Deschutes County commissioners want feedback on proposed changes for accessing property information online, they said Wednesday during a work session.

Commissioners tentatively scheduled a public hearing for Jan. 23 to take comments on a proposal that would create a two-tiered system for the public to access property ownership, value, sales and tax information over the county’s website.

The proposal would create a limited basic version that would not permit searches of individual properties by the owners’ names, and an enhanced version for registered users that would, along with access to other information.

Currently, most of the information is available without a registration.

Deschutes County Clerk Nancy Blankenship said the extra step of registering could appease residents who are concerned about how much information is publicly available.

“It’s how you serve it up,” Blankenship said. “The information is public. It’s how easily is it made available to balance issues of privacy.”

Commissioner Alan Unger wanted to know what, if anything, the county would do with the information provided by registered users.

“I’m curious how big brotherish we’re getting,” he said during the discussion.

The proposed policy coincides with the retooling of the online applications — making all property information available through one Web page, rather than via multiple pages, as it is now, said Bob Haas, GIS program developer and coordinator for the county. It will also be accessible over multiple platforms.

Although the application will have the ability to track users, that is not the intent, and monitoring won’t occur without a policy to do so, he said.

But for meeting attendee Brian Larson, the idea of registering to view public information is an invasion of privacy.

“It’s like Facebook. If you’re not selling or using information, why do you need it?” he said. “If you don’t need the information, why are you gathering it?

“For 10 years we’ve been using (DIAL) without giving our names.”

Larson said the ability to track who’s viewing the information and how often could lead to future charges for the service or the disclosure of that information.

“It’s none of their business,” he said.

While some Oregon counties charge for online access to property information, Haas said, that isn’t the intent of Deschutes County’s proposal.

Commissioner Tammy Baney said she wasn’t convinced registration is necessary. At first, she said, she understood why the county would want to require someone to register before being able to search for an individual property owner by name.

“But (now) I don’t know that the argument is compelling enough at that because you could go to whitepages.com (and) get the name. There’s so many easy ways to do that,” she said.

“So, we’re just asking people essentially to take an extra step to get to where they need to go, when they’re going to get there anyway, and it’s public.”

For Bend resident Bob Hammond, the idea of registering doesn’t make a difference. He attended the work session Wednesday to ensure he’d still have access to all the information he needed. The same information will be available, he said, it will simply be easier to access.

“There’s really nothing new here,” Hammond said. “I figured they wanted (a registration) because they were getting set to charge … but it doesn’t appear that that’s the case.”

To comment

To comment on a Deschutes County proposal for accessing property records online: Deschutes Services Center, P.O Box 6005, 1300 N.W. Wall St., Suite 206, Bend, OR, 97701. or by email: board@deschutes.org.