Labor Day Letter to OPRD Director Sumption
Director Sumption,
On this Labor Day, I write to you because the choices have been yours from the beginning, and they remain yours today. You may route this letter to counsel and tell yourself the matter has left your hands. It has not. It never has. Every choice in this record was made under your authority, and the next one also will be.
You are the first woman to lead Oregon's Parks and Recreation Department. For more than a decade, you have been its Director. You sit on national boards. Your peers gave you a distinguished service award and praised your focus on transparency, trust, and welcoming. And today, you must answer for the culture you built underneath the praise: the culture that exploits free labor.
I see your institution's strategy. I have seen it from the beginning, because it has only ever been one thing: wait. Wait for the letters to stop, wait for the person to make a mistake, wait for the man with no salary and no lawyer to run out of whatever keeps him going. Route what can be routed, ignore what can be ignored, characterize what cannot be ignored, use state power to scare him, and wait.
So look at the ledger of how that has gone.
You sat me down at a picnic table and told me to chew glass and swallow it. I documented it. You sent a man to covertly interrogate me while you were conveniently away. I marked him the day he came, and your cover story for him fell apart a year later when I met him again on a Forest Service trail. You called me on the phone to ambush me with another abusive meeting. I called you a bully. You dismissed me without process. I moved next door, where I built a life out of the displacement you tried to force on me. You expelled me in writing and named my speech as the reason. That letter foreclosed the possibility of repair in exchange for everything that followed. You closed communication with a letter that assigned me feelings instead of addressing evidence. I built the archive from seven dollars and you will never take it down. Your Emergency Manager reported my letters to the police. That referral produced your state's own file, and the file proves what followed: a press captain ordered a threat assessment over publicity; detectives reviewed my archive, found nothing, and came anyway; officers gathered satellite screenshots marking my home and my workplace, reaching into my standing with a second institution where they did not belong; my supervisor there was told to conceal it from me; and the stated basis for all of it was "publicly airing grievances." The police withheld the record; withholding produced an Attorney General petition, a fee refund, and a production. The visit itself produced a tort claim in which you are named in your individual capacity.
Seventeen months of escalation, and every single act became evidence. You have never taken an action against me that did not make the record stronger. It was never going to go another way. That is what happens when one side documents and the other side reaches for power.
Now look at who is still standing where I stood.
Your parks run on volunteers. They clean the facilities, maintain the trails, meet the visitors, and hold the ground you cannot staff. Many of them live on the land they steward. The position is their housing. The position is their community. And they serve with no union, no human resources access, no grievance process, no appeal, no progressive discipline, and no requirement that a reason ever be given. A supervisor's account of them is the only account, and there is no mechanism by which it can be questioned. When this happened to me, there was no one I could turn to, so I pressed record. Every volunteer in your system is serving this morning under exactly the conditions that produced this record. You know that, because you built this culture with every silence to me and every other volunteer you have ignored. You are its steward. You are responsible.
And the violation is not history. It is ongoing. The bar you maintain is enforced every morning. Each day it stands is a new act, by officials on written notice, and the count is published. Courts recognize the loss of those freedoms for even minimal periods as irreparable injury as a matter of law, and you have permitted it to go on for more than a year. Nor does the case run on my money. It runs on 42 U.S.C. §1988: a constitutional lawyer needs confidence in the merits, and your institution spent two years manufacturing it before handing me the proof in your own records. Everything in this record was built while my attention was pointed elsewhere. It has not yet turned to finding counsel. Every month you wait, the file gets better organized and easier to take on contingency. And the records clocks run on statutes, not on my energy. Time is not your shelter. It is the cage you built with each choice you made about me.
So here are your remaining options, all of them.
You can continue the silence. The register grows, the counter runs, and every day is documented. You can fight it in court, where your own production is the exhibit list, your employees are individual defendants, and if I prevail the state pays my attorney.
You can buy the case. I would let you. What you cannot buy is the record. It will not be sealed, redacted, or quieted at any price. It is not yours to buy. It is not mine to sell. It exists for the next volunteer standing where I stood. I will not allow you to hide what you did, and I will keep showing what your institutional process is, in public, for as long as this is what it is.
Or you can tell the truth. The price has been the same since the first email, and it has never changed: if you tell the truth, I document it, and I move on. Acknowledge what was done: the dismissal without process, the expulsion for speech, the referral, the visit. Withdraw the bar. And build what should have existed before I ever arrived: a real process that protects your volunteers. Written standards. Notice. A hearing before removal from the ground a person lives on. An appeal that reaches someone other than the supervisor whose account is in question. Protection from retaliation for documentation. The ordinary machinery of fairness your agency extends to every employee and has never once extended to the people who make your parks possible.
And there is one other. You can reach for power again.
Every option above is a choice, and every one of them is yours. If they are not -- if you have truly handed them to counsel, to process, to hope or to fate -- then answer a simpler question first: what are you still doing in that chair?
Respectfully,
Robert Samuel White
P.O. Box 334
Reedsport, Oregon 97467
rsw@rswfire.com
https://oprdvolunteerabuse.org
──────────────────────────────────────────────
FOR THE RECORD
This is a letter Robert Samuel White sent to Lisa Sumption, Director of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. It went through three versions, each sent to the full recipient list: the original on September 5, 2026, a revision (v1.1) on September 6, and the final (v1.2) on Labor Day, September 7, 2026. The text below is v1.2, the final version as sent. It was copied to the four line staff involved in his dismissal, Deputy Director J.R. Collier, the OPRD Commission, the Governor's office, the Kotek campaign, DAS Risk Management (claim P195403), and OSP Risk; the final version added District Ranger Michele Holman of the U.S. Forest Service.
It was written two days after Oregon State Police produced its file on him under public records request PR27478 — a production that established, in the state's own documents, that the March 24, 2026 police visit to his residence originated at OPRD as a publicity referral over his letters reaching the Governor, that a threat assessment was ordered by the captain of Government and Media Relations, that officers found no threat and no crime before they came, and that the stated basis was "publicly airing grievances." A tort claim notice under ORS 30.275 had been served on September 3. The statewide volunteer ban imposed in March 2025 remained in force.
The letter is the first time he laid the institution's full position out to its face: naming the waiting strategy, showing that every escalation became evidence, closing the exits (silence, litigation, a quiet settlement), and stating the only condition on which he stops — the truth, an end to the bar, and a real process for the volunteers who come after him. It is addressed to the Director because the choices have been hers throughout.
