Thursday, December 17, 2020

Oregon Senate: PDF File I Created Has All Senator's Statements of Economic Interest and Highlights Shortcomings in Electronic Filing System Data Retrieval.

Oregon requires certain public officials to file annual statements of economic interest. 

However, the database available to the public to extract the relevant information for a group of elected officials is woefully inadequate. 

I attempted to extract information for all Senators however there is no way to extract the information for a group of office holders as a batch .

Even extracting information for one public official was painful. It required locating that public official in the database, clicking on a "View Details" button, clicking on a link with the year of interest, and then printing the multipage document as a PDF.  

Adding to the frustration, once a PDF file was printed the formatting of the filing system did NOT allow conversion to a legible spreadsheet format OR a search by keyword, even after I attempted to use optical character recognition to make the PDF text searchable.. [I encourage others to try their hand at conversion and let me know if you are more successful than I was].

Should the opportunity present itself I will highlight the inadequacies of the current SEI retrieval database during the legislative session, but in the interim HERE is an alphabetical ordered single PDF file with all Oregon Senate members 2020 Statements of Economic interest. (I'd recommend that you download it and view it in Acrobat reader so that you can see the bookmarks to individual Senate members, which may not be visible when file is viewed within a browser window).

Note: Section 3, the "Real Property" section of each filing has information on real estate holdings, including any rental property interests

Unfortunately because of the inadequacies of the Oregon electronic filing system, you cannot keyword search the combined PDF, but will have to manually navigate to find that information for each Senator. 

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog

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