OUR VIEW: Ink by the barrel: Legals need to be in print
Don't pick fights with a guy who buys ink by the barrel -- at least according to an old saying we've heard countless times. Although we don't think we pick too many fights (well, maybe a few), we also aren't ones to back down, either.
Yes, we buy ink by the barrel. Lots of it. We also buy paper by the semi truckload, and it comes in huge rolls that, if stretched along the highway, would reach somewhere around six or seven miles apiece. We employ more than 60 people, and an army of delivery personnel. We also distribute thousands of newspapers through the U.S. mail, and our trucks and other vehicles guzzle thousands of gallons of gas, at $3.50 per gallon.
So we can't help but feel slighted by Davison County Commission member John Claggett's public questioning of legals, and the county's requirement by state law to publish those legals in The Daily Republic.
By law, the county must publish a 21-page drainage ordinance in The Daily Republic's legals section. Although he said he has no problem with regular proceedings being included in newspaper legal sections, he thinks its wrong to have to publish long, large documents in newspapers for a fee.
He said Tuesday that "perhaps we should have a different venue."
We get so tired of arguments against publication of legals, and/or the argument to put legals on the Internet in place of traditional newspaper publication.
For the record, Davison County has budgeted approximately $20,000 for publication fees in 2014, according to information presented at Tuesday's commission meeting. Although that's no small chunk of change, it's important to note that it's about a quarter of 1 percent of the county's $7.5 million budget. Again for emphasis: About a quarter of 1 percent of the budget.
That means that for a miniscule portion of its budget, the county is able to fully inform its constituents of its intentions and day-to-day operations, payouts, hirings and so forth, according to the state law that mandates it. In some cases, the legals even alert taxpayers of big troubles.
A good example is the recent court case involving The Daily Republic and the Huron school board. When a Huron resident saw in her local legals that the board was still paying a former superintendent, she wondered why and asked us to look into it. We found that the school district apparently paid the ex-superintendent nearly $175,000 in public money over a series of months, after his employment with the district ended. We're still trying, on behalf of the district's taxpayers and taxpayers everywhere, to find out why. If legals weren't published in the tipster's local newspaper, that odd payout to a past employee probably never would have come to light.
Gov. Dennis Daugaard is entirely in favor of keeping legals in newspapers, and a majority of the Legislature, too.
And finally, we can't help but notice that locally, the people who generally have raised a stink about legals are elected public servants who have had dustups with the newspaper.
It once happened a few years back with a former city councilman who was unhappy with The Daily Republic's coverage and shortly thereafter suggested removing the legals from the newspaper.
More recently, earlier this year, Claggett announced at a county meeting that he was "teed off" at The Daily Republic for its coverage of a commission decision to award a purchasing contract to a company owned by Claggett's brother.
Either way, state law says legals should be published. We say that's the way it should be, since legals are the only regular connection some taxpayers have to their elected boards.
Legals could be put on the Internet -- and in many cases they already are, by newspapers who also publish them in print -- but it'll still cost money to do that. Also, we can't imagine that every city council and county board would entirely follow through on such a project, and even if they did, it would restrict access to people who aren't Internet savvy or have no interest in having to search for their public records.
Meanwhile, newspapers still have the attention of their communities. Chances are you're reading this in print, after all.
Sure, we could do it for free, for the sake of public openness. But like the old joke says, we buy ink by the barrel and, gosh darn, that ink is expensive.