Make public notices a priority
The public has a right to know exactly how its hard-earned tax money is spent. At no time is wastefulness acceptable, but it's especially harmful during the present budget crisis.
Throughout much of our state's history, Kansas citizens could see where a great many of their dollars were spent.
As an example, when the Downs News subscribers read their county commissioners' proceedings on Feb. 16, 1939, they learned that John Yost was paid $62.75 in salary, that the Stephenson Brothers were paid $62.02 for a tubercular cow, and that W.W. Dimond received $80.50 for working on a road, while Harold Deters was paid $97 for working on a bridge.
These proceedings ran more than a full page of body type, and explained Osborne County's January 1939 expenditures of $19,026.04 in great detail. For presenting this information, the four county newspapers received $169.57 — less than nine tenths of one percent of the total spent.
That's how it once was, but public officials are more secretive now. A few years ago, the Smith County commissioners quit publishing their expenditures. Under a new law, they told me, they no longer were required to do so.
Public notices waste money, some officials say, and they claim that the public doesn't read them.
The exact opposite is true. Few articles are more thoroughly examined than the delinquent tax list, for instance. More importantly, detailed public notices don't cost. They save taxpayers a great deal of money.
Almost all public officials are honest, but they also are human beings. It's human nature to be much more frugal with the public's money when the public is watching your every move. It's a lot easier to vote for wasteful equipment and projects if you can hide what you're doing.
This trend toward secret spending has cost taxpayers a great deal of money.
Detailed public notices are one of the keys to open government. Newspapers are the proper vehicle because they are honest brokers of information for a wide segment of the population. They're well-read throughout the year and the public trusts them.
But public notices are under attack. Some county officials want to spend the publication money elsewhere. Some offer to post them on little-known government web sites, even though lots of citizens don't own computers, while many computer users don't find time to navigate the multitudinous Internet sites.
Free "shoppers" and little-known private web sites also are after this legal-notice revenue.
Many newspapers set legal notices in readable type with attractive headings and position them among the important news. They promote legal notices, and they write news stories that call attention to them. They include these notices in readership studies, and they provide top-notch service to the officials who publish them.
Darrell Miller,
Smith County Pioneer
