Opinion - Cutting access is too expensive

Washington lawmakers are still faced with a $5 billion bukdget shortfall. They are scrambling to cut that amount from state spending.

Increasing efficiency, taking on unions, revising retirement programs, cutting the multiple layers of state management and sizing down the bureaucracies are tough but logical places for savings.

The legislature is looking instead for easier ways to balance the budget or, more correctly, ways to use the budget crisis to justify self-serving changes. As a result, some long held beliefs are being cast aside and some strange new attitudes are emerging.

One such idea is to allow government entities to disseminate their own legal notices.

Currently tax supported entities are required to notify the public of their actions and intentions in general circulation newspapers. The Gazette is one such newspaper, and the Gazette is paid for running those legals.

Often, government and tax supported entities are rankled by the fact that they must announce certain activities and proposed actions. More rankling, perhaps, is that citizens respond to the notices and get new and important information from them. Sometimes legal notices can prompt the public to act in ways that public employees do not like.

Bills now in Olympia would allow public legal notices to be shown only on government websites, allowing all levels of government to hide in new privacy. This change apparently is sought by the state associations of counties and cities whose members pay their dues with public funds.

Not many citizens regularly visit government websites, and that could, in fact, be an impetus for the proposals.

Open government is the cornerstone of a democracy. The on-going state budget crisis may bring us some unpleasant things. One of the most serious, in the long run, is the elimination of easily accessible public notices. Full disclosure is important. That is threatened by this round of bills.

The public has the right to know. Yet, the main supporters of these bills to limit access are the very entities which have the responsibility to keep the citizenry informed.

Cutting government costs and operating within the constraints of a budget are one thing, cutting public access to government itself is altogether different and far too expensive.

Gordon Forgey

Publisher