A plan to allow cities and counties the option of posting public notices to official government websites rather than in the local newspaper may be dead for this year, but the nefarious idea will surely pop up again.
The Mississippi Senate’s version (SB 2606) was tabled in the accountability and ethics committee last week, and those in the know say they are confident it is dead for the session. As of this writing, the status of a companion bill in the House remained in question, as it was set to come up before the municipalities committee Tuesday.
Regardless, the issue pops up year after year and will surely be brought to the table again in the future, so the faulty logic that is motivating it needs to be refuted. Seven points to consider:
1. Newspapers already post public notices on a freely accessible website (mspublicnotices.org). We do this at our expense, but if these bills were passed the cost would fall to the taxpayers to pay for the websites to host these.
2. There are also serious concerns about how much the public notices would be seen online. Very few people are going to go to a website to periodically check for public notices, meaning important issues like property tax increases or zoning changes could be secretly pushed through before the public knew about them.
On the other hand, when the notices are in the paper, they are regularly available where people are already browsing through and can see them. Often, we see them at the paper and are able to do more reporting about those important issues.
For example, when the Marion County Board of Supervisors proposed a substantial (4.4 mill) property tax increase last year, the county was required to run notice in the newspaper. We also wrote stories about it, and there was widespread public opposition so that supervisors scuttled the plan and didn’t raise taxes. If that notice was buried on a website somewhere, it's unlikely that we or anyone else would have seen it and taxes may have gone up before anyone could have done anything about it.
3. Many residents in rural areas do not have access to the internet and rely on newspapers for necessary information. The way it stands now, we reach people both in newspapers and online. This proposal would weaken that system by only publishing online.
4. The costs of public notices are low, with surveys showing that it’s less than 1% of a municipality’s budget on average. In fact, the price is set by law and has been flat since 1998. How many other things cost the same as they did two decades ago? Simply put, the expense to the taxpayers of publishing public notices is a pittance compared to the benefits they get in being alerted to important information about their government. It’s a worthwhile investment.
5. Newspaper readership remains strong in Mississippi. A 2016 survey showed 7-in-10 Mississippians read their local newspaper and more than half recall reading public notices in the newspaper. Only 12% responded they would rather view them online, which means a vast majority prefer print. And we already accommodate that small minority who want public notices digitally via mspublicnotices.org.
6. Websites can be manipulated and changed, while a printed newspaper is firm proof of exactly what was published, which is what courts and banks want. Newspapers provide sworn affidavits attesting that public notices were indeed published.
7. The government should not be both the originator and publisher of its public notices. Sometimes municipalities don’t want the information in public notices to be known to the public and would have incentive to bury them. But as it is now, newspapers act as a third-party verifier or auditor of the notice.
When this issue comes up again, let your state legislators know that there’s no reason to fix a system that isn’t broken.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him via email at csmith@columbianprogress.com or call (601) 736-2611.
