SALEM (AP) - Gov. Ted Kulongoski has signed a bill requiring the Oregon State Police to set up and maintain a Web site with a list of high-risk sex offenders.

”This is one of the better approaches in getting information out to the public about sexual predators,“ Kulongoski said.

”I think this is the right thing to do. It is going to give citizens more information than they have now, and it is going to bring about better protection for them,“ he said.

The new law was sponsored by state Rep. Jerry Krummel, R-Wilsonville, who drafted it after the mother of a college student began pushing for a way to determine if any sexual predators lived in the neighborhood near her daughter.

”I am not politically driven at all, so this was my first time being involved in the process,“ said Connie Hollon of Wilsonville.

”But I feel very fortunate that I ran into a lawmaker who felt as passionately about this issue as I do,“ Hollon said.

Hollon said she turned to Krummel when she attempted without success to find a site to check on neighborhoods for her daughter, who was in college in Eugene.

”At that point, I became an angry mother,“ Hollon said. ”I've had victims in my family affected by sexual abuse and I have seen how those ramifications have affected their lives.“

Before the bill passed, Oregon and South Dakota were the only states without statewide Web sites.

The U.S. Department of Justice plans a national registry after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that states could list sex offenders on Web sites.

Oregon's site will not list all 11,000 sex offenders outside prison. But it will list an estimated 500 sex offenders classified by the state Parole Board as high risk.

The board's ”predatory“ classification came into question earlier this year when the Oregon Supreme Court decided that the board violated an offender's constitutional right to due process because the offender had no opportunity to object.

Krummel said that he has been assured the legal problem will be resolved.

The state police are on track to start the Web site by the law's deadline of July 1, he said.