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WW reporter Sophie Peel has won the 2024 Bruce Baer Award, one of the highest prizes in Oregon journalism, for her stories exposing the influence a troubled cannabis outfit exercised on state officials. Peel’s reporting that Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan had secretly signed a $10,000-a-month consulting contract with the founders of La Mota led to Fagan’s resignation last May.
The Bruce Baer Committee announced its decision last week, calling this year’s contest “extremely competitive.”
As WW noted in its nomination, Peel did not set out to investigate Fagan’s ties to La Mota. In the months prior to Fagan’s resignation, Peel published more than a dozen stories about the desperate condition of Oregon’s cannabis industry, and the emergence of two political donors to Oregon’s most powerful Democratic politicians, including Gov. Tina Kotek.
The couple, Aaron Mitchell and Rosa Cazares, had built a cannabis empire consisting of over 130 distinct LLCs while also accumulating millions of dollars in state and federal tax liens, unpaid bills, and numerous lawsuits. Peel also reported on the weaknesses in Oregon’s cannabis regulatory system, which allowed far less scrutiny of its licensees than Washington state, for example.
La Mota’s principals fought Peel every step of the way. On March 2 (prior to publication of Peel’s reporting about the company’s financial irregularities), WW’s managing editor and editor-in-chief received a letter from La Mota’s attorney threatening legal action if Peel continued her reporting.
We published her first story on La Mota three weeks later.
In the last week of April, because of public pressure due to Peel’s reporting, nearly a dozen elected officials, including Gov. Kotek and Senate President Rob Wagner, donated the campaign contributions they had received from La Mota (more than $200,000 in total) to charity.
Peel’s reporting took on greater significance when she broke the story that Fagan, the state official responsible for safeguarding the integrity of Oregon’s elections, was on the payroll of La Mota. (Most worryingly, records showed Fagan directed her Audits Division to consult with Cazares to shape an audit of the agency that regulated her cannabis shops.) Five days later, Fagan resigned her office—and official inquiries began.
Kotek launched two state investigations into Fagan’s conduct. In mid-May, the U.S. Department of Justice began a criminal investigation into Fagan that remains ongoing to this day.
The Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission and Oregon Department of Revenue changed their rules to now require cannabis companies to pay their taxes before receiving new licenses or renewing existing ones. For its part, the Oregon Legislature outlawed the practice of politicians accepting campaign contributions in cash—a common practice with Mitchell and Cazares.
The Bruce Baer Award is considered one of the most highly sought prizes for investigative and enterprise reporting in Oregon. It honors the late Bruce Baer, “the dean of the Capitol press corps,” who died of cancer in 1977.
WW last received the award in 2014, for Nigel Jaquiss’ reporting on first lady Cylvia Hayes peddling her influence. That reporting, like Peel’s, triggered a resignation—that of Gov. John Kitzhaber.
You can read all of Peel’s stories on Fagan here.