Legislative commentary
Public notice bill would put foxes in charge of henhouses
Staff writer
House Bill 2191, which would allow public notices to be published only on government websites, poses a greater threat to the health of state newspapers — and our democracy — than did the disavowed police raids 18 months ago on our newsroom and two homes.
The raids resulted in the death of 98-year-old Joan Meyer. HB2191 could lead to the death for numerous struggling businesses and the death of voters’ ability to participate as informed citizens.
Contrary to what sponsors claim, the bill will not save time or money and will not increase public awareness of notices.
Across the state, local governments often spend more to maintain websites than they ever do on publishing official notices.
Thousands of dollars flow out of our communities to distant hosting firms — some even out of the country, raising serious questions about security.
Still, local government websites often are outdated and inaccurate, in part because only a few employees are trained to change them.
Even if sites are updated and accurate, more than one in 10 Kansas households have no Internet access, and that percentage is higher in rural areas — as many as one in four in some.
Proponents support online posting of official notices by claiming that print newspapers are dead or dying. What they conveniently ignore is that nearly every newspaper also publishes online.
In the case of our paper, not only are legal notices published in print. We also post them on three different free websites — our own, in an area in which no subscription is required; on a special statewide site created by the Kansas Press Association; and on a Kansas Historical Society site available free in virtually every library in the state.
Limiting public notices to government sites would reduce rather than expand their visibility.
Putting notices within news publications also ensures that citizens will be able to discover them without having to know to look for them and will be able to find them — unaltered — years from now.
Very few people visit government sites unless they are looking for something in particular. They won’t know to check when something important is adopted but will read a news publication weekly and stumble across notices, just as citizens did centuries ago when notices were required to be posted prominently in a public square rather than hidden away in some official repository.
Permanently recording notices in print, in a medium not controlled by the unit posting it, is an absolutely vital safeguard.
A steady stream of officials routinely come to our office or the city library in Marion to research notices published in the past and make sure they have not been altered since their adoption.
On a government website, a notice easily could be altered by a hacker or an unscrupulous worker.
Throughout the state, government websites have been repeatedly hacked. It’s impossible to hack print, and we’ve had zero instances of state newspaper websites being hacked.
We do, however, have ample evidence of officials attempting without authorization to alter legislation after its passage.
A city clerk in one community we cover resigned a few years ago rather than alter without council approval an ordinance a city administrator wanted to change.
The City of Marion’s official ordinance book was missing for several weeks and found lying unguarded in a public area.
More recently, when the city proposed a charter ordinance on bonding, a city employee responsible for including the ordinance in a city newsletter was told to leave out an entire section that would have eliminated citizens’ right to vote on bond issues.
The deletion was discovered only because the full text was included in our newspaper. The chicanery of attempting to hide the true impact of the ordinance led to a successful petition drive that forced an election, at which the ordinance was rejected by a 10-to-1 margin.
HB2191 solves no problem except, perhaps, to further attempts to drive local news organizations out of business.
Yes, many news organizations owned by distant chains provide inferior service to local communities, but locally owned and operated newspapers provide important public services to their communities and would be equally damaged by loss of public notice advertising.
Unfortunately, the motive for taking that advertising away may be anything but pure.
In investigating the raid on our newsroom, the Colorado and Kansas Bureaus of Investigation uncovered a note sent by Marion’s city administrator at the time suggesting that the city find a way to stop publishing legal notices in our paper because it disagreed with our reporting and editorials.
It’s bad enough that cities use taxpayer money to post free social-media ads in competition with local businesses such as ours, which cannot rely on taxpayers to defray costs of such services.
If the Legislature were to adopt HB2191, could one be certain that it was not done in an attempt to control news media, a clear violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which the Legislature failed to reaffirm its commitment to after the illegal raid on our newsroom.
Debating legislation such as HB2191 also diverts attention away from needed bolstering of the Kansas Open Meetings Act and Kansas Open Records Act, which lag significantly behind laws in other states.
They — like HB2191 — put the fox in charge of the henhouse.
Kansas fails to require, as many states do, that executive sessions be recorded so that a magistrate can determine whether what was discussed legally could be discussed behind closed doors.
Kansans must take officials’ word for it, just as we must when they reply to open-records requests by stating no such documents exist.
We currently are suing the City of Marion for saying that precise thing about a records request we made. After we filed our suit, the city miraculously produced nearly 80 pages of documents it originally had said did not exist.
We as a society cannot afford to give local government total control over such things as the integrity of public notices when we can’t trust them to be honest in other areas unless we go to the considerable expense of suing.
The only plausible reason for legislators to consider HB2191 is its punitive effect on local media, which not only provide important public service but also create jobs and pay taxes in local communities.
HB2191 is ill-advised and unnecessary.
If anything, the Legislature should consider eliminating differences in requirements for legal notices by class of city so local governments may not charter out of permanent publication by independent news organizations.
Express your opinion
Marion County’s state legislators can be reached at these email addresses: Representative Scott Hill at Scott.Hill@house.ks.gov; Representative Mike King at Mike.King@house.ks.gov, and Senator Michael Fagg at Michael.Fagg@senate.ks.gov