By Christy Solo – Editor
In our Jan. 21, 2026 Shady Cove City Council meeting article we mentioned that government transparency is not council (or county commissioners or state level elected officials) answering questions asked by the public in the course of a public meeting.
In fact, there is nothing in the Oregon Revised Statutes which states that public comment must be allowed during public meetings. Only that meetings are public and noticed.
Allowing public comment is a choice made by any given Oregon public body and has no link to government transparency laws.
So, what is government transparency?
In a nutshell, it means that government-held information is open, comprehensive, timely, easily available to the public and meets basic open data standards where formats allow.
It means any citizen must be able to do their own research and access public documents on their own (or via a formal public records request when applicable).
In other words, transparency law does not give access to any group of elected officials, or any individual. It gives access to documentation.
In a small city or town, it feels like “transparency” should include getting immediate answers to questions any time. It doesn’t. Transparency laws apply equally to “next to impossible” to speak to state level elected officials as well as “the councilor is my neighbor” elected officials.
In the digital age, most government entities now cover their transparency bases via their websites (or in the case of the State of Oregon, an entirely separate website).
What should a city’s official website contain to ensure government transparency?
Below is a 10-point checklist created by Sunshine Review – which matches up quite well with Oregon’s transparency website.
Eagle Point’s website checks the applicable boxes: https://www.cityofeaglepoint.org/
Shady Cove’s City website: https://shadycove.org/ ticks almost all the boxes (not all are applicable) though there are some broken links on the website – all of which should be updated when a new permanent staff is in place. Some of the checklist information is within individual meeting agenda packets so it takes a few clicks on the site to access them.
A transparent website should include:
- Budgets
- Open meeting rules, notices, agendas and minutes
- Information on elected officials including names and email addresses
- Admin/staff information including names of key admin and contact information such as email addresses
- Building permits and zoning permits should be available to download
- Audit information such as schedules and final reports
- Contracts with outside vendors
- Lobbying (not applicable to our smaller cities)
- Public records – not all the records themselves, but contact information for the person(s) in charge of fulfilling records requests
- Taxes and fees – information on what (if any) taxes are collected and the types and amounts of other fees routinely charged by the city
And that’s Government Transparency 101
