On Feb. 10, Lane County released a summary of a “months-long outside investigation regarding claims of Commissioner David Loveall retaliating against Lane County staff.”
The press release says Mountain Lakes Employment Investigations concluded its report on Feb. 1, finding that “Commissioner Loveall engaged in multiple incidents of retaliation against three staff members.”
MLEI conducted factfinding relating to allegations by three county employees — one of them County Administrator Steve Mokrohisky — who “experienced retaliation by Commissioner Loveall for having raised complaints on matters that Lane County Policy protects.”
The report says MLEI conducted interviews with 15 county employees or elected officials, and considered several hundred pages of documents.
Among the allegations against Loveall — who is up for re-election in May — is that Loveall met with Mokrohisky after employees complained about him saying of a community partner, “I think of a stripper on a stripper’s pole, her hands moving like this,” and using religious language in the workplace that made an employee uncomfortable. Not mentioned in the summary are incidents where Loveall has invoked “Kingdom work” in county meetings or the recent Jan. 5 State of the County, which was deeply Christian in tone.
The report says Loveall told the county administrator, “Tell the employees to fuck off, commissioners can do what they want and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
And later Loveall said to Mokrohisky, “Can someone give me a list of bad words that I can’t say? We need a culture change. This DEI thing is over the top. Words like blessings and spinster are triggers?”
The press release says that the Board of County Commissioners directed the release of the document in conjunction with an upcoming meeting. And will “consider this matter further in an executive session next week. Until the Board has an opportunity to decide what, if any, action to undertake there will be no further comment on this document.”
Executive sessions are closed to the public, but open to the media but the governing body may require that specified information be undisclosed. The commission is scheduled to have the session Feb. 18.
Loveall responded via email to a request for comment, saying, “The process surrounding this investigation has been a partisan attack that has relied on suspect allegations and a flawed investigation that has ignored any evidence that did not support the seemingly pre-decided conclusion.”
He claims that he has “pushed back on the system to ensure greater accountability and make our local government responsible to the people of our county and it is clear the system is now pushing back as the county has ignored every safeguard and protocol to publish this report before it’s been officially presented to the board.”
Loveall alleges that the report is being “brought forward now as a brazen attempt to influence the upcoming election, and says he’s “exploring every avenue to pursue against the county for their mishandling of this matter and look forward to a quick resolution of these baseless accusations brought by activist staff members attempting to insert themselves into the political process.”
The allegations against Loveall orginally came to light in September 2025, before he had filed for re-election.