Some Travel Errata, Briefly

Note: I founded Celebrate Oregon Beer and serve as its part-time Executive Director. A component of our mission involves promoting travel to the state, and we hope to work with Travel Oregon and its regional and local DMOs to sing Oregon’s praises. The other part of my work is writing about the beer industry, and today they crash into each other; this post is in part an effort at transparency.

Portland’s alt-weekly Willamette Week published a big piece last week about Travel Oregon, our quasi-independent, tax-funded travel commission. I spoke to and was quoted by reporter James Neff—more on that presently. The story is quite a banger, and if you’re curious about how travel promotion happens in the state, give it a read.

One of Neff’s main findings was that executive director Todd Davidson had a base salary of $365k, and thanks to some Covid-era compensation, took home nearly half a million in 2024. Apparently Neff’s reporting was sufficiently probing that Davidson announced he was retiring just before the article came out—after declining to be interviewed for the piece. And it may have been time: he had been the E.D. there for thirty years.

Travel Oregon has an astounding budget—$92.3 million in the current biennium [an earlier version listed this as an annual figure—I regret the error]. They have a dedicated funding stream that comes from a 1.5% tax on hotel stays in the state (the “transient lodging tax”). Neff argues that the commission has some problems, including the lax oversight that allowed Davidson’s salary to rise so high (“far higher than that earned by state agency directors who run vastly larger, essential service operations, such as the Oregon Department of Transportation or the Department of Human Services”). You can read the article to see if you think he’s right. I wanted to make a correction and a comment on my part in the story.

The correction is in the text, where Neff quotes me saying “We’re [Oregon] akin to Bavaria in the Czech Republic.” That should be and rather than in. I am getting old and forgetful, but I haven’t yet started to confuse these countries.

I assumed Neff would contact a bunch of folks who would comment about how well Travel Oregon was promoting different industries. It turns out I was the only critic on that dimension of the article. It’s possible Travel Oregon is killing it with other industries; the state is also famous for its wine, coffee, cuisine, and agricultural and natural resource plenty, not to mention its non-industrial and amazing outdoor activities. Neff quoted folks who said it was great, and I have no reason to argue with them.

In terms of making the case that Oregon is a unique and special place for beer in the US, with a deeper culture and history than you’ll find anywhere else, not so much. Travel Oregon’s brewery information is out of date and sparse, and the map is even more out of date and inaccurate. Those deficits are a big part of the reason I wanted to create Celebrate Oregon Beer. Since I was really the main critic, I just wanted to heavily caveat my comments to say they only applied to beer.