State Sen. Ryan Aument, a Lancaster County Republican who serves as Senate whip, “sent a letter to his colleagues in December urging them to support a study by the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee to assess the cost of paid public notices incurred by public entities statewide,” LNP-LancasterOnline’s Jaxon White reported.
That study, Aument wrote, “will go a long way to helping the Legislature decide if continued advertising in print newspapers is still the best method to ensure this important information reaches the public.”
The subject of where public notices of local government meetings are published may seem like inside baseball — that is, the kind of issue that only the wonkiest of government wonks would care about.
But it’s actually very important to all of us, and not just those who are employed by newspapers. This is about keeping tabs on what our local governments are doing and how they are spending taxpayer money. This is about transparency.
Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act requires public entities — counties, municipalities and school boards — to notify people in advance of meetings, contract proposals, scheduled zoning hearings and other official business in “newspapers of general circulation.” Public notices are intended to help better inform citizens about what their governments are up to, promote participation in public meetings and ensure businesses have an equal shot at bidding for jobs and projects.
But newspapers charge public entities to run the public notices, and those entities are balking at the cost. Local government officials want to be able to publish public notices primarily on their websites.
As White noted, “The Pennsylvania State Association of Boroughs and the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors have identified removing the requirement as a top priority.” You’d think that in Pennsylvania, where local government is fragmented and inefficient, those associations would have bigger fish to fry, but apparently not.
The problem with publicizing public notices on local government websites begins with those websites. Some of them are very basic and difficult to navigate; this may be one reason they draw so little traffic. But there’s also this: Even in 2024, not everyone in Pennsylvania has internet access.
Newspapers — even with shrinking circulations — remain the best way to disseminate information to the greatest number of people. And they’re generally available in public libraries.
Barbara Hough Huesken, director of legislative affairs at the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, said public notices allow constituents to be “part of the process” when governments are doing the public’s business. And, importantly, she said newspapers are an “independent third party.” If a public entity posted the notices themselves, Huesken said, there could be a “conflict of interest,” because they could hide or shape a notice to a desired point of view.
Huesken said citizens want newspapers to continue holding the responsibility of publishing public notices. She cited a 2022 poll that found that 92% of 600 registered voters surveyed supported the requirement. That study was paid for by the Pennsylvania NewsMedia association and conducted by the Virginia-based Public Opinion Strategies.
Aument and state Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill, R-York County, are considering legislation to require newspapers to display the cost of each public notice in the ad’s corner, which they believe would increase transparency between newspapers and taxpayers. We would be fine with this requirement.
We say the more transparency, the better, especially when taxpayer money is being spent — the amounts local governments spend on public notices are already a matter of public record.
Losing revenue from public notices would hurt newspapers such as this one. That’s an undeniable fact.
What worries us, and should worry readers, is that this may be the goal of some of the elected officials prioritizing the public notice issue.
Newspapers can be bothersome to elected officials, who would prefer to conduct the public’s business without being questioned.
Aument, for example, has criticized LNP-LancasterOnline for its news coverage of his legislative attempts to limit access to what he considers to be sexually explicit content in school libraries. He authored a column on that issue that the Opinion department published Oct. 29, 2023.
Community newspapers exist to provide forums for such debates. They exist to inform citizens what elected officials are doing on their dime. And when newspapers disappear, the consequences are terrible — research has shown that voter participation goes down, corruption increases, and taxes go up, as the cost of government borrowing rises.
We hope that any legislative study assessing public notices in newspapers takes all of this into account. Our shared interest in advancing the public good should be the prevailing aim.
— LNP-LancasterOnline via TNS
