NEWBERG, Ore. — Do you remember that city council meeting from Nov. 18, 2002, when they approved purchasing a small lot on the east entrance to the town, just west of the flagpole between East First Street and Hancock Road? If the city hadn’t bought the lot from the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), we might not have the beautiful brick “Welcome to Newberg” sign, which thousands of people drive past every day.
If you don’t have photographic memory, you may need to rely on written records to know when events like this happened. That’s where public records requests come in.
Public Records are defined as any information that “is prepared, owned, used or retained by a state agency or political subdivision, related to an activity, transaction or function of a state agency or political subdivision, and is necessary to satisfy the legal, administrative, fiscal, tribal cultural or historical policies, requirements or needs of the state agency or political subdivision,” according to the State of Oregon.
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Anyone can submit a public records request by going to the Public Records webpage on the City of Newberg website. The city will respond within five days, informing the requestor if they can fulfill the request and an estimated timeline if so. If the request is expected to incur a fee, an estimate of the cost will be provided. The requestor can decide whether or not to move forward with the request or modify it to reduce fees.
While a majority of public records requests can be fulfilled free of charge, there are specific instances where requests can incur fees starting at $60.
Public records are stored by the City of Newberg and can be accessed by the public. This includes City of Newberg purchasing records, email correspondence, ordinances, City Council meeting minutes, and other city documents of interest, including historical records from as far back as 1890.
In Oregon, public records are available to any entity that requests them. Per state law, municipalities in the state are allowed to charge fees to reasonably be reimbursed for the cost of staff labor and research.
In Newberg, all public records requests that take under an hour to fulfill are not charged for staff time, but some that require deeper searching incur fees starting at $60 per hour, and $400 per hour if legal review is required. City Recorder Rachel Thomas said these rates are below the city’s combined average rate for all employees of $71.50 an hour, including all retirement matching and employment benefits, otherwise known as the “loaded rate.”
At the July 6, 2026 Newberg City Council meeting, Thomas said legal review requests are rare, citing two of 124 requests that drew legal review in 2025. In both cases, the legal review was to determine whether or not the public records request was eligible to be released — in which case, the State of Oregon prevents governments from charging a legal fee.
According to Newberg’s Public Records Request Process, records that cannot be requested include “public records pertaining to litigation, criminal investigations, personnel discipline actions, personal information of public employees, ongoing audits of public bodies, corrections and parole board records, records protected by attorney-client privilege, and more.”
Redactions, generally, are managed in-house by Thomas and do not require legal review. Complex redactions, such as with files containing juvenile records, may require legal review.
In the city council meeting on July 6, Thomas said that many similarly-sized cities in the surrounding area charge more and start charging earlier than Newberg.
For example, Lincoln City starts fees after 30 minutes of staff time and calculates the actual staff cost of each individual who worked on it and their salary, according to their fee schedule — as do Tualatin, Keizer, and Oregon City, with Forest Grove waiving the first 30 minutes and charging $77 per hour thereafter. Sherwood’s Master Fee Schedule states that they charge after the first 15 minutes and use the loaded rate of staff members fulfilling the request. The City of Dayton provides the same fee charge as Newberg.
“We wait a little bit longer because most of the records requests don’t take that much work and we’re willing to do that for someone — the vast majority of these really are 5 to 10 minutes,” Thomas said during the presentation. “Once we hand the request to the staff member who has the record, they hand me the records back, and we’re able to produce them right away.”
Thomas has also worked to digitize many commonly requested records, such as permits, resolutions, ordinances, and orders. These digital copies are available on the city’s public records searchable web page.
The system, which is run by the Oregon Records Management System, received a complaint from a resident at the May 18, 2026 city council meeting for its hard-to-navigate page, which Thomas acknowledged.
“We decided to make it go live because you know what, it’s there,” Thomas said at the meeting. “We’ll let people use it even if it’s not perfect.”
The city is currently moving to a new AI-assisted platform, Laserfiche, to improve system searches and allow more records to be self-accessed. The public records request form will always be available because some records will be unable to be digitized or made available online, but Thomas hopes to make records more easily accessible online without the need for a request.
“We’re creating lots of different ways that people can learn what’s going on here without having to go through a records request process,” Thomas said. “I don’t care if they do though, because I like doing my job, but I would love people to be able to help themselves.”
