Jeb Bladine: Legal notices augmented by online databases

First, a quick survey: Do you read “legal notices” in the newspaper (you should)? Do you know what a legal notice is (many people don’t)? When a legal notice relates to real property — or just out of personal curiosity — do you know how to find out who owns it (read on)?

Legal notices are messages considered so important for public disclosure that laws require them to be published in a newspaper of general circulation … for readers like you to find.

Nationwide, state and local governments have eliminated or reduced the frequency of many legal notices and moved others onto websites to save money. That change effectively removes legals from general public exposure.

Meanwhile, citizens interested in legal notices have new research tools to pursue more information.

The past decade produced dramatic expansion of online databases for local, state and national government information. And today, artificial intelligence programs can instantly scan, analyze, summarize and explain the issues brought to light in published legal notices after gathering information from laws, ordinances, case law, public budgets, professional briefs and beyond.

Back to property ownership:

Years ago, tax assessors in Yamhill and many other counties established look-up databases showing real value, taxable value and taxes levied on all real property parcels and business personal property. The missing ingredient, until more recent years, was ownership information, which now is part of that database, which is easily searched by tax account number or property address.

It’s this easy: Go to the county assessor’s website; click “Account & Payment Info” in the upper-left corner; on that page click “Search Accounts and View Payment Information” in the left column; and hit the “Proceed to Site” button.

The search boxes are self-explanatory. One tip: Enter any street number – or any portion of a street number – and the system will return every tax account in the county with that number sequence in the address. Reduce the number address by adding “city” or “zip code” to the search limits.

Resulting linked tax accounts display property description and ownership, historic property sales, recent appraisals and tax levies, and 10 years of annual property tax statements. It can be enlightening to compare your own property tax statements with those for neighboring, cross-town and cross-county properties.

Interestingly, it appears that until 2022-23, the names of property owners were not even displayed on the annual property tax statements, only the property location. Owner names have always been a public record, but it took a recent-year change in county leadership to put those owner names into a user-friendly public online database.

Legal notices are one of the primary “news tip” systems available to newspaper reporters and editors – if they were not required by law, do you think government would voluntarily pay to publish all those the important messages? (In general, probably not, but giving due credit, the city of McMinnville often does pay for regular advertising of important public messages affecting local citizens.)

Meanwhile, more public readership of legal notices would result in a better-informed community.

News-Register Publisher Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.