Gov. Tina Kotek describes her first 60 days in office as an all-out dash to set her in motion. A sprinter on her team, Kotek said her administration probably needs to downshift to a sustainable pace soon “but it’s really important for people to see us working hard to set the foundation. ” It’s clear two months in that Kotek is running hardest at the state’s twin crises of homelessness and a lack of affordable housing, problems that loomed large for last year and were top concerns for Kotek dating back to her years as state House speaker. Within 24 hours of , Kotek issued a trio of executive orders that set an ambitious statewide goal of building a year, declaring a homelessness state of emergency in parts of the state with the largest increases in unsheltered homelessness and directing all state agencies to focus their resources on finding ways to reduce the number of people living on the streets. She has also met biweekly with Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler since before taking office and has included Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson in the meetings at least once a month. The governor’s early focus on housing and homelessness has the potential to shift how local governments and the state approach the two crises. Kotek’s new housing council met for the first time Friday to begin generating recommendations to boost home construction. Kotek has also directed local governments in regions with the largest increases in people living unsheltered to draft plans by March 17 for how they can collaborate to reduce homelessness. Those plans will be the basis for deploying money appropriated by the Legislature. “They have to explain how they’re going to reach outcomes, not only for keeping people housed” but also for connecting people with services and getting unsheltered people into homes, Kotek told The Oregonian/OregonLive. She is personally leading the multi-agency coordination group in the Portland metro area. Kotek has also signaled an unusual willingness for an Oregon Democrat to seek exceptions to the state’s rigid city boundary system, which critics have said undercuts the state’s ability to build adequate housing. It’s not yet clear whether Kotek will be as willing to challenge longstanding political allies when it comes to other major problems in the state, even though she on the campaign trail that the state faces myriad challenges. In a survey conducted by Portland polling firm DHM Research earlier this month, respondents indicated they are still forming an impression of the new governor. While 34% said they have a somewhat or very positive opinion of Kotek and 43% had a negative view of her, nearly a quarter said they did not know. Oregonians view Kotek less positively than they viewed former Gov. Kate Brown early in her first term in 2015, when 48% of respondents reported a positive impression of Brown. John Horvick, senior vice president at polling firm DHM research, said the survey reflects that politically, Oregon is “a divided state. Democrats go to their corner; Republicans go to their corner. ” Horvick noted that Oregonians have a good grasp of Kotek’s priorities, since 33% said homelessness is her biggest focus, followed by 7% who cited housing affordability. Improving Oregon’s behavioral health systems is another top priority for Kotek. She picked new state health and program directors, only to have the interim health director because the job demanded too much time away from his family. Kotek listed education, specifically boosting Oregon’s , as one of her top priorities. Yet the governor has drawn criticism from literacy advocates for proposing a hands-off, incentive-based approach to improving reading instruction, and she is waiting months to bring in a new schools chief, which could slow progress. Dave Miller, host for public radio show Think Out Loud, asked Kotek earlier this month why she wants to leave it up to school districts to select reading curricula when reporting has shown that some are using discredited methods rather than strategies supported by research. Brain studies dating back two decades have shown that most children need explicit instruction in phonics to learn to read, but popular curricula instead attempted to teach children to read using methods such as guessing the meaning of words based on pictures. Schools’ failures to teach children to read using scientifically based methods is now as a key factor in dismal reading scores. Kotek said it might make sense for the state to publish a list of reading curricula that use methods supported by research, but she wants to give school districts the leeway to purchase any curriculum they want as long as they explain their reasoning to the state. “We don’t want to say, ‘This is the curriculum,’” Kotek said. “There’s not one perfect curriculum … We believe in local control. ” The governor’s opposition to curriculum mandates is in line with the of the statewide teachers union, which supported Kotek’s election bid. Scott Smith, a retired educator and member of the Oregon advocacy group Decoding Dyslexia, contended in a letter to Kotek and lawmakers that the governor and lawmakers’ proposals “prioritize district choices over student needs” and wrote “Oregon is ignoring best practices from other states where the states have taken direct responsibility for literacy and have seen impressive, sustained gains in reading. ” The governor has also taken a largely hands-off approach to bipartisan efforts to revive Oregon’s semiconductor industry, one of the Legislature’s top priorities this year. Lawmakers want a share of $52 billion in federal CHIPS Act subsidies meant to help encourage chipmakers to build new factories in the U. S. The semiconductor industry had been among Brown’s top priorities in her last months in office, and she helped lead a task force of public officials and business leaders who drew up a wish list of new chip industry incentives. While Kotek has been generally supportive of those efforts, she has left it to legislators to hammer out difficult questions over tax credits and . Last month, during a meeting of the National Governors Association in Washington, D. C. , Kotek met with U. S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to discuss Oregon’s CHIPS Act efforts. Kotek’s proposed budget included $200 million in direct incentives for chipmakers plus $10 million for university research. The industry’s backers are seeking in tax credits, new academic facilities and to prep industrial sites for development. Lawmakers are considering legislation that would give Kotek to convert rural land for developing data centers. Kotek told reporters at a briefing in Salem last month that she would “love to have” that authority and would like a similar ability to designate land for housing development. Kotek last year that she would not push for major new programs and policy changes out of the gate, instead focusing on getting Oregon government to function better. She told The Oregonian/OregonLive that she is sticking with that approach. “This is a moment to support the agencies to do the work that’s on their