Gov. Kate Brown said when she first took office that throughout her career she has “sought to promote transparency and trust in government, working to build confidence that our public dollars are spent wisely. As governor, this will not change.”

As governor, it has changed.

She issued an executive order that allows local governments to post required public notices about their budgets only on their own websites. That’s like the fox guarding the henhouse.

It has nothing to do with protecting public health during the pandemic. It’s an attack on government transparency.

You have probably seen public notices in newspapers. They are those long, wordy, technical and dry ads usually in the classifieds. They can make your eyes glaze over faster than a parking spot is scooped up during Round-Up week in Pendleton — at least before the pandemic.

Public notices, though, have information that is important to people, such as how the government plans to spend taxes. And they are required by law. They exist so the public knows what their government is doing, so government is transparent and open.

Public notices are reported to have begun in English newspapers in 1665 with what was later renamed as The London Gazette. It published notices from the King’s Court, from London officials and so on. The practice later spread to the United States. Congress made it a requirement in 1789 for the federal government to publish similar notices in newspapers.

So much has changed. The internet makes it much easier to share information and to find it. State and local governments across the country have pushed for the freedom to only publish such notices on their own websites.

The biggest argument for that is: It’s free. It costs money to run legal notices in newspapers. And the East Oregonian is no different. This newspaper makes money from legal notices.

But the important issue is getting information to the public. Where does the public look for such information? In newspapers. Remove it from newspapers and bury it on a website and who will see it? That precisely could be the goal.

The internet is available almost everywhere. But as we all know, and politicians and school officials say again and again, not everybody has access to it. Why would the governor make a move to secrete more information on the wrong side of the digital divide?

The other issue is the absence of connection between the change and the pandemic. We asked the governor’s office about that. We were told that the change was made at the request of local governments who were concerned about completing their budget processes on time.

That argument just does not make sense. Publishing legal notices is part of the routine. It’s not an onerous requirement. Where is the danger to public health and safety? What’s the problem? There isn’t one.

Brown has done her best during the pandemic to balance public health, the economy and keeping government operating and open. When there’s a threat like COVID-19, politicians can use it to make changes with less public scrutiny. Never let a good crisis go to waste, as the saying goes. Brown chose this crisis to undermine public access to information about how tax dollars are spent. She has changed.