With RTK track record, legal notices should stay

Published: March 16, 2010

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Local governments in Pennsylvania claim that the state law requiring legal advertising of government business in newspapers of general circulation, including this one, needlessly imposes costs on those governments. They want the Legislature to repeal the law and allow them to post meeting notices and other legal advertising on their own Web sites.

But the issue is public access to information rather than costs. And those governments' own failure to comply with Internet-posting requirements of the state's new Open Records Law demonstrates the inadequacy of self-posting to inform the public.

The new law requires all public agencies to post online contact information for the government's right-to-know officer and the state Office of Open Records, the policy for requests and a form to make requests.

The Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition conducted an audit of Web sites for the commonwealth's 67 counties. It found that, a year after the new law was enacted, fewer than half of counties had fully complied with online requirements, and that 15 counties had posted no right-to know-information. One county had no Web site.

Counties are among the largest and best-financed local governments. If they can't manage to post even simple state-mandated information on Web sites, what are their prospects, and those of smaller units of government, to faithfully post public meeting notices and other legal notices?

The newspaper industry itself already operates a Web site, www.mypublicnotices.com, that posts, at no cost to governments, legal ads that appear in every newspaper in every state.

The Pennsylvania newspaper industry has agreed to a compromise bill that would still require posting legal notices in newspapers of general selection at below-market rates. Yet, under the obvious fiction that governments themselves will inform the public on their own Web sites, the bill has stalled in the state Senate.

It is false economy to terminate the legal notice requirement and a clear case, as demonstrated by the dismal performance of counties to meet the minimal requirements of state law, of getting what you pay for.

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