Citizens should be aware of – and opposed to – House Bill 2801 and the provisions that would allow local governments to cease publishing public notices in their local newspapers.

The presumed cost savings to local government is in fact false economy – there is a hidden and very dangerous cost. In trying to save money, local governments would curtail access to the legislative process, and ensure that fewer – rather than more – citizens know what their representatives are up to.

The publishing of public notices in newspapers of record dates to 1789, when the first Congress required publication of its bills, orders, resolutions and votes in at least three generally available newspapers. The founders recognized that government should not be the gatekeepers of its own information. So their purpose was to require government to report its actions to citizens in a medium independent of government influence or control: the newspaper.

It was good policy then, and it remains good policy today.

Publishing legal notices in a newspaper of record ensures that decisions related to public debt, ordinances and laws, zoning, taxation and quality of life – all matters of compelling and perpetual public interest – are made with transparency.

Legal notices empower the public to get involved in the process. And they contribute to a reservoir of archived material in a form that cannot be altered, changed, hacked, hidden or manipulated after the fact. This would simply not be true of notices published exclusively online.

In publishing public notices in newspapers of record, local government acknowledges that government itself carries the burden of keeping citizens informed, and that it will not shift that burden to the citizens themselves to go hunting for information.

To that end, the local, general-interest newspaper remains the vehicle with the widest reach to the widest cross-section of the community. And we can prove it.