Salem Mayor Julie Hoy lied about a majority of the city council wanting the City Manager to resign. Actually, only Hoy did.

A recently concluded ethics investigation found that the Mayor of Salem, Julie Hoy, violated our state’s Public Meetings Law in February 2025 when she orchestrated a private series of individual conversations with city councilors about whether the City Manager at the time, Keith Stahley, should resign.

That was bad. But this is worse: Julie Hoy lied when she told the city council president, Linda Nishioka, that her conversations revealed that a majority of the city council (at least five of the eight members; one seat was vacant at the time) wanted Stahley to resign.

At the request of Mayor Hoy, on February 7 Councilor Nishioka met with Stahley and told him that a majority of the city council wanted him to resign. On February 9 he did, saying in his resignation letter:

I understand the desire of the Mayor and Council to move forward and have a fresh start. I hope that my resignation per Section 14: Severance (b) (3) of my contract will help to facilitate that.

I am submitting this resignation based on a meeting that I had with Councilor Nishioka on Friday February 7, 2025, where she represented that she was the duly authorized representative of the Mayor and a majority of City Council and requested that I tender my resignation. 

Sadly, and unfortunately, both Nishioka and Stahley assumed that what Hoy had told Nishioka was the truth. It wasn’t.

The investigation by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission revealed that actually none of the seven city councilors — zero, zilch, nada — had told Mayor Hoy that they wanted Stahley to resign. Hoy was the only one of the eight city council members who wanted this. That’s a long way from the majority of five that Hoy told Nishioka wanted Stahley to resign.

This was an obvious lie.

An error, mistake, or misstatement is when someone wrongly believes something to be true, but it actually isn’t. But Mayor Julie Hoy clearly lied. After all she conducted most of her conversations with city councilors between February 1-6. This is part of the timeline produced by the ethics commission investigator. (The # references pertain to investigative sources such as texts , emails, documents, and such.)

February 6, 2025 (Thursday) – Hoy/Nishioka
Linda Nishioka speaks to Julie Hoy over the phone. They talk about the leadership audit and Hoy informs Nishioka that a majority of the City Councilors wanted Keith Stahley to resign. (#IR9, #IR10).

Either February 5, 2025 or February 6, 2025
Linda Nishioka speaks with City Attorney Dan Atchison, asking if she can contact the other City Councilors to verify that they want Keith Stahley to resign. Atchison tells Nishioka not to contact the other Councilors and he tells her not to use the term “majority.” He tells her to use the term “general consensus” instead. (#IR11).

February 7, 2025 (Friday)
Linda Nishioka meets with Keith Stahley and asks him to consider submitting a letter of resignation. Nishioka states that she wanted to inform Stahley what she was told by Hoy – that a majority of the Council wanted him to resign. Nishioka suggests that Stahley speaks with his family about the matter. (#IR12).

February 9, 2025 (Sunday)
Keith Stahley submits his resignation letter which states that Linda Nishioka “represented that she was the duly authorized representative of the Mayor and a majority of the City Council and requested that I tender my resignation.” (#PR3).

What Hoy did deeply angers me.

When I submitted my complaint to the Oregon Government Ethics Commission about Mayor Hoy’s use of prohibited “serial communications” to orchestrate the City Manager’s resignation, I didn’t know exactly how many city councilors had spoken with Hoy about Stahley, because City Attorney Atchison told them not to respond to the emails I sent out simply asking if they’d spoken with Hoy prior to Stahley’s resignation.

(By the way, Atchison told Mayor Hoy that her conversations with individual city council members were legal, which, of course, they weren’t. As noted in the timeline above, Atchison somehow soon after told Councilor Nishioka that she couldn’t contact other councilors to verify that they wanted Stahley to resign — as Mayor Hoy told Nishioka through her illegal conversations with city councilors that City Attorney Atchison had told Hoy were fine. Thus Atchison gave the go-ahead to bad behavior by Hoy, and prevented Nishioka from doing the right thing by verifying the truthfulness of what Hoy had told Nishioka about a majority of the city council wanting Stahley to resign. Lesson: don’t always trust City Attorney Dan Atchison.)

