Sunshine grows accountability

There’s a movement afoot in the Wyoming Legislature that threatens your right to know.
Two bills were quietly introduced last week that would reduce or eliminate the requirement to publish public notices in local newspapers. HB 146 would eliminate the requirement that names be published along with positions and salaries for cities and counties.
HB 201 goes even further, effectively removing the requirement that public notices be published in newspapers at all. Cities, counties and schools would be allowed to post these notices on their websites and become the official repository for public notices – a job newspapers have done well for over 100 years.
While on their surface, they would appear to save money, research indicates otherwise. When governments are not held accountable for their spending and citizens are not able to easily track that spending, costs go up and government becomes less efficient.
Often called “legals,” Wyoming statute dictates that municipal governments publish in local newspapers meeting dates and times, minutes from meetings, bids for large purchases or construction projects and salaries of staff and elected officials, among other information. Statute also dictates what newspapers may charge for publishing legals and the size of print.
Legals appear near the classified section and readers can find a bevy of information here about how their government functions. Thanks to public notices, readers of the Buffalo Bulletin know that former city of Newcastle Mayor Deb Piana earned just over $7,000 annually.
In Bell, California, that was not the case and left unchecked, the city’s manager was soon taking home $787,000 per year. Bell is a suburb of Los Angeles with a population of about 38,000. Local residents long wondered how he was able to afford a multi-million dollar luxury home on the beach, but it took an investigation by the Los Angeles Times to discover that the manager’s salary had increased 10 fold in 17 years. That same investigation also found that the chief of police was earning $450,000 – more than 50 percent more than the salary of Los Angeles’ chief of police.
Public notices in local newspapers ensure that anyone who reads the newspaper can know what their government is up to. What bids are being let? To whom and for how much? What new ordinance is the city council considering? How much did the county commission spend on new equipment? 
And you don’t even have to buy a paper to get this information because it’s free at the local library.
Public notices provide a permanent, secure and independent repository that keeps government in check by allowing citizens to know how their money is being spent and what their elected officials are doing. The goal of the Wyoming Legislature shouldn’t be to make government spending easier and less accountable. The goal should always be to allow citizens to readily and easily find out how every government dollar is spent.
According to research by Notre Dame’s Medoza College of Business, without the accountability provided by local newspapers, not only do government salaries and the number of government employees go up, so too does spending in all categories, adversely impacting government’s ability to borrow money with bonding. In essence, government becomes vastly more inefficient and expensive.
Wyoming citizens simply cannot afford to eliminate public notices in newspapers.