Christian Trejbal

Trejbal is the board chair of the Overlook Neighborhood Association. He also was the open government chair for the Association of Opinion Journalists for more than a decade.

On May 15, without any warning, Portland took a step backward on public records. The city turned off the ability to search PortlandMaps.com by people’s and companies’ names. Want to know what parcels someone owns? There’s no longer a good way to find out.

Matthew Freid, who manages the city’s corporate geographic information system team,is in charge of PortlandMaps. He unilaterally decided to turn off name searches after receiving a few complaints and reviewing a couple of decade-old city ombudsman annual reports, he told me, in response to my inquiries. He didn’t consult anyone outside his team – not the council, not the public.

He should have. Any time government rolls back access to public records, it warrants a serious public conversation.

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In many Oregon counties, this isn’t an issue. Deschutes, Crook, Jefferson, Linn, Benton and others have allowed name searches for years because property records are public records and Oregon’s public records law has a presumption of transparency.

Multnomah County maintains property records for assessment and taxation purposes. The county shares those records with the city to power PortlandMaps because it’s such a helpful tool. In fact, PortlandMaps pops up on the terminal at the county records office.

The fact that city staff retains the ability to do name searches belies the usefulness of such searches.

Public access to property records helps guard against chicanery. Watchdogs and journalists can discover if the assessor’s buddy is getting a break on his taxes or if elected officials own property in an area being rezoned to higher value.

In the Overlook neighborhood, we used PortlandMaps to find out what residential properties adidas had purchased around its North Portland campus before its major expansion began.

Maybe tenants in an apartment complex want to reach out to tenants in other properties the landlord owns. Neighbors might want to check how many Airbnbs the owner down the street is operating. Or they might want to look at other projects by the developer proposing an apartment building on their street. Now they can’t. Their only hope is to get lucky wading through convoluted property records at the county building during limited business hours or online after paying a $150 sign-up fee.

Not that the reason someone wants to look at property records really matters. Public records are public for everyone. Outside of a few narrowly prescribed limits, people don’t have to justify wanting to see information that belongs to the public. That is the price of ensuring government is answerable to the people.

And privacy still isn’t guaranteed, despite the change. Anyone can find out who owns a specific property by entering the address or clicking on a parcel on the map. The owners’ names, how much they paid, assessed value, property taxes, square footage, etc. – it’s all there.

Freid and his team do a great job with PortlandMaps, but this time they blew it. To his credit, he said he's willing to revisit the decision. "I'm always open to trying to find the right balance on these things," he said.

His superiors, all the way up to Mayor Ted Wheeler, should explain that the right balance is user-friendly transparency. Tell Freid that Portland should make public records more accessible, not less. Turn name searches back on.