By Chris Powell

Some town officials and state legislators are bemoaning the cost of the notices state law requires towns to place in local newspapers to alert the public about government meetings and actions. These officials and legislators claim that the legal requirement should be repealed because towns can provide adequate notice through postings on their Internet sites.

The claim is ridiculous, for while local newspapers have large and measurable audiences, municipal Internet sites do not.

Yes, the mechanisms of conveying information are expanding and changing. Many people, especially young people, spend much time on their Internet-equipped telephones and portable computers. But they’re spending time that way to keep up with friends, with “virtual” communities of no particular geographic connection, and with information about their personal interests, not to check out municipal Internet sites.

Despite the many recent technological changes, only local newspapers provide large audiences in particular geographical areas that pay attention to the news of those geographical areas. So for the time being no mechanism provides actual notice to any town’s residents better than the local newspaper does.

That is also because only local newspapers are consistently reporting news about local and state government. Local television and radio news seldom gets beyond fires, accidents, and titillating sex crimes. Twitter, Facebook, and the other Internet mechanisms of social media are almost entirely personal and trivial outside of anyone’s circle of acquaintances.

Yes, the legal notice requirement brings revenue to local newspapers. But then why shouldn’t it do so?

Reporting news about local government costs money and indeed is the most expensive content in journalism, since most interest in news about local government expires at the town line. Serious coverage of local government isn’t free. Either local newspapers will do it or it won’t be done, and it won’t be done if newspapers don’t have advertising income. Municipal and state government subsidize far less essential undertakings throughout the state.

Indeed, that is another reason why complaints about the supposed high cost of legal notices and their supposed burden on municipal finances are ridiculous. The real problem here is that municipal government, restricted by state mandates and its own political cowardice, can never bring itself to control expenses.

For example, on both a percentage basis and a dollar basis the cost of the salaries and benefits of municipal employees goes up almost every year far more than the cost of legal notices, but town officials and state legislators just shrug as if this is the natural order of things. Town officials and state legislators might be delighted if newspapers stopped reporting about local government precisely so that this lack of control over government expenses might never be brought to the public’s attention.

In the name of easing the financial burden on municipalities, Connecticut House Speaker Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden, lately has not only expressed support for curtailing the legal notice requirement but also for repealing the local property tax exemption enjoyed by hospitals, colleges, and other nonprofit enterprises. Of course whatever municipalities gain by taxing hospitals will just be recovered by hospitals through higher fees to patients, fees that to a great extent will just be passed along to state government itself, which insures many patients either as employees or as recipients of Medicaid or other programs. So the savings would be mostly illusory.

Sharkey and other legislators could relieve far more of the financial burden on towns by giving them more control over their biggest costs, employee compensation. The ignorance that will result from eliminating legal notices will be far more expensive than the notices themselves.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.