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Triz delaRosa, left, speaks with former Cover Oregon executive director Rocky King and Amy Fauver, the exchange's communications director in March 2013.
(Michael Lloyd/The Oregonian)
Gov. John Kitzhaber has defended his handling of the
debacle by noting that he engaged in "cleaning our own house," including holding three officials "accountable" after the health insurance exchange website did not work.
But newly released records reveal that one of those three, Triz delaRosa of Cover Oregon, didn't go quietly.
After Kitzhaber called for delaRosa, the exchange's chief operating officer, to be fired
, she warned the state she'd sue if she was fired, according to documents obtained under Oregon's public records law. She
for the exchange fiasco on Oregon Health Authority mismanagement, as well as Kitzhaber's staff, for failing to confront problems Cover Oregon reported after taking over the project in May 2013.
As a result, delaRosa received a $67,714.90
and continued drawing a salary through May 16. In return, she agreed to say nothing negative about the state.
In Kitzhaber's March 20 house-cleaning press conference, he announced he'd accepted the resignation of OHA director Bruce Goldberg and urged the Cover Oregon board to fire delaRosa and Aaron Karjala, the exchange's information technology manager.
Karjala resigned March 31. But delaRosa would not go so easily. She wrote in an April 7 letter to Goldberg, who was serving as interim exchange director: "I am not willing to be the scapegoat for these problems nor to see my reputation publicly harmed as has occurred to Aaron and others."
She wrote that resignations by people such as Karjala and Goldberg, "provided plausible political cover for the Governor's office" but said the exchange crisis was "enhanced" by the failure of Kitzhaber's staff to confront problems reported to them by Cover Oregon staff.
She negotiated a settlement with the state on April 22. The eight-page settlement includes a reminder that she'd signed a confidentiality agreement about Cover Oregon business. She also agreed to "not make disparaging public statements to news media outlets" about the state. Cover Oregon agreed to provide a neutral job reference.
Kitzhaber's spokeswoman declined to comment on the settlement or delaRosa's letter. In a May 29 interview, asked what the letter resulted in, delaRosa responded that it led to the May 16 resignation date. "They communicated with me my fate," she said. "At least I knew that May 16 was my day."
In a May 29 speech to a legislative committee, Kitzhaber said his house cleaning led to holding accountable "those within the Oregon Health Authority and those in Cover Oregon whose decisions contributed to the failure to deliver a website that worked."
In interviews and in her letter, delaRosa defended her job performance, saying fault for the debacle lay with the main technology vendor, Oracle Corp., as well as OHA, the agency tasked with building the exchange.
DelaRosa's style raised eyebrows on at least one occasion. In August, with the launch of the exchange just six weeks away, she received an e-mail from Bob Cummings, legislative information technology oversight analyst, asking about plans to go live, as well as fallback plans such as manual enrollment if the site didn't work.
"Bob, I will try to make this simple," she wrote. "We will be ready to do business on everything, manual or automated."
Cummings and his counterpart in the executive branch, Ying Kwong, didn't believe it – and were proven right when the website never worked as planned. The site's failure triggered a belated manual enrollment process that cost millions and itself was plagued with errors and delays.
--Nick Budnick