Basic Rights Oregon (BRO) made this announcement today:

Basic Rights Oregon board co-chair Cris Land said Thursday that the board had accepted the resignation of executive director John Hummel, and has launched a wide-scale search for a replacement.

“We expect a smooth transition with strong interim leadership as we move through a formal hiring process,” Land said.

Hummel, who moved to Portland from Denver to lead Basic Rights Oregon through a period that included fending off an attempted referendum on Oregon’s domestic partnership and anti-discrimination laws, as well as the most successful annual fundraiser in the organization’s history, is returning to Colorado to be closer to family.

“We deeply appreciate John’s leadership during this extraordinarily successful year,” Land said. “We wish him well in all of his future endeavors.”

The Board of Directors will name an Interim Director by January 1.

According to my sources, Hummel was canned.

True, the year was extraordinarily successful when it comes to gay rights in Oregon, but Hummel really can’t take any credit for that. Hummel, whose resignation is effectively immediately, didn’t do a whole lot in the short time since he started at BRO back in April. Notably, he declined to get involved when there was community outrage that OPB planned to hold an event with Ira Glass at an anti-gay church in the ‘burbs (though he changed his mind a few days later, when it became clear that the gay community—and BRO’s former executive director—were leading the charge). BRO accomplished legislative victories this year—domestic partnerships and a non-discrimination law—largely without Hummel, who came on board within weeks of those votes. And he was pretty quiet around the anti-gay referendum effort this year. Beyond those issues—and the resolution of a lawsuit filed before his time at BRO—I can’t point to much he’s done this year. One of my sources dubbed him “a follower, not a leader.”

It took BRO a year from Roey Thorpe’s announced departure in 2006 to Hummel’s hiring earlier this year. I wonder if this search will take as long…

UPDATE: BRO spokesperson Karynn Fish says Hummel was “absolutely not fired.”

It simply “seemed like the right time for him to move on,” she says. The job “was not a perfect fit, and he was really missing his partner” who hadn’t moved to Oregon.