Coos County

We cannot tell you anything about what Coos County government has decided about surveillance, and the reason is worth a page of its own.

Every document the Board of Commissioners publishes is a photograph. We collected all 22 agenda packets and minutes on the county’s board meetings page and not one of them contains machine readable text. Not the minutes only, which is the pattern in Sherman and Tillamook, but everything, agenda packets included.

We checked this rather than assuming it, because when every file fails to open the usual explanation is a broken reader on our end. It is not one here. The files have real sizes, a median of 691 kilobytes and a largest of 5.4 megabytes, and our extractor recorded real page counts for every one of them, up to 64 pages. It opened genuine PDF documents and found no text inside them. The county scans its board record to images.

So there is no keyword result to report from this county. Not a hit, not a zero, not a scoped absence. There are no characters to search. Anything this site said about what Coos County has or has not done would be invention.

A resident is better placed than we are. Those documents can be read a page at a time, and the county posts recordings of its board meetings on YouTube, which for this county is the most accessible form its record takes. What is missing is not the information. It is the ability to search it, which is what lets one person check twenty years of decisions instead of twenty pages.

Coos is the third of eleven Oregon counties we harvested whose governing record a keyword search cannot read, after Sherman and Tillamook, and the first where the condition is total. That is worth saying plainly next to any statewide claim, ours included: a meaningful share of Oregon county government is published in a form that cannot be searched by anyone.

What we can report is what other people have mapped. OpenStreetMap contributors record six plate readers and seven cameras in Coos County, and the EFF Atlas holds three entries. Those are community reported and third party records, we never merge them with agency confirmed data, and here there is nothing in the county’s own record to set beside them in either direction.

Twenty one documents would need to be put through optical character recognition to make this county searchable. That is the smallest such pile of the three: Sherman has 84 and Tillamook 170.