Public notices serve a vital role in our community

The Arizona Legislature has launched an offensive against the requirement that cities and counties publish public notices in newspapers.

Legislation currently making the rounds in the Arizona House of Representatives would allow government entities to put their public notices online instead of in newspapers.

The concept is problematic, on a variety of levels.

Arizona newspapers have published public notices for over 100 years, with the purpose of notifying the public of government actions that may impact their interests or rights. The information is available to individuals who may not be searching for it, but instead find it by reading their local newspaper.

We also publish those public notices online, both at YumaSun.com and statewide on the Arizona Newspaper Association's website to ensure a wide, broad reach. Both sites are free to the public to access and search at any time.

In fact, this newspaper reaches 101,000 readers in print and online each day – a significant number.

Printed public notices are especially vital in a rural market like Yuma's, where not everyone has access to the Internet. Yuma County has one of the highest unemployment numbers in the nation, and with that comes a lot of belt-tightening. Many do not have access to computers or the Internet. The Yuma Sun is easier to afford and/or obtain for many here.

And newspaper public notices are vital to government transparency. Currently, governments have an obligation to notify the public of what they are doing before a decision is made – and they should be required to post it in a medium that is independent of the government.

Publication also provides a printed record that can't be manipulated, but can be preserved for future reference.

Eliminating public notices would also have a financial impact to the Yuma Sun in lost revenue, which in turn would be a loss of jobs. At the same time, the government entities that are required to publish the notices online would see higher payroll costs, due to the fact that they would likely need to hire additional staffing to handle publishing the notices on their own websites. And publishing notices online is not free – it will cost the government a lot of money to set up a website to publish notices, at a huge cost to taxpayers.

Our communities connect through the newspaper. The Yuma Sun provides news that the residents and visitors to Yuma County need to know about, and a part of that news is public notices.

The bottom line is, public notices serve a vital role in our communities, and government entities need to continue publishing them in the newspaper.