Imagine for a moment putting a bunch of teenagers in charge of guarding keys to liquor cabinets.
Chances are one of three things is going to happen.
You’re going to have several good ones, who are going to do what they are supposed to do and everything will be fine.
There are going to be a few, who will genuinely misplace the key to the liquor cabinet. This will cause some chaos, some big searches and lots of drama trying to find keys that shouldn’t have been lost. Sometimes things will turn out alright despite the misplaced keys. Other times, those misplaced keys are going to end up in the wrong hands and there will be results varying between bad and extremely bad.
Then you have the instances where the keys are “accidently misplaced,” and we have a bunch of drunk teenagers running around or worse driving around. Then the teenagers, who are in charge of guarding the keys to the liquor cabinets, swear up and down that they didn’t do anything wrong and “can’t imagine what might have gone wrong.”
I used this analogy in 2023 when talking about problems associated with a proposed house bill in the Kentucky General Assembly, which would have let pretty much all public agencies post legal notices on their websites instead of in the newspaper.
It is equally appropriate now that the Kentucky General Assembly is back at it with House Bill 368, which was filed on Feb. 5. This bill would allow all Kentucky cities – regardless of size – to put public notices on their own government-owned websites instead of running those notices in the newspaper. There is a provision that would require a small notice in a newspaper by each public agency showing the URL where a notice can be found on a government website.
Some of you may be wondering right about now what public notice advertising is and why you should care about it?
Public notice advertising encompasses several things, such as a notice that a sheriff’s office audit has been completed and is available for viewing at the courthouse, or the notice by a company that it intends to mine a certain area, or notice by a business that it plans to sell alcohol, or that bids are being accepted for a particular governmental building project or road project.
Some of it seems pretty mundane to most people.
However, if a business planned to start mining land right across the street from you, then it would probably become a big deal to you and most of your neighbors. If your neighborhood convenient store was planning to start selling alcohol, which would result in a lot more vehicle traffic on your street, then it would probably become a big deal to you and several other people. If you are a contractor looking for work, then notices about governmental entities accepting bids for construction or road repairs would probably be a big deal for you.
Admittedly, audits are usually pretty boring to read, if officials are doing their jobs correctly. I mean often cure for insomnia boring. Not always though. If the sheriff’s audit shows a bunch of missing receipts for purchases, or show missing or unaccounted for tax money, then that is a big deal. (It has happened before right here in Whitley County for anyone, who doesn’t remember.)
So what is the problem with a city being allowed to place their own public notice advertising on their own website? Actually, there are a few of them.
First, as someone, who looks at websites and particularly government websites on a pretty regular basis, I can assure you that often times information on some of these websites is hard to find, can be outdated and sometimes links to stuff on these websites just doesn’t work.
I’m just talking about the stuff that they want people to be able to access. Frequently, you will find links to positive things that are disabled or don’t work anymore. I’ll cite the example of one government website a few years back that had a community calendar of events, which hadn’t been updated in well over a year.
Some of our local government websites take months to update listings about current government officials, and you will sometimes see people listed, who no longer work in that office.
In fairness to local governments, updating their websites and making sure that the latest information is on there is often low on their list of priorities. They usually have far more pressing concerns to deal with, such as flooding. I get that.
Newspapers on the other hand update their websites and the information on it regularly. I spend much of each Wednesday updating just the editorial content, such as stories and columns and scheduling when those will publish on the website and then on social media. Others at the paper update things, such as the advertising portion of the website, the listing of obituaries and so forth.
Many days various people are updating our website content with breaking information as are most newspapers.
The community calendar of events and which officials to contact for which problems is information that governmental entities generally want people to know about.
Now imagine, if you will, a government entity, whose responsibility it is to post a critical audit of their administration on their website. How long do you think this audit link is actually going to work in many instances? How long do you think that link is going to work when you are dealing with an “ethically challenged” politician?
This is why you have to tailor the law to put in checks and balances to protect against potential government abuse, and one of those checks and balances is publishing legal notices in the newspaper of record in the county rather than relying solely on government websites.
One of the arguments frequently made by politicians for posting audits on government websites is to save local governments money.
Is the cost of running legal advertising bankrupting local agencies? Decide for yourself.
Last week, the News Journal ran an editorial by the Kentucky Press Association in opposition to this bill, which noted that according to a Legislative Research Commission study, only about 0.16 percent of a public agency’s budget is spent on putting notices in newspapers. Put another way, this amounts to about $16 for every $10,000 that local governments spend.
For those that don’t know, the Legislative Research Commission was created in 1948 as a fact-finding and service agency. It operates as the administrative and research arm of the Kentucky General Assembly, which is the legislative body in Kentucky. You can find out more about the agency on its website at https://legislature.ky.gov/LRC/Pages/default.aspx.
I would encourage 82nd Rep. Nick Wilson and 25th Senator Robert Stivers to vote no on House Bill 368.