plate,” Kotek said. “We don’t need a bunch of new programs … They need to be able to focus and do their job and perform. ” Nonetheless, Kotek has pushed for huge amounts of spending on affordable housing: more than to build or preserve affordable housing, including $770 billion in state debt for the construction of new homes for renters and first-time homeowners. Meanwhile, Kotek and lawmakers have each upped the ante on the size of their early-session homelessness and housing spending package, with the package growing from Kotek’s initial $130 million proposal to around $200 million, with money added for rural areas and to help homeless youth. Oregon’s housing agency struggled during the pandemic to deliver assistance to struggling renters as federal funding poured into the state. But Kotek said she is confident the state would not run into those problems this time because she is largely proposing big increases in funding for existing programs. The governor said she is focused on asking people in state government, “‘How do we operationalize that? Do you have the capacity? Do you have what you need to do that?’ … I’ve been asking this every single day because it does no good to invest money if you can’t actually deliver the product. ” Kotek is also proposing to give a brand-new state agency, the Department of Early Learning and Care, $90 million more than it needs to keep up its current programs and services. As part of that, she proposes to do warm-and-fuzzy things, including expand access to daycare for low-income working parents and increase payments to preschool providers to lower class sizes and expand availability of transportation. But she also wants to take less flashy back-end actions to try to ensure state government performs, steps her predecessor sometimes failed to take. Kotek proposes hiring seven quality assurance workers to check that programs operate effectively. And in response to the Early Learning Division’s struggles at expanding its Preschool Promise program last year amid understaffing, she proposes adding 13 agency staffers “to bolster operational capacity in human resources, accounting, compliance, payroll and other administrative service functions. ” Under Brown’s leadership, state agencies experienced high-profile dysfunction and failures to deliver services, from months-long pandemic jobless benefits delays and problems distributing rent assistance to state leaders’ decision to move back the launch of Oregon’s paid family and medical leave program. Although Kotek promised to increase accountability in state government, she is keeping some top Brown staffers including Brown’s former deputy chiefs of staff Andrea Cooper, now Kotek’s chief of staff, and Berri Leslie, now the interim director of the Department of Administrative Services. In her first week in office, Kotek sent a to agency directors mandating among other things that managers check in with 90% of workers quarterly. Brown signed labor agreements with public employee unions eliminating annual performance reviews for state workers and making it more difficult for state government to get rid of poor performers. In the place of annual performance reviews, Brown adopted quarterly check-ins with employees but figures provided by the state’s administrative department reveal that state managers across many agencies failed to complete those check-ins. As of January when managers were supposed to complete their first check-ins of 2023, Oregon Health Authority managers had only completed check-ins with 50% of workers and the Department of Corrections was at 49%. Kotek declined to say whether she would push for Oregon to resume conducting annual performance reviews and allow poor performance to factor into decisions about a state worker’s continued employment. “I don’t know anything about that policy,” Kotek said. “Let me do a little research and let’s come back to it. ” She does plan to implement biannual reviews for agency directors, something Oregon has not done for years. Kotek has also promised to visit all 36 counties this year to hear from Oregonians across the state. She began her tour with stops in Yamhill and Douglas counties. Kotek is already in negotiations with public employee unions for contracts that will determine not only how the state handles performance reviews but also how much workers receive in cost of living and other raises. Service Employees International Union Local 503, to Kotek’s campaign, opened with an initial ask for 20% cost of living pay increases spread over the next two years plus a $1 pay differential for workers who come into the office. Pati Urias, spokesperson for the union, said “in-person workers with no option to telework tend to be at the lower end of the pay scale and experience financial strain paying for costs associated with going to work, such as paying for gas and child care. ” Oregon’s administrative agency conducts surveys of salary and benefits to determine whether the state offers but this year the state has yet to publish the report, which in prior years was completed as early as December. The governor wants lawmakers to set aside $515 million for salary and benefits cost increases, recruitment and retention bonuses and unionized private sector home care and personal support workers, according to her . That is significantly higher than the $350 million that state suggested the state might need to spend on pay raises late last year. Not long after Kotek’s spending proposal was finalized, she replaced the state’s budget official who led the work, Chief Financial Officer George Naughton, who served under previous Democratic governors. It was a surprise move during the legislative session when budget writers are starting to zero in on spending plans. In February, Steve Marks, the longtime executive director of the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission, also resigned from his job, shortly that an internal investigation at the agency last year found top officials, including Marks, for their own use or for use as gifts. Kotek had already asked Marks to resign before the scandal was reported publicly. “There’s obviously been some hiccups with the administration with departures of key staff,” said Shawn Cleave, a partner at public affairs and lobbying firm Pilot Strategies who worked as a House Republican staffer and on Chris Dudley’s 2010 campaign for governor. Some of that turnover reflects a governor’s prerogative to pick their high-level staff and is normal, Cleave said. “Those things happen. We have yet to see exactly what her executive staff is going to do. ” Anna Richter Taylor, who worked as a top aide to former Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski and now owns a public affairs business, said Kotek’s focus so far on following through on her campaign platform stands out. “She’s very consistent and disciplined on that,” Richter Taylor said. “The learning curve is how to accomplish those priorities while also being a good executive on the other issues you don’t anticipate because you really can’t know the extent of the governor’s job until you’re the governor. ” ­ — Hillary Borrud;.