As head of Oregon’s housing finance agency, Andrea Bell oversees a lot of taxpayer money.

Oregon Housing and Community Services has handed developers more than $1.4 billion in state funding to build rent-restricted apartments over the last five years — and even more counting federal tax credits the agency allocates.

Bell’s husband, Joshua Crites, works as a director for the consulting firm JH Brawner, which helps local housing authorities develop subsidized apartment projects that receive a lot of money from Bell’s agency.

The company lists offices in Oregon, Washington and Arizona and says it has played a role in creating 20,000 low-income housing units that cost $3 billion to develop. JH Brawner’s Oregon work includes consulting on two housing authority projects that applied for or were awarded tens of millions of dollars collectively from Bell’s agency since her husband started working for the company. (JH Brawner gets paid by the housing authority rather than the state.)

Oregon law requires leaders like Bell to report their sources of household income on annual ethics disclosures, including naming their spouses’ income sources, especially when they could present a conflict of interest. The law also says any government official with a conflict should notify the person who appointed them in writing.

But Bell didn’t do either until ProPublica asked her about it.

A spokesperson for Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat whose predecessor appointed Bell in 2022, told ProPublica that the governor’s office had “not been notified of any potential or actual conflict of interest.”

The closest Bell came to a disclosure was in 2025 with this vague note with a misspelling: “Spouse serves in an advisory role for a developmen.” It did not name a company but instead showed a misspelled street address, with no suite number, for JH Brawner’s office in Issaquah, Washington, a commercial building with multiple tenants.

Bell filed amended........

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