Chuck Sheketoff: Watching out for Oregon’s working families

By Matt Day

Chuck Sheketoff’s professional life has been spent working for those in need. 

The idea of social justice propelled the Silverton resident from his New England roots, to Midwest coal-mining communities, to Oregon courtrooms and statehouse corridors. Now he works from a second-floor Silverton office, advocating for a fairer tax policy for Oregonians.

Sheketoff’s Oregon Center for Public Policy, a nonpartisan research and lobbying group, has published more than 100 reports since 1997 on government economic policy and its effects on Oregonians. The center’s findings have been cited in countless media reports and have been brought up on the floor of the State Legislature.  

What makes OCPP unique in the realm of state lobbying groups is that it isn’t headquartered in Salem or Portland. The Oregon Center for Public Policy began its work out of Sheketoff’s Silverton basement.  

OCPP was incorporated in 1995. At the time it was only a name and a vision in search of funding. The center’s board of directors, a group composed largely of high profile state activists, educators, business owners and advocates for nonprofit groups, spent two years working to secure a grant to formally begin operations. 

Sheketoff spent Christmas 1996 working on a three-page paper, “basically on why I’m a good person and [the center] is a good idea,” he said. 

The preparation paid off. Sheketoff flew to Washington, D.C. in March 1997 for an interview with the Stern Family Fund, a foundation that provided startup money for government and corporate accountability projects. 

“I flew in Friday, interviewed on Saturday and came back to Portland on Sunday.”  The following Wednesday, he received an email saying the center had been awarded $100,000 a year for two years.  

“Call it one of those life-changing emails,” Sheketoff said. The sum was enough to allow him to focus full time on the center. He gave notice at his day job at the Oregon Law Center and the Oregon Center for Public Policy was in operation by September.  

“The board strongly preferred that we be located in either Silverton or Salem,” Sheketoff said.  “It was important to be tied to the seat of government and not to be just another Portland group.”

The board ultimately decided the center should run in Silverton, and initially it kept the overhead low by operating out of Sheketoff’s home. 

He wrote the first report issued by the center, an assessment of the effects of federal welfare reform on Oregonians, in October 1997.  

One of its latest reports, on the state of working Oregon 2008-2009, was issued in December. Rolling Up Our Sleeves, Building an Oregon that Works for Working Families is full of graphs, statistics, analysis and source notes, reflecting  OCPP’s identity statement: “Because facts matter.”

OCPP was not Sheketoff’s first foray in to social and economic justice. In high school the Connecticut native was involved in a program tutoring disadvantaged students. While attending college at the University of Vermont he worked with the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, which hired him after he graduated in 1977.  

“My interest in social justice work probably comes from my family and upbringing – values my parents instilled in me to work for a better world,” Sheketoff said. 

His commitment continued after he left New England. In 1979 he moved to Illinois to work with a social development group working in coal-mining communities.  

Sheketoff’s career in Oregon began when he decided to go back to school. He said much of the work he had been doing since college required the use of lawyers, and “I thought it would be nice to do it myself. I’ve always seen law as a tool to accomplish social change.” 

“People advised me to go to a law school where you’d like to practice,” Sheketoff said.  At the time, the University of Oregon had the only black dean of a predominantly white law school, which he said factored into his decision. “Eugene was a nice place to spend three miserable years,” he said.  

After graduation, Sheketoff put his law degree to work for Marion Polk Legal Aid.  “I worked primarily on getting people public benefits, dealing with custody disputes, basically civil legal work for people who couldn’t pay,” he said.

His career path shifted from a courtroom to a lobbying role in 1992 when he took a job in Multnomah County Legal Aid. Sheketoff was one of two lobbyists statewide who campaigned for the disadvantaged on economic and legal issues in Salem and Portland. 

It was while working for Multnomah Legal Aid that Sheketoff said he first noticed inadequacies of the research into government economic policy. Law and policymakers, he found, were making judgments based on limited or biased information. Sheketoff said the void was intensified by the closure of the University of Oregon’s Bureau of Government Research and a partisan turn by the Oregon Tax Research Center.  

“We needed to have our own research capacity,” he said.  “People who care about low-income Oregonians needed to have our own analysis capacity. We had become too dependent on state data.”  

Around the same time, changes were in the works with regard to the structure of Oregon’s tax policy. With the passage of Ballot Measure 5 in 1990 and the resulting cap on property-tax increases, the State Legislature was about to take a more influential role in determining Oregon’s economic policy, especially on public education.

“Measure 5 … really threw the state fiscal situation into a new ball game and my boss knew that no matter how well [then-governor] Barbara Roberts’ anticipated special session in 1992 went, that tax policy would be more important,” Sheketoff said. 

Six years after Roberts’ special session, OCPP was established and helping to fill the void in economic research and analysis.

The operation moved out of Sheketoff’s basement and into a room on the second floor the Silverton Realty building downtown and hired an office manager in 1998. Over the next two years, the center brought on two policy analysts and by 2007 the staff had expanded to eight people occupying a four-room suite. 

With three full-time policy analysts on staff, Sheketoff said his role at OCPP has changed from lobbying to administrative work.  “More administrative stuff than my general nature likes to do,” he said. “We’re 11 years old, operationally. The organization isn’t me. It’s bigger than me. Our policy analysts are increasingly more known in the circles we work with.

“It’s still fun.” 

As for the Silverton location, Sheketoff said it has been a positive for the center. “It is far enough that we don’t go to the capitol at the drop of a hat, it can be a black hole.” 

In an age in which legislative committee hearings are broadcast online and most research can be accomplished with tools available on the Internet, he is confident that OCPP isn’t handicapped by its distance from Salem.  

“Subsequent board members have agreed that our location works to our advantage,” he said.