The Indiana Publisher

We can't rely on public officials to voluntarily surrender information July 2018 Page 8 Richard Karpel Public Notice Resource Center The commissioners in Guilford County, N.C., voted this year to move all public notices required by state law from local newspapers to the county's website. Four companies that publish newspapers in the county recently filed suit to have the ordinance — and the statute that enabled it — ruled unconstitutional. If the lawsuit fails, Guilford will become the first county in the U.S. to completely arrogate to itself the responsibility for publishing its notices. And there is a grave danger that the practice will spread to the rest of the state. There are many reasons why this is a spectacularly bad idea. Perhaps one of the best is simple human nature: If you give people the ability to hide information that is embarrassing or otherwise inconvenient to reveal, nine times out of ten they will hide it. Earlier this month, elected officials and government employees in Robeson