The Oregon Department of Aviation just released a free, comprehensive UAS Operations and Policy Manual template that any Oregon state agency, city, county, special district, or public body can download, customize and adopt as the foundation of their drone program.
Sure, this is another document about Oregon government bureaucracy. But it could be a significant mover or the world of U.S.-based, public sector drone programs. It’s also likely that its implications will extend well beyond Oregon’s borders.
What Oregon built with its drone policy template
Here’s the template (this link will download a file to your computer from the Oregon Department of Aviation website).
It contains a 17-section operations manual covering program governance, pilot qualifications, aircraft registration, Remote ID compliance, Oregon public body registration requirements, mission planning, operational control, risk assessment, airspace review, contractor oversight, emergency procedures, maintenance, records retention, privacy, data management, and public communication.
It includes a primary customization checklist, a revision and approval record, a definitions section that’s grounded in FAA and Oregon statutory language, a detailed roles and responsibilities matrix, authorized mission categories with checkboxes for agencies to select or deselect, prohibited uses, and a legal compliance section current to June 9, 2026.
One thing particularly welcome in this report: It separates public safety and law enforcement provisions into optional annexes — meaning a county public works department that uses drones for bridge inspection doesn’t have to wade through law enforcement-specific surveillance procedures that have no relevance to their operations.
“Drones are becoming an everyday tool for Oregon public agencies,” said Kenji Sugahara, Director of the Oregon Department of Aviation in a prepared statement. “This template is intended to help agencies build programs that are safe, accountable, and consistent with Oregon and federal requirements. It gives agencies a strong foundation so they do not have to start from scratch.”
The “start from scratch” problem
“Start from scratch” is the key phrase here.
There are more than 1,200 public safety agencies in the U.S. currently operating drones, plus thousands more state and local government agencies using them for mapping, inspection, environmental monitoring, emergency management, and infrastructure work. Most of them are small (e.g. county road departments, municipal utilities, regional transit authorities, soil and water conservation districts), largely powered by just one or two drones, one or two pilots, and limited administrative capacity.
As most things go when it comes to bureaucracy, those agencies typically need to come up with a drone paperwork before they can actually fly. That means they need to spell out — in paper form — someone who can authorize flights, who has final authority to cancel a flight, how data is stored and for how long, what happens when something goes wrong, how contractor drone services are managed, how Remote ID requirements are met, and dozens of other operational and legal questions.
For small government agencies, that’s not just a lot of work that might be infeasible given limited government resources, it’s also just a huge waste of taxpayer money to continuously reinvent the wheel around drafting a bunch of jargon. Generally in these cases, we either see agencies end up throwing up their hands and not building such a policy at all — instead operating in a compliance gray zone, —or they spend significant staff time and legal fees reinventing that wheel, which should have been standard anyway.
The optimist in me says that Oregon’s template addresses both problems simultaneously.
Oregon’s legal compliance layer
Interestingly, Oregon is one of a growing number of states with its own UAS law layered on top of federal requirements. That means that an agency operating under federal Part 107 alone might be fully FAA-compliant but could theoretically still be out of compliance with state law.
Yes, Oregon has its own laws on data handling, annual reporting to ODAV and law enforcement use restrictions. For government agencies in Oregon, the template brings those state-specific requirements into the same document as the federal framework. In theory, that means agencies in the state wouldn’t accidentally be compliant on one layer while violating another.
The operational control section
One of the more sophisticated pieces of the template is Section 3.2 on operational control. In short, it addresses the question of which entity is actually responsible for a drone flight when multiple agencies are involved.
That’s a relatively common problem with government drone operations. When a county emergency management agency requests a drone flight from a city fire department during a disaster response, who has operational control? When a state agency hires a contractor to collect aerial data, does the contractor’s pilot operate under the contractor’s procedures or the agency’s? When two agencies share a UAS during a mutual aid operation, who can cancel the flight?
The template addresses this with a four-question framework:
- Which entity requested the aircraft
- Which entity is paying for it
- Which entity is directing it
- Which entity benefits from it
When the answers point to multiple entities, the template requires written designation of a lead agency before flight. Theoretically, this kind of interagency coordination language could prevent confusion during the high-stakes situations (e.g. emergency responses, multi-agency inspections, disaster assessment) where drone operations are most valuable and where confusion about authority is most dangerous.
What this means beyond Oregon
Don’t live or work in Oregon? This news still matters to you.
Sure, Oregon built this template for Oregon agencies operating under Oregon law. And no, it’s not directly portable to other states as-is. This document’s specific statutory citations, the ODAV registration requirements, and the Oregon public records law references are all state-specific.
But the architecture of the document is directly relevant everywhere. The governance structure, the operational control framework, the mission authorization process, the data minimization principles, the contractor oversight requirements, the maintenance and airworthiness documentation — all of these elements reflect best practices that apply to any public agency drone program regardless of state.
For drone program managers at state and local agencies in any state, this template is worth reading even if you can’t adopt it wholesale. It’s a useful benchmark for what a complete, well-designed government drone policy looks like — and a practical checklist for gaps in your existing policy.
“This is about building trust as much as building capability,” Sugahara said. “When public agencies operate drones, the public should know that those flights are being planned, documented, and conducted under clear rules. A good policy manual helps protect the public, the agency, the pilot, and the airspace system.”
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