Why do they want to bury public spending notices?

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Question: Who visits school district Internet web sites daily or weekly?
Answer: Students, parents, teachers ... people who are already invested in school districts.
Do you?
The question is important because you - people from all walks of life, including but not limited to the above-mentioned school-invested folks - read newspapers daily or weekly.
Who reads the public notices that are published in our classified advertising section?
That answer depends on your definition of "read." Few of us read word-for-word those notices of sheriff's sales, bid proposals, forthcoming public meetings, mine blasting permits, etc.
But we do skim - and, if something catches someone's eye, we stop.
So, for example, a New Bethlehem resident might go right past a mine blasting permit - but a Toby Township resident's eyeballs will screech to a halt, go into reverse and first gear, then slowly peruse that permit because of two little words, "Toby Township."
That same resident is not about to go to the school district's website daily or weekly, unless he or she is also a school-invested person looking for lunch menus, school delays, etc.
But mine blasting permits don't go in sections of websites devoted to school districts. Notices of separations don't go in sections devoted to requests for bids.
So if Pennsylvania's legislators, still fuming that newspapers played a role in denying them their unconstitutional pay increase in 2005, succeed in crippling us financially by pulling public notices out of newspapers onto obscure governmental web sites, we (newspapers) do "lose."
So do you.

• Legislators crow about "protecting local jobs." Pulling public notices from our newspapers will force layoffs of from two to four people locally, and 750-1,000 jobs statewide. That's far more jobs than are being "protected" by the Legislature's refusal to tax smokeless tobacco at the same level as cigarettes.
• All of those public notices are already "on line." We - newspapers - put them there, at no additional cost to government, because we can, since we already have websites.
• Government will need to create a whole new bureaucracy to put these notices on line, to oversee their legality, etc. Those will be governmental jobs, with governmental benefits, i.e., "Cadillac" health care, lengthy sick leave accumulation, etc. All this to replace good local people already doing the work for private-sector wages and benefits.

Sure, the Legislature can "pay back" newspapers for having done our job in 2005.
In the process, they make government less transparent, more expensive - and you're left to wonder why some official's brother-in-law gets all those high-profit local contracts, while other potential bidders never knew about them.
In this instance, legislators don't listen to us. They already know where we stand.
Where do you stand? Let them know.