the strategy:
“The idea is to run a slate of candidates so that they could be elected as a group.”
Galas-Merten said the goal was to find four people “who are aligned.”
This was not a vague invitation for residents to become more civically involved. It was a plan to recruit, vet and align four candidates—and elect them together.
“If we can get a city council”
Galas-Merten did not stop at winning seats.
She told the audience that North Plains and the surrounding community were “out of alignment.” Then, at 1:43 in the clip, she described what her group would try to do after it secured Council power:
“One of the things that we're going to try to do, if we can—if we can get a City Council—is also to change the charter and allow people who live outside the boundary but within 97133 to have two members at large on the Council.”
She said those outside-city members would have a voice when land beyond the city boundary was affected.
Residents can agree or disagree with that idea. The political structure Galas-Merten described is the point: build an aligned slate, win the Council and then use that Council to pursue a change in who could govern North Plains.
Galas-Merten and Aaron Nichols spent the next year fully executing the plan.
County officials were sent the recording before the election
The warning reached Washington County months before voters cast their November ballots.
On September 24, then-Mayor Teri Lenahan emailed a CPO program leader asking what rules applied to CPO candidate forums. She said she had seen a page advertising a CPO 8-sponsored forum and asked whether that was normal and what best practices community organizations were expected to follow. She copied mayoral candidate Russ Sheldon.
Two days later, former North Plains Mayor Cindy Hirst sent Commissioner Jerry Willey a formal complaint about CPO 8. Hirst accused Galas-Merten of using the organization as a political platform and directed Willey to the complete April 20 forum recording—specifically to the candidate-recruitment remarks at 1:41:20.
Hirst's conclusions were her own. The link and timestamp were concrete.
Washington County had been pointed directly to Galas-Merten's recorded plan before the November election.
As Part One documented, County Chair Harrington later explained that CPOs being used for “political city criticism purposes” was why the Board had directed staff to modernize the program and return it to its root purpose.
The County did not have to imagine how the line could blur.
It had the video.
By October, “four aligned candidates” were on stage
The April clip does not identify the two candidates Galas-Merten said had already been found. It does not establish who sat on the recruitment committee.
What happened next is still striking.
By October, Ariel Goodwin, Aaron Dumbrow, Mandy Hagedorn and Katie Reding appeared together at the “North Plains 2024 Candidate Forum for Mayor and City Council.”
Galas-Merten opened the recording by welcoming the audience to the “CPO 8 candidate forum” and introducing “our four candidates.”
The moderator said CPO 8 was “technically under the auspices of the County” and that the forum would use a League of Women Voters-style format. He also told the audience that the four candidates “generally share the same philosophy.”
Goodwin later said “all four of us are well aligned” on the City's growth direction.
Then an audience question put the April strategy into plain language:
“Why is it important that we vote for all four of you?”
Reding answered that electing all four was important “so that we gain a majority vote on City Council.”
We.
Goodwin followed:
“We have a really unique opportunity here in one election cycle to move the needle and make meaningful change ... the four of us sitting here would be four out of seven, which is enough.”
We.
She called getting “all four of us across the finish line in November” the goal.
At the end, Galas-Merten thanked the “CPO 8 members who came today, planned this, put it all together”. She urged attendees to tell neighbors and friends what they had heard and get people to the polls.
The blueprint worked
The April recording described the architecture:
Four available seats.
A committee to recruit and vet candidates.
Four aligned people.
A slate elected as a group.
Council control.
The October forum presented four aligned candidates and the majority they could create together.
In November, Goodwin, Dumbrow, Hagedorn and Reding all won.
Campaign-finance records added the financial structure. As TRFNP documented in “Follow the Money,” a single PAC supplied almost all of each candidate committee's reported in-kind support, with 39 matching transactions across all four campaigns.
The October forum, election result and campaign-finance records show how closely the eventual slate matched that blueprint, apparently incubated within the taxpayer funded CPO 8.
All four won.
All four have since resigned.
The final resignation came less than twenty months into the term, leaving North Plains with the wreckage of the governing coalition the slate was built to create. TRFNP documented that collapse when Mandy Hagedorn resigned.
First came the committee.
Then the slate.
Then the Council majority.
The “unsponsored” label did not stop the organizing.
It simply removed Washington County's name from the banner.
NEXT IN PART THREE: The forum was not an isolated episode. County records show CPO 8 assigning speakers to pressure the outgoing City Council, falling behind on required records and beginning to route the same North Plains advocacy toward Strong Towns.
