Tort Claim Notice Filed by Sheriff’s Candidate Sergeant Kent Vander Kamp

5 min readSep 5, 2024

We can report that Sheriff’s Candidate and Sergeant Kent Vander Kamp has filed a tort claim notice against the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office.

For those wishing to immediately read Vander Kamp’s tort claim notice we provide the following link:

“Sergeant Kent Vander Kamp Tort Claim Notice”

Reading Vander Kamp’s allegations paints a picture of a Command Staff certain members of which are clearly out of control and dead set on getting Captain William Bailey elected as the next Sheriff regardless of cost to the taxpayer, the reputation of the Sheriff’s Office or the well being of their employees.

Some of Vander Kamp’s numerous allegations include:

A DCSO employee told Vander Kamp that they were questioned about their friendship with Vander Kamp and if Vander Kamp was responsible for the DCSO Follies Facebook page. The DCSO employee also told Vander Kamp that Sheriff Nelson is planning to “burden [Vander Kamp] with an administrative albatross” as punishment for running for Sheriff against Bailey.
William Bailey headed an all-supervisor meeting at Sheriff’s Office Headquarters in Bend. During this meeting, Bailey talked about DCSO Follies. Bailey ordered the supervisors that they were not allowed to look at DCSO Follies on or off duty and its content should not be discussed at anytime. Vander Kamp claims that he and many other Sheriff’s Office members and supervisors were shocked that Bailey and the Sheriff’s Office were trying to control what they did on their own time
William Bailey called other Sheriff’s Office members, including Sergeant James McLaughlin, to inquire about an incident that had occurred (we believe this might have been incident where an individual shot at the Sheriff’s Office Jail). Vander Kamp says in his claim that he believes Bailey was trying to create a false narrative and storyline against him. As well, he believes that Bailey was trying to get Sheriff’s Office member’s support and threatening them with discipline if they did not pledge support
Bend Police Department Lieutenant Michael Landolt — who works at the Central Oregon Drug Enforcement (CODE) with Vander Kamp — told Vander Kamp that Landolt had been told by then Captain Paul Garrison that Sheriff Nelson didn’t want Vander Kamp writing CODE press releases anymore. Vander Kamp believes this was done to prevent him from interacting with the public in order to reduce his exposure to voters and thereby harming his campaign for Sheriff.
In yet another incident, Lieutenant Landolt told Vander Kamp that Garrison was inquiring about who and how CODE Team presentations are made to the public. In particular, Garrison asked if Lieutenants should be the only CODE management that does presentations. Landolt told Vander Kamp it was clear that the Sheriff’s Office didn’t want Vander Kamp to make any presentations to the public to limit Vander Kamp’s pre-election public exposure
A Sheriff’s Office member told Vander Kamp that the feeling of the Sheriff’s Office administration had changed. Vander Kamp was warned that Bailey and Garrison had a personal vendetta against Vander Kamp because of Vander Kamp’s other off-duty businesses and thought that someone should look into Vander Kamp’s businesses. Additionally, Vander Kamp was informed about the following: (1) Garrison is working on investigating Vander Kamp. On information and belief, Vander Kamp believe Garrison does not like Vander Kamp. Our suspicion is that this may be because Garrison’s wife is a real estate agent and one of Vander Kamp’s businesses successfully competed with hers. This is speculation on our part. (2) A golf cart being paid for on behalf of Bailey at the Deschutes County Fair. DCSO would pay for them on the backend by reducing staffing charges to the fair. This conversation took place with the Fair Director Geoff Hinds. (3) Sheriff Nelson admitted that Sheriff Nelson was publicly campaigning for Bailey at the fair while on duty. Sheriff Nelson carries business cards from the Bailey for Sheriff campaign in his pocket

The above are just a few of the many allegations in Vander Kamp’s tort claim notice

We believe Vander Kamp’s allegations against Captain Bailey, Undersheriff Paul Garrison and Sheriff Shane Nelson do in fact paint a picture of the three men collaborating and using the power and purse of the Sheriff’s Office to further their own personal agendas and goals.

Vander Kamp’s tort claim notice demonstrates that there is clearly something terribly wrong at the highest levels of the Sheriff’s Office leadership. As we have previously said, the evidence is incontrovertible, overwhelming and frankly damning.

This all follows on the heals of the tort claim notices recently filed by Sergeant James McLaughlin, Sergeant Jay Minton and Deputy Matthew Palmer. We have provided links to their tort claim notices below.

When taken collectively, we believe the allegations of these four men are simply overwhelming and to our minds paint an utterly devastating picture of a corrupt leadership team that has completely lost its moral compass and its sense of right from wrong.

Unfortunately due to the actions of men such like William Bailey, Paul Garrison and Shane Nelson, it is quite likely that Deschutes County will once again be exposed to substantial financial risk amounting to many millions of dollars.

In our article “No Taxpayer Funds for Sheriff’s Office Leadership’s Legal Expenses” (linked below), we wrote extensively about two Oregon Statutes that give public agencies the right to investigate allegations against their employees and if discovered that those employees were acting out of malfeasance then the employing agency can reject claims of indemnification by the offending employees.

In other words those employees would have to defend themselves on their own dime and not the taxpayer’s

With the above in mind, we strongly urge the Board of County Commissioners to exercise their fiduciary duty and at the appropriate time and under ORS 30.285 and ORS 30.287 require Deschutes County Legal Counsel to conduct a full investigation into Sheriff’s Office leaderships’ actions against their employees.

As we have previously written, if such an investigation determines the actions men such as William Bailey, Paul Garrision and Sheriff Nelson were malfeasant or otherwise fell outside of the relevant statutes, then Deschutes County should refuse to indemnify and reject any demands for legal defense by them as required by law.

REFERENCES

Tort Claim Notice Filed by Sheriff’s Candidate Sergeant Kent Vander Kamp

Written by DCSO Follies

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