The Montezuma County commissioners are investigating ways to pay less for publishing legal notices.
At first, that sounds laudable. Seeking ways to minimize government expenses is always a good idea. The detail potentially lost in that objective, however, is that “publishing legal notices” means “providing information to the public about what their government is doing.” This is not all about money; it is about something more important.
Informing citizens in a cost-effective manner is good; doing less of it is not good at all. Representative government is only ever as good as its constituents require it to be, and uninformed constituents cannot effectively monitor it.
Add to that the putative belief that elected officials do, or at least should, desire citizen participation, and it is obviously incumbent on the commissioners to be sure that no action they take reduces the amount of information available and easily accessible to the public. Tacking notices to a bulletin board in the courthouse does not provide the same value.
Montezuma County has long required such notices to be published in an established local newspaper that is circulated at least weekly. Right now, the Journal is the only qualifying newspaper. The county could change its own rules — after providing adequate notice to the public, of course — but would still run up against a state statute with the same requirements.
The state law has stood against many challenges from Colorado governmental entities — mostly counties — and their lobbyists. Over the years, they have accomplished some tweaks, but legislators are, rightly, reluctant to remove a mechanism that protects citizens’ ability to be involved in what their governments are doing. One rationale behind maintaining the current system is that it is part of a time-honored system of checks and balances. Allowing governments to publish their own notices only through their own websites (which they are certainly free to use also) does not provide many checks.
Newspapers, which have a financial interest in this system but which also deeply value transparency in government, have responded to complaints by finding ways to make legal notices available online and by collaborating to make them searchable in bulk on PublicNoticesColorado.com. For example, a contractor in Denver can easily discover that a county in the southwest corner of the state is planning to build a new justice building and can provide a bid that the county is free either to accept or reject by applying a local preference.
Those mechanisms function with varying degrees of effectiveness, and the commissioners are justified in requiring that the county’s notices be available to the most people at the lowest cost. It is tempting to believe that another business could do it better or less expensively. That might be true; the newspaper industry is contracting rapidly, and monopolies rarely function to hold costs down.
But cost savings can be shortsighted, especially if they start pulling cogs out of a larger system. It is also worth pointing out that not all costs accrue to the county in the end. For example, the publication fee for delinquent property tax notices becomes a lien on the property, to be paid to the county.
Right now, Montezuma County must follow state statute. If it wants to challenge that system — a recent trend — a mechanism exists to do that. The Legislature is in session.
In order to bring about that change responsibly, the commissioners must respect the goal of an informed citizenry. That value was established so long ago when these laws were written. The invention of the Internet may have added a new medium, but it has not taken away any valid rationale for using taxpayer money to inform taxpayers fully about the actions of their county government.
