APP: Public contracts should be online. Why not public notices?
This morning The Asbury Park Press argues in an editorial that public labor contracts should be posted online. They argued that municipalites that don’t have websites that can handle such postings should post them on the Department of Community Affairs’ site.
We agree. While we’re at it, why not public notices that municipalities, school boards and private sector zoning and planning applicants now pay millions per year to advertise in newspapers where very few people see them?
During the last legislative session a bi-partisan bill that would have given jurisdictions the option of advertising legal notices in newspapers or online was passed in committee and scheduled for a vote in both houses of the legislature on the last day of the session. It met fierce resistance from the newspaper industry in committee and before that scheduled vote.
The corporate welfare recipients of the newspaper industry argued that politicians would use the choice to punish newspapers who didn’t give them favorable coverage, and that the savings wasn’t that much, if anything. In their final push to kill the bill, which worked, they argued that some towns don’t have websites that could handle the ads.
The legislature’s Democratic leadership, Senate President Stephen Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Shelia Oliver, killed the bill by not letting their chambers vote on it.
Well, thanks to the good nudniks of Neptune, The Asbury Presseditorial board, we now have a solution to the problem of a small number of towns not having websites that can handle posting legal notices. Notice publication could be a shared service hosting by the Department of Community Affairs or by the counties.
Sweeney has already announced that the legal notice bill will not be a priority in the legislative session that just started, signaling to the reformers that support they bill that they shouldn’t bother. Now that The Asbury Park Press has come up with a solution to the newspaper industry’s latest objection, maybe Sweeney will reconsider.