Jon Hunter and I will disagree on this bill: House Bill 1078 would allow municipalities, counties, and school districts to publish their minutes, bids, and other official documents on an officially designated website in addition to or instead of in the traditional print publication.
I already publish the Lake Herman Sanitary District agendae, minutes, and other documents online. I can take minutes during a meeting, hit "Publish" the moment the meeting is done, and instantly inform all of my eager Lake Herman constituents of what their government is up to. The cost of maintaining a website for the district is about the same as the cost of two major publications in the newspaper. Allowing online publication would be a great money-saver for local governments. Plus, online documents are a lot easier for citizens to retrieve and share, making it easier to watch government and hold it accountable.
HB 1078 still requires some print publication. Local governments taking the online publication route would still have to publish notices in the official newspaper at least twice a year telling people where they can get hold of the city/county/district's official documents. Of course, that statute would have to be rewritten when iPads and the Web put print newspapers completely out of business....
You are forgetting that for weekly newspapers, especially, a high readership are older who aren't comfortable with using the internet. This is the biggest detractor for me ... by using the internet ONLY, governments would be limiting openness for a segment of constituents.
We see in media that the outlets to connect with people are increasing, not decreasing. By allowing ONLY internet, entities would alienate a section of users, rather than drawing them into the process. But, from a govt perspective, using the internet in addition to publication will grow their reach. That makes more sense to me.
There is an easy fix for the issue of taxpayers who are not connected to the internet, and that is to post copies of minutes at the Public Library, City Hall and County Courthouse for anyone to read. This bill would save government entities millions of dollars over the next ten years, and we would have the information much faster than the old traditional pre-internet method of waiting for the newspaper. Also, 50% of taxpayers no longer subscribe to newspapers and none of the younger generation subscribe. They are all internet based for their information. Good common-sense change that reflects changing times and better communication.
Does this sound familiar Cory?
Observing this, the Vogons turned on their PA again. It said:
‘There’s no point acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.’
That sounds very familiar, Michael. It's exactly what I thin of when, to track down some government action, I have to go to the library or the newspaper archives and sift through a bunch of heavy, musty, analog, poorly indexed tree remains with no electronic search function.
Jessica, right now we have the same openness issues because the law allows only print. Each medium favors some citizens over others, which is a problem. Print and electronic would be ideal... but then so would $50K teacher salaries. If we have to make a choice, electronic-only publication (with free public access to Web terminals at the library and e-copies or paper copies at the courthouse) would provide more people better access (searchability! sharability! blogability!) than the current paper-only model.
So can the Chamberlain paper develop a profitable iPad app?
A correspondent notes that public notices are available online at http://www.sdpublicnotices.com, courtesy of the South Dakota Newspaper Association. Of course, last I checked, SDNA only posts notices there after paid publication in a member newspaper.
The SDNA online notice service still stinks. The notices are posted as scans of the original newspaper notice. That's nice if you're verifying that legal notices were published in the official newspaper, or if you're studying the evolution of fonts in print, but it adds little value for the citizen who just wants to find what was said and done at the meeting.
Via the SDNA site, I search and open the 9/22/2010 minutes of the Lake Herman Sanitary District as published in the October 6 Madison Daily Leader, and the initial view is too tiny to read. I have to hit my browser zoom button five or six times to get i legible. I try copying some text as I would if I were blogging about it or copying text to e-mail to someone. Here's what I get:
Mostly useless.
And then there's this notice on the home page:
In other words, because they're storing these big bulky image files instead of simple text, SDNA doesn't have enough room on their servers to maintain a historical archive. So you can't use the SDNA service to research any government action more than a few months old.
Now try this: Google '"Lake Herman Sanitary District" "September 22" minutes'. Use those quote marks, and the very first result is the copy of the minutes on the sanitary district website. Google returns no results from the SDNA's website. Same thing happens if you search "Lake County Commission minutes": plenty of Google results straight from the government website, zilch from SDNA. SDNA's database is searchable only within its own website. So for 9 out of 10 citizens who are simply turning to their regular search engine looking for a specific document from the sanitary district, the SDNA's public notice site is invisible.
We can do public notices better and faster straight through the web.
I say use both. I do most things on-line, but there are a number of people who aren't internet savvy, and aren't going to be. (These are the same people I am currently calling with close-line listings because KJAM has quit broadcasting the information and it's all on-line and available.) We need both print and internet. The other reason to have both is that, in case anybody hasn't noticed, on-line postings can be edited or even deleted without leaving a paper trail. It's always nice to have some proof in hand of what the legislation/decision was.
Our local governments are broke. In a perfect world we would have notices read on the radio because there is a percentage of the population that can't read or afford a newspaper. But we have to make choices based on cost.
Luckily there is a solution that would preserve independence and save the taxpayer money:
Look at this site http:// free-public-notice.com . It is FREE-You don’t have to subscribe to a newspaper to receive the notices THE NOTICES COME TO YOU-. No more hunting for notices in the back of the newspaper. They e-mail alerts based on preference of both type of notice and locality. (“Please e-mail me whenever there is a zoning hearing in Camden". Set it up once and forget it. -IMMEDIATE-The local government doesn’t have to wait for the notice to be published in the newspaper for it to be published on line. The government employees can upload it straight to the site. -BETTER DISCLOSURE-They link to the original documents (zoning maps, bid specifications, providing way more information than a notice in print. In addition, they map to the localities-DOCUMENTATION- they provide affidavits of publishing. -GREEN- No cutting down trees to publish these notices. -PERMANENCE- The notices stay on line forever. In newspapers they are published in a few editions and then are gone. COST SAVINGS- The local governments will save 90% of what they spend in notices. The newspaper’s publish the notices for only a few weeks.This issue is playing out all over the country. Read http://legal-notice.org. Newspapers do a lot of things really well. But so do a lot of businesses. It doesn’t mean as taxpayers we should overspend for a service that is now inferior
Our local governments are broke. In a perfect world we would have notices read on the radio because there is a percentage of the population that can't read or afford a newspaper. But we have to make choices based on cost.
Luckily there is a solution that would preserve independence and save the taxpayer money:
Look at this site http://free-public-notice.com . It is FREE-You don’t have to subscribe to a newspaper to receive the notices THE NOTICES COME TO YOU-. No more hunting for notices in the back of the newspaper. They e-mail alerts based on preference of both type of notice and locality. (“Please e-mail me whenever there is a zoning hearing in Camden". Set it up once and forget it. -IMMEDIATE-The local government doesn’t have to wait for the notice to be published in the newspaper for it to be published on line. The government employees can upload it straight to the site. -BETTER DISCLOSURE-They link to the original documents (zoning maps, bid specifications, providing way more information than a notice in print. In addition, they map to the localities-DOCUMENTATION- they provide affidavits of publishing. -GREEN- No cutting down trees to publish these notices. -PERMANENCE- The notices stay on line forever. In newspapers they are published in a few editions and then are gone. COST SAVINGS- The local governments will save 90% of what they spend in notices. The newspaper’s publish the notices for only a few weeks.This issue is playing out all over the country. Read http://legal-notice.org. Newspapers do a lot of things really well. But so do a lot of businesses. It doesn’t mean as taxpayers we should overspend for a service that is now inferior