There’s another effort to hide information from the public, this time in Junction City.
City commissioners there are considering a proposal to stop putting public notices in the newspaper. The idea is to put the notices — which are required by law to be published in a newspaper — on the city government’s website instead. Making use of a ridiculous loophole in Kansas law, they would declare the city government website as the official “newspaper.”
The point of the law — a version of which is in place in every state in the country — is that the public should know about what the government is doing. So the city — or the county, or the school district — has to pay for what’s called a “legal notice” or “public notice” in a printed newspaper with paid distribution in that community.
These notices inform citizens about things like proposed zoning changes, budget proposals or new ordinances, so that they can have a chance to tell their elected representatives what they think of those proposals. It’s pretty central to the idea of democracy — without informed citizens, the whole system collapses.
The government sometimes tries to say that the cost of buying those ads is burdensome, but the reality is that it’s always some minuscule fraction of the operating budget — like, the same as the cost of replacing a couple of stop signs. It’s never really about the money. Truth is, if you’re worried about that level of expense, there are lots of other ways to trim.
Sure, I imagine you’re thinking, it’s self-serving of me — a print newspaper publisher — to make this argument. In doing so, I’m supporting a stream of revenue that helps sustain local independent professional journalism. True. I acknowledge that. In the particular case in Junction City, we have no direct stake; the newspaper there is owned and operated by Ryan Wilson, who’s doing a good job of informing the public there.
I’m really saying that publishing those notices in an independent printed newspaper is simply better for the system of representative government. Just imagine that the government itself is in charge of publishing those notices on its own website. Do you trust the government to police itself like that? No, you probably don’t. At least since Watergate, you’ve known that the government tries to hide information that makes those in power look bad.
Even if the government tried to do the right thing, the reality is that citizens would not be notified because nobody makes a habit of going to government websites. And then if a citizen challenged the legality of a certain proposal, how would the government prove that the notice had been published? Everybody knows that websites get hacked, crash and are digitally manipulated all the time. If I were a city commissioner, I wouldn’t want to take that legal risk.
The simpler, cleaner way to do things is to simply continue publishing legal notices in the printed newspaper. Then there’s a tangible, verifiable record of publication that nobody can challenge.
