oregon-stories · from oregon-counties × executive-regulatory-frameworks
Living county law, dead citations: 8% of county ORS citations point at statutes that no longer exist
Oregon's mirrored county code carries 8,723 citations to state statutes. 808 of them — about 9% — point at sections that no longer exist under that number: mostly renumbered (the text lives on elsewhere) or repealed outright, some as far back as 1993. County ordinances cite the law as it stood when they were adopted; the state renumbers and repeals underneath them. This is a fact about how law ages, found mechanically — not an error count.
What the dead citations point at
| cited section | what happened to it | county citations |
|---|---|---|
| ORS 197.763 | renumbered 2021 → ORS 197.797 | 30 |
| ORS 197.298 | renumbered None → ORS 197a.350, ORS 197a.355 | 20 |
| ORS 477.490 | repealed 2025 | 15 |
| ORS 197.247 | repealed 1993 | 14 |
| ORS 197.296 | renumbered 2023 → ORS 197a.350 | 14 |
| ORS 308.370 | repealed 1999 | 13 |
| ORS 195.145 | renumbered 2023 → ORS 197a.245 | 12 |
| ORS 192.440 | renumbered 2017 → ORS 192.324 | 12 |
| ORS 195.137 | renumbered 2023 → ORS 197a.230 | 11 |
| ORS 279b.085 | no disposition mined | 11 |
| ORS 192.410 | renumbered 2017 → ORS 192.311 | 10 |
| ORS 197.307 | renumbered 2023 → ORS 197a.200, ORS 197a.400 | 10 |
| ORS 475.314 | renumbered 2015 → ORS 475b.450 | 10 |
| ORS 197.352 | renumbered 2007 → ORS 195.305 | 8 |
| ORS 192.501 | renumbered 2017 → ORS 192.345 | 8 |
Read this before quoting the chart
A dead citation is not a county's mistake unless the ordinance was adopted after the section died — and adoption dates are not consistently recorded, so this page makes no such claim for any county. Bars show each county's share of dead citations with its absolute denominator printed beside it; counties with fewer than 10 recorded ORS citations (3 of them) are excluded from the bars to avoid rate noise, and everything remains in the counts. Dispositions are mechanically mined from ORS chapters' own history brackets (29,215 sections) — non-authoritative; verify against oregonlegislature.gov. 598 of 3,335 county documents are OCR-recovered, and OCR can corrupt a citation (a real example: ORS 4758, a machine's misreading of 475B) — such strings simply fail to parse and are absent here, but treat single odd citations with suspicion. Coverage: 27 of 36 counties are mirrored; the other nine are access-blocked, not evidence of anything about those counties.