Keep notices readily available here

By Steve Estes

Unfortunately for the American people, including the folk right here at home, governments at all levels are getting more and more regressive in terms of a free flow of information.

In response to the orders from their corporate overlords, politicians everywhere are trying to rush through legislation aimed at restricting the public’s access to public records.

The US Supreme Court has been very pointed in its definitions of public records. If the information was developed on, typed on, saved on, conceived on, reproduced on, recorded on, sent from, received by or in any other fashion hits any reproducible format technology owned by a government entity, it is considered to be public record.

There are few notable exceptions. Public records do not include plans to purchase real property or the negotiations surrounding that, until the time comes to vote to spend taxpayer dollars.

Public records do not include information that would identify employees such as social security numbers, home addresses and phone numbers. Many in-house employee actions are also off the table, including negotiations surrounding contract employees.

Public record does not include negotiations or legal strategy during ongoing court actions.

We can all live with those exceptions.

What we can’t live with is the withholding of information concerning the spending of taxpayer dollars because it night reveal “business secrets,” as is being used currently by Florida Gov. Rick Scott to withhold information on how little he has gotten in the way of jobs for the $30 million-plus he’s handed out in incentives to corporations.

What we can’t live with is the use of a classified label to hide information about misappropriation of funds, misuse of taxpayer assets, plans detrimental to the safety of citizens or other information that in the hands of populace would be enlightening and beneficial.

And what we also don’t want to live without is the actual physical publication of legal notices from governmental entities.

The Florida Legislature will be asked to opine on bills in the coming session to allow banks to post their notices of foreclosure on a publicly accessible website instead of in a published newspaper of general circulation. On a bank-owned website that requires tedious registration we’re sure.

We have no dog in this fight. There are very strict rules on what newspapers can carry legal advertisements of general interest, and except in narrowly defined cases, free circulation newspapers do not qualify.

The state Legislature will also be asked to opine on bills that will allow governments at all levels to post legal notices, such as meetings, bid notices and prospective actions, on government-owned and controlled websites.

The move is being touted as a money-saving measure.

What it really amounts to is an attack on information flow. Despite everyone’s “acknowledgement” that it is a digital world, still less than 70 percent of American homes have a computer. Governments have thus proposed excluding 30 percent of the homes from access to public information they may need to enrich their lives.

People who are interested in government will generally pick up a publication in which legal notices are carried. The argument can be made that if people don’t pick up the publication, they aren’t interested.

Although the same argument will be made about owning a computer, only the ignorant fall for such an argument.

And since government will control the website, if it doesn’t then the cost-savings is gone and then some, it can make it easy, or it can make it hard, to access the information, similar to the current Monroe County website that went from being extremely user friendly to something of a nightmare to navigate—-but it looks good.

Libraries offering internet access can be cut from the budget, circa 2008 Monroe County. Positions used to update websites can be cut from the budget, circa Monroe County yearly.

A couple of years ago, county staff tried to get the Board of County Commissioners to buy off on limiting legal notices to a single publication, regardless of its readership in any county area. The trade off was to be posting of legal notices on the county-owned web site.

The latter hasn’t happened yet. The only legal notices posted on line are bids, and users must pay for those except in summary form.

Until the government entities are prepared to live up to the spirit of the transparency directives contained in laws up and down the chain, this is just a bad idea.

Saving pennies for the taxpayer and millions for the banks isn’t a fair trade off.