Notices keep the citizens informed

The folks we send to the Indiana General Assembly like to tell us how much they value citizen input. You know, “we the people” and all that.
So how come every time the same folks gather in Indianapolis they are so eager to keep citizens in the dark?
It happens every session.
Given the opportunity to figure out a way to reduce public notice advertising, far too many of our lawmakers eagerly sign on.
They’ll offer one reason as their justification: It’ll save a few dollars for local government.
But the real reason is simpler: They know that the workings of government run more smoothly when they are opaque.
Transparency translates into citizen involvement and pesky questions, and those are things that far too many of our elected officials and unelected bureaucrats detest.
A long time ago, back when we had elected officials who actually believed in citizen participation in government, one way to increase transparency was public notice advertising.
The idea was that if the state required units of government to spell out the particulars about how they were spending tax dollars then citizens would be more inclined to rein them in.
And it worked pretty well, though not without its glitches.
Back in the day when newspapers had party affiliations, the rules had to state that public notice advertising had to run in both Democratic and Republican newspapers. These days, those affiliations have virtually disappeared.
Then, somewhere along the line, political types uncomfortable with transparency had an idea.
It worked like this: They would portray a reduction in public notice advertising as a cost savings for taxpayers, and they would suggest newspapers were feeding at the public trough.
It made no difference that the lawmakers themselves set the rate for public advertising, just as it made no difference that without such advertising the public was often in the dark.
The sales pitch was effective. After all, who could be against cutting local government spending? And weren’t newspapers that objected simply looking out for their own balance sheets?
Unfortunately, the pitch worked.
A few decades ago, taxpayers could read a public notice advertisement that spelled out every nickel spent on salaries for teachers and administrators. The Indiana State Teachers Association and the Indiana School Boards Association teamed up to kill that one. The teachers kept their pay behind the veil, and the school boards cut their budgets.
Not too long ago, every claim paid by county government was detailed in a public notice advertisement. The Indiana Association of Counties killed that, looking out for the interests of metropolitan counties like Marion and Vanderburgh and Allen.
Through this whole process, it didn’t matter that local entities — the Jay County Commissioners, the Jay School Board, the Jay Classroom Teachers Association — weren’t pushing for opacity. Their larger organizations were.
Unless the Indiana General Assembly takes action this session, local units of government will no longer be required to publish their budgets.
Okay, so now we get to what editors like to refer to as the “nut graph,” the point where we acknowledge that newspapers benefit financially from public notice advertising.
We do. That’s true today, and it’s been true through the entire history of this nation.
But in the larger scheme of things, it’s not an exorbitant amount of money. Without it, this newspaper would continue to function. It would hurt, but we wouldn’t close our doors.
What would be lost, instead, is public awareness of what government is up to.
And who should pay for that awareness?
It seems to us that the burden for that should be the folks who like to think they are governing us. —J.R.