Denied

The Legislature created the Oregon Sunshine Committee in 2017 to look at exemptions to public records disclosure that prevent records from being released.

How is that going?

We laughed and winced when we saw that Charlie Fisher, a chair of the committee and OSPIRG state director, pointed out that the committee’s reports go to a legislative committee that doesn’t even meet.

It’s something easily remedied. It’s an imperfect barometer of the status of public records reform in Oregon. Things are not that miserable. The public records compact between Oregonians and their government is, though, in some ways, broken.

Oregon’s public records law is a disclosure law, not a don’t-release-it law, not a make-it-hard-for-the public-to-get-it law. Sometimes, it’s still a hassle for the public to get public information.

Although the editorial board can’t speak for every member of the public, many government bodies in Deschutes County that we deal with regularly are helpful and prompt. They want to help. Costs are often waived.

There have been some remarkable exceptions in the past. A reporter at The Bulletin once requested records of complaints submitted to the local Dial-A-Ride service. It took the agency more than a year to respond.

Much more recently, we have had some travails with a report that a state task force on alcohol taxation declined to release. It failed to provide a justification spelled out in the law.

When records are routine, disclosure is often prompt. When public records might show problems with an agency, then delays and high fees can be what a public records requestor gets instead of public records.

What if Oregon did it differently?

What if a public records request for a police report, emails from the city of Bend or a draft report from a state task force became semi-obsolete?

What if it was the rule that public agencies had to release all their emails, audits and reports? Automatically. Oregon could switch to a system of proactive disclosure.

We didn’t come up with this automatic release idea. It’s been floating around primarily in discussions of how to fix the federal Freedom of Information Act.

And such a system would have significant costs. Records would need to go through some sort of vetting process to scrub them of information that should not be public. It would take a lot of work, personnel and money to make that routine for every public agency and most public records.

We imagine it would also change the way government employees do their work, if they knew their emails were going to be automatically released. They might share more information over the phone, so information wouldn’t be captured as easily and be publicly available. That would not necessarily be a good thing.

The city of Bend already does some impressive work with its data dashboards and open data efforts. The state has a similar transparency effort. The Oregon Health Authority has been churning out new public data dashboards.

Oregon needs more of it.