SALEM — It could soon get a lot harder to access public records from the Pendleton Unmanned Aerial Systems Range.

State Sen. Bill Hansell, R-Athena, has introduced a bill that would exempt the city of Pendleton from disclosing records produced by the test range if making them public “would cause a competitive disadvantage to the test range or its users.” The exemption covers a broad range of records, “including but not limited to pricing, intellectual property and customer records.”

At a Feb. 11 Senate Committee on Labor and Business hearing, Pendleton City Manager Robb Corbett called passage of the bill “crucial” before introducing Steve Chrisman, the city’s airport manager and economic development director.

In his written and oral testimony, Chrisman gave legislators a brief overview of the UAS range and its history.

Six years after it was established, Chrisman said the UAS range now supports about 75 jobs, conducts thousands of drone tests per year, and produces millions of dollars worth of economic activity.

Given the $20 million the public has invested in the test range at the city, state and federal levels, Chrisman said it was in all Oregonians’ best interest that the UAS range succeed. And if Oregon wanted to see Pendleton succeed, city officials maintain, then they needed to let the range keep some records under wraps.

As an example, Chrisman pointed to Pendleton’s successful recruitment of Airbus to the UAS Range. He said the city knew Airbus wanted to test its Project Vahana air taxi concept in Pendleton a year and a half before Airbus went public with an announcement in 2017, but Airbus instructed staff to stay quiet or it would test its drone elsewhere. Airbus ceased testing in Pendleton in 2019.

“This need for confidentiality is standard in the industry, and the first thing prospective range users ask is for the City to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA),” he wrote in his testimony. “Without some assurance of protection of their identity, activities, and proprietary information, then companies just simply will not come to Oregon with this cutting-edge technology. “

Chrisman added that the other UAS test ranges in Oregon were either privately or tribally owned, meaning Pendleton was the only range in Oregon that had to comply with public records law.

While none of the committee members seemed opposed to the bill, some senators pointed out that some of their requests were already duplicated by existing exemptions and wanted to know what specifically the city wanted to protect from public disclosure.

Chrisman declined to delve into specifics, but he did say UAS companies wanted “peace of mind” when looking to protect their information, something Senate Bill 315 would afford them.

“I would prefer not to have to get into the nuanced arguments of law in the state of Oregon, when I’ve got lots of other competition that I’m competing against in other places,” he told the committee. “I just want to get them to Oregon because I think it’s in the best interest of Oregonians, if we can get this industry, this new and exciting technology, to come to Oregon and we enjoy the benefits of that.”

The city is also arguing that the Oregon Legislature has previously granted public records carve outs for other municipal projects, like the Klamath Regeneration Project in Klamath Falls.

In an email, City Attorney Nancy Kerns, who helped draft the language of the bill, agreed that the city could theoretically block any public records disclosure related to the UAS range as long as it could argue that it could cause a competitive disadvantage for the range or its customers.

The only person to speak out against the bill at the hearing was Tom Holt, a lobbyist for the Society of Professional Journalists, who argued that the language of the bill was too broad.

In an interview after the hearing, Hansell said he believes the city is seeking the public records exemption in good faith, but because of the SPJ’s concerns, he was encouraging the city to work with the editors from the East Oregonian to come up with a compromise.

Whatever solution the two sides arrived at, Hansell said he was confident the resulting bill would easily pass through the committee and the Legislature.