Oregon Public Notice

"One reason why state and local governments succeed is that they tell you what they are planning, what they are doing, and what they have done in your neighborhood. They do this through public notices published in your community newspaper."

Since Oregon became a state in 1859, the Legislature has understood the value of keeping citizens informed about the activities of local governments and the effects that those activities have on their lives. People cannot support any government unless they know what it is doing.
For this reason, state statutes and local ordinances require government bodies to publish notices of their activities in local newspapers. This legal requirement ensures that people have the opportunity to stay abreast of local government activities that may affect them.
These notices by government bodies are paid advertisements, not subject to editorial alteration by the newspaper. They must be published in a community newspaper that is read by the people most likely to be affected by the notice, rather than in some remote publication.
These important pieces of information are known as public notices, legal notices, legal ads, or other similar names. Most often you will find those notices in or near the classified section of your local newspaper. And because the notices appear consistently in print, people have the opportunity to find and study them, refer to them repeatedly, and clip out and save specific notices to discuss with others or for reference at public meetings.
Your town council publishes notices about hearings on proposals for local residential and business development, new ordinances it is considering, and streets it is planning to close. Boards representing special districts, school districts, and counties all must tell you about bond issues, new tax proposals, public improvement projects, restrictive regulations, and other things they are doing, and then give you financial reports on their activities. If the governmental body is going to buy property or equipment or conduct a building project, they publicly ask for bids in these notices so they can get the best price from the best source. This also eliminates any suspicion of special favors to friends and prevents illegal contracts from being given secretly.
When a public notice is published in your newspaper, it becomes a permanent record. No one can change it or challenge its appearance. It is there for all to see. And research constantly conducted in states all across America shows that people want to find public notices in their newspapers. You feel safer when you know that you can find information about your local government in your own newspaper. Those notices are not ignored.

Then why make these notices available on the internet?

The internet is quickly becoming the best means for making information available in a timely manner anywhere in the world. In the case of this public notice database, you now can see this information wherever you are, whenever you have internet access. Notices from last week and last month are still here, and you can search through them from the convenience of your computer. If you want to see a notice from another Oregon town or school district, even hundreds of miles away, it's here.
Nothing can take the place of timely printed notice, published dependably in your own local newspaper where you expect to find it. But the newspapers of Oregon have voluntarily created this internet site—without requiring any additional cost or effort of taxpayers or government—to make these notices available to you. It is a one-stop database for all public notices published in newspapers throughout Oregon.
You can use the Manual Search button at any time and as often as you wish to find the notices you want to read immediately. With this feature, you can search through the notices published in all newspapers or just a specific newspaper or county, within a specific date range, and/or containing a specific word or phrase.
If you want to be notified when a certain kind of notice is published anywhere in the state, you may subscribe to our Smart Search service. Click on this link and sign up now. You are only a click away from the information you want.

The public notice database on this site is not a substitute for the official publication that is required by law. You will still find those notices in your local newspaper.

A public service by the member newspapers of