Saving money or limiting access?

"Never waste the opportunities offered by a good crisis" -- Machiavelli

A recession, lower than projected tax collections, a constituional amendment requiring a balanced and a shortened legislative session -- a "perfect storm" scenario for all sorts of issues to come up and be acted on without much information or public input.

That's what the 2010 edition of the Iowa Legislature is shaping up to be with the first week completed.

Case in point: Senate Study Bill 3030, a 150 page bill to reorganize the government. It contains many good ideas to streamline state government and save money. It also contains a very bad idea: moving all public notice advertising from newspapers to the Internet.

This study bill is one of three measures introduced that would move public notice advertising to the Internet. A sub-committee of the Senate State Government Committee reviewed the Senate Study Bill, all 150 pages, in 90 minutes. One of the members of the sub-committee, Sen. Randy Feenstra, made a motion to strike the language moving all public notice advertising from newspapers to the Internet. His motion was ignored, and the bill has proceded to the Senate.

Public notice advertising is the minutes of government meetings including the bills paid, probate notices and many other types of notices from child safety to sheriff's sales. They have been a part of newspapers since the 17th century. A study conducted by the Iowa Newspaper Association showed that the cost of public notice advertising was, on average, 1/20 of one percent of the budgets of cities, schools and counties.

In addition, as an added value service, Iowa newspapers publish public notices online at one searchable website: www.iowanotices.org. There is no charge for this service.

So, what we have here is a solution in search of a problem. Surveys of Iowans reveal that public notice advertising is well read. A study done in 2009 indicated that 87 percent of Iowans read their local newspaper. Among those that read newspapers, more than half read public notice advertising.

The same survey showed that 57 percent of those surved had never been to a government website. One in four adult Iowans don't even have access to the Internet.

If we were to hazard a guess, we would have to conclude that this measure is motivated by something else than financial considerations.