Now we know from the ethics commission investigation that Hoy spoke with six of the seven councilors. Hoy claims all eight, but the investigator found that Councilor Brown “was not an active participant in the above-referenced communications.” So since it is clear that Hoy wanted Stahley to resign, this means that four of the six councilors Hoy spoke with must have wanted Stahley to resign in order for Hoy’s assertion to be true that a majority of the council members wanted Stahley to resign. (The Mayor is a city council member, so she needed her “vote” plus four others.)

Again, the actual number is zero. Here’s excerpts from the ” name of councilor Participation” section of the seven city councilor PDF files sent to me by the ethics commission investigator, since I was one of the two people who filed a complaint against Mayor Hoy’s actions regarding Keith Stahley’s resignation.

Linda Nishioka’s Participation
…On February 6, 2025, Julie Hoy spoke with Linda Nishioka on the phone. They discussed the leadership audit and Julie Hoy informed her that a majority of the City Councilors wanted Keith Stahley to resign. [#IR9, #IR10]. After her conversation with Julie Hoy, Linda Nishioka met with City Attorney Dan Atchison to ask if she could verify the information she heard from Julie Hoy by asking the other City Councilors directly. Dan Atchison told Linda Nishioka not to contact the other City Councilors about the matter to avoid a serial meeting. [#IR11].

Deanna Gwyn’s Participation
Between February 1st through 6th, Julie Hoy called Deanna Gwyn to speak about the leadership audit and Keith Stahley’s performance as City Manager. Deanna Gwyn stated that when Julie Hoy told her that Keith Stahley might be tendering his resignation, she expressed her surprise but did not give her opinion on the matter.

Vanessa Nordyke’s Participation
Vanessa Nordyke met with Julie Hoy in-person on February 3, 2025 to speak about the City’s leadership audit and Keith Stahley’s performance as City Manager. During this conversation, Julie Hoy expressed that she wanted Keith Stahley to resign, and Vanessa Nordyke stated that she did not believe his resignation was necessary. Vanessa Nordyke suggested postponing any action until after the levy election. [#IR8,#IR19].

Micki Varney’s Participation
Micki Varney spoke with Julie Hoy on February 2, 2025 about the City’s leadership audit and Keith Stahley’s performance as City Manager. During this conversation, Micki Varney asked Julie Hoy if Keith Stahley would be terminated as a result of the audit. Micki Varney stated that she had a lot of concerns that should be discussed with the City Council when the audit was released. She also told Julie Hoy that she needed more information before making a decision about Keith Stahley’s employment, but she suggested placing him on administrative leave while the City Council worked toward a resolution. [#IR4].

Irvin Brown’s Participation
Irving Brown was not an active participant in the above-referenced communications. Julie Hoy stated that she had a conversation with Irvin Brown to speak about the leadership audit and Keith Stahley’s performance as City Manager sometime between February 1st and February 6th. [#IR2]. Irvin Brown does not recall a conversation with Julie Hoy at the beginning of February, but he remembered a conversation with her about the leadership audit at the beginning of January. Irvin Brown stated that he did not give his opinion about Keith Stahley’s employment or resignation during this conversation. [#IR7].

Shane Matthews’ Participation
Between February 1st and February 6th, Julie Hoy had a conversation with Shane Matthews to discuss the City’s leadership audit and Keith Stahley’s performance as City Manager. Julie Hoy told Shane Matthews that she had been speaking with the other Councilors about the matters. During that conversation, Shane Matthews told Julie Hoy that he did not have enough time to form an opinion. [#IR6].

Paul Tigan’s Participation
The information provided indicates that Julie Hoy called Paul Tigan on February 1, 2025, and informed him that she believed it was time for Keith Stahley “to go.” Paul Tigan told Julie Hoy that he had not read the leadership audit yet and had not formed an opinion onthe matter. [#IR3].

So there’s no indication that any of the seven city councilors favored Keith Stahley’s resignation at the time Mayor Hoy spoke with them. This means that Hoy lied when she told Councilor Nishioka that a majority of the city council wanted Stahley to resign. Hearing that lie, Stahley did resign. That led to a major disruption in both the life of Stahley and his family, and in the workings of the City of Salem. The City was forced to pay a large amount of money to Stahley. A Statesman Journal story about the ethics commission investigation says:

Stahley submitted his resignation letter Feb. 9. Per the terms of his contract, Stahley received a total of eight months’ severance and a payout of accrued leave for a sum of $255,845.

All because of Mayor Hoy’s lie.

Now, a perplexing portion of the investigative report on Mayor Hoy says:

There is evidence that a quorum of the Council decided to request the resignation of the City Manager, that request was communicated by Councilor Nishioka, and the City Manager acknowledged in his resignation letter that the request for him to resign came from a majority of Council.

Perplexing, because the only evidence that a quorum, or majority, of the city council decided to request Stahley’s resignation is the assertion by Mayor Hoy that this is what a majority of the city council said in her conversations with them. But as I shared above, the ethics commission investigator’s interviews with all seven councilors show that none of them said they told Hoy that they wanted Stahley to resign.

Is it possible that some of all of the city councilors are lying? Well, it is possible, but exceedingly unlikely. This would require a degree of coordination between the councilors for which there is no evidence. My strong suspicion is that when the investigator says “there is evidence…” he is speaking of Hoy’s assertion to Nishioka that a majority of the council wanted the City Manager to resign, which Nishioka passed on to Stahley, and which Stahley referenced in his resignation letter.

So all of that supposed “evidence” traces back to Mayor Hoy’s lie. Which is why I don’t consider it evidence, given the statements all seven city councilors gave to the investigator.

Lastly, I’ll just briefly mention another perplexing part of this fiasco, as it possibly deserves another blog post, and this one is getting really long. The Salem City Council accepted the resignation of Stahley on February 10, one day after he resigned on February 9. An executive session was held which is closed to the public, and journalists can’t divulge what went on there.

It’s hard to understand how the city council could accept his resignation when the only member of the council who wanted Stahley to resign was Mayor Hoy. This is just a guess on my part, but I suspect that the councilors took the easy way out by accepting his resignation. After all, at the time they weren’t sure if a majority of the city council really did tell Hoy that Stahley should resign. Or course, all they had to do to check on this was have a show of hands in the executive session.

As I noted in my ethics commission complaint, the City of Salem’s response to my “grievance” (ethics complaint) included this: “…the City Council voted to accept the resignation and deem that it was made at the request of Council.”

Thus some sort of game was being played by the city council. The nature of that game is hidden under the covering of the executive session. Somehow the official position of the City of Salem is that (1) the City Council voted to accept Stahley’s resignation, (2) Stahley’s resignation is “deemed” to be made at the request of the city council, and (3) that request is not intended to suggest that the City Council collectively asked for Stahley’s resignation.

Huh? (2) and (3) are highly confusing. Somehow the City Council “deemed” that it requested Stahley to resign, but at the same time this doesn’t suggest that the City Council asked for his resignation. I suspect that the city councilors just wanted to sweep this whole Hoy-Stahley mess under the rug with some confusing verbiage and hope that it wouldn’t be uncovered. But it was, thanks to the complaints filed by me and another person, and the ensuing ethics commission investigation.

The unanswered political question is how Mayor Julie Hoy’s violation of Public Meeting Law, and her evident lie about whether a majority of the city council wanted the City Manager to resign, will affect her re-election campaign against Councilor Vanessa Nordyke. Since I helped bring Hoy’s actions to light, I’m hoping Salem voters will consider what Hoy did — the bad and the worse, as I noted at the beginning of this post — when they cast their ballots in the May 2026 election.