She got the gold mine, we got the shaft

The story of paying Portland-area bureaucrats obscene amounts of money to leave their public jobs and not say anything about what went on behind closed doors got quite a bit weirder last Friday afternoon with this story in the Weed, which has already been buried:

On Aug. 7, Oregon Health & Science University made an abrupt internal announcement: Its chief lawyer, Alice Cuprill Comas, would be retiring that very day. She had been on family leave for weeks, OHSU said, and felt the need to turn her full attention to the health of an ailing parent.

But there was an additional dynamic at play between OHSU and Cuprill Comas that the medical center did not publicize or answer questions about at the time: an exit agreement in which OHSU agreed to say nice things about her—and pay her $1.8 million in severance pay.

The document, dated Aug. 7 and titled “Resignation Agreement and Mutual General Release,” turns out to have been significant. In the agreement, obtained Thursday by WW through a public records request, OHSU agreed to pay Cuprill Comas $1,791,990.36—the equivalent of 24 months’ base pay—plus an additional $20,250, while she agreed not to file legal claims against the institution....

The nine-page document included agreed-upon language that OHSU would “exclusively” use in communications about Cuprill Comas’ separation from employment—whether OHSU was speaking with the press, faculty, students, donors or trustees.

The form statement it would use when characterizing the separation is Exhibit A in the agreement, and a version of it was indeed used in OHSU’s Aug. 7 internal announcement of Cuprill Comas’s retirement.

There really ought to be a law against this sort of thing. But it's pretty clear that the politicians in Oregon are never going to pass one. I guess the only answer would be a ballot initiative. Add it to the long list.

As for OHSU, well, the management up there has gotten so bad that it's really past time to start talking about breaking the institution up and radically reorganizing it. In the short term, the directors or trustees or whatever all need to "retire" – without a severance,