Former Multnomah County Commissioner Sharon Meieran left the government in 2024 frustrated by what she describes as widespread dysfunction. So she set to work on a highly detailed plan to restructure the county, one she hoped would be of great value to the next county chair.

But since Meieran entered the chair’s race June 9, she has argued that the plan actually has no value at all—at least not any that she needs to disclose in campaign finance records.

In fact, campaign filings show that a political action committee Meieran created last October spent $70,000 writing and publicizing the plan, using contributions largely from business owners and property developers frustrated with the county’s performance. That committee, Fixing Multnomah County, and a corresponding website centered on the plan feature photos of Meieran and links to her campaign website.

But Meieran has opted not to declare the plan as an in-kind contribution to her campaign, even as some argue that local and state campaign finance rules suggest she should. (Like other candidates, Meieran has a separate committee, Friends of Sharon Meieran, to finance her campaign.)

In an email, Meieran told WW she doesn’t need to report the plan as a campaign expense because it is available to any candidate—including her opponents, Multnomah County Commissioners Julia Brim-Edwards and Shannon Singleton.

“All information I gathered was (and is) publicly available,” Meieran wrote. “Anyone could have adopted (and still could use) the plan, including current board members, the current chair, and the current candidates. I did not write the plan to run for chair, but because it was obvious to me and others that the county needed a plan.”

Multnomah County places strict limits on campaign contributions, including in-kind contributions, which are contributions that have value but are not cash.

In the eyes of some observers, such as those backing Meieran’s opponents in the fierce three-way contest as well as neutral watchdogs, Meieran effectively sidestepped the county’s low ceiling on campaign contributions by taking tens of thousands of dollars from a handful of donors to craft a platform she’s now using in her bid for office. In other words, as a candidate, she is using something of value well in excess of contribution limits—and failing to report it.

The Oregon Campaign Finance Manual defines an in-kind contribution by its fair market value, or the dollar amount a consumer would expect to pay for the good or service.

Seth Woolley, a campaign finance watchdog, says because the plan written for Fixing Multnomah County was funded by a third-party political committee and with money from several donors, “contributing the report back to her own campaign is fully subject to limits and would be ‘fair market valued’ based on the amount the committee paid to generate the report.”

“The report is a thing of value created by a political committee. It meets the definition of a contribution as another thing of value that is categorized as an in-kind contribution,” Woolley adds. “So she’s in effective noncompliance as she has not reported it yet on both accounts and furthermore claims it is nonreportable.”

Elected to her first term as commissioner in 2016 and her second in 2020, Meieran, an emergency room physician who also has a law degree, ran against Jessica Vega Pederson for Multnomah County chair in 2022 (WW endorsed Meieran in that race). After losing, she completed a fiery second term as commissioner, sparring with Vega Pederson at nearly every opportunity. As a thorn in Vega Pederson’s side, Meieran won many fans.

“When I left the county, many people expressed sadness that I was leaving, [and] described me as the only ‘voice of reason’ on the board,” she says.

In October 2025, Meieran founded a miscellaneous political action committee called Fixing Multnomah County. That committee raised $70,116 and built a 23-page “Comprehensive Multnomah County Turnaround Plan” that Meieran now says she will enact if elected.

The plan advises how to make the county more efficient and improve transparency. It ties dollars to outcomes, asking that instead of setting budgets for programs that continue year after year, county departments should outline the results they expect funding to deliver—and be held responsible for achieving those results. The plan also looks to streamline the county’s 11 departments into five hubs to eliminate duplication of services and better track how money flows through the county. (The plan zeroes in on homeless services as its case study in how these budgeting principles would play out).

Meieran says developing the plan was not a stepping stone to her bid for county chair. She decided to enter the chair’s race, she says, to force the county to engage with a plan, any plan.

“I did not originally want to run for chair,” she says. “The only reason I am running is because no other candidate has proposed even an outline of a plan…Had any of the other candidates made constructive positive or negative comments about the plan, or shared one of their own, I would have happily considered that success my final contribution to the county.”

The debate now boils down to whether Meieran should have reported the $70,000 spent to develop the plan, now core to her platform, as a campaign expense, and whether that money should be allowed in the race as an in-kind contribution.

Contributions to county candidates are limited to $603 per donor this election cycle thanks to a charter amendment voters approved in 2016.

Yet Fixing Multnomah County acquired much of its bankroll from donations that far exceeded $603.

Those contributions included $10,000 from developer Homer Williams, $10,000 from former City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, $5,000 from affordable housing developer Rob Justus, $5,000 from former Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission chairman Paul Rosenbaum, and $2,500 from downtown property owner Greg Goodman.

Laurie Wimmer, executive secretary-treasurer of the Northwest Oregon Labor Council, says Fixing Multnomah County’s collection of “way larger than allowed” contributions allows Meieran to skirt campaign finance laws. Wimmer’s group has endorsed Brim-Edwards for chair. (Meieran is not seeking organizations’ endorsements.)

“Even if this doesn’t strictly violate the letter of the law, it surely violates its spirit,” Wimmer says. “As long as we, as a community, have decided that limits are good public policy, then everyone should follow them with fidelity and not game the system for some kind of advantage.”

Jessica Morkert-Shibley, a spokeswoman for Multnomah County, says a political committee’s contributions to any candidate are subject to the $603 limit. The definition of the limit is broad enough to extend to in-kind contributions, Morkert-Shibley says, but she declined to comment on Meieran’s campaign bookkeeping.

“The county would not comment on a particular candidate or campaign outside the context of a formal complaint or investigation without an opportunity to gather all the information,” she says. “We wouldn’t want to prejudge a matter before it’s been reviewed. And at this time we do not have enough additional information to initiate an investigation without a formal complaint.”

Meieran, for her part, says that if someone had a substantive issue with her two committees, she would have been made aware of a complaint. None has been filed with the county, Morkert-Shibley says. And Meieran says she’s acting within the law, having sought legal advice from C&E Systems, which provides management services.

When asked if she believed the plan Fixing Multnomah County developed provided value to her campaign, Meieran said it was “immaterial from a disclosure perspective.”

And Meieran took issue with WW’s suggestion that not reporting the plan as a campaign expense violated campaign finance laws’ spirit of transparency.

“The question should not be: How the hell does Sharon Meieran have a plan to talk about in her campaign?” she says. “It should be: Why is she the only one who cared enough to spend a year figuring out what needs to happen after an election before even deciding to be a candidate?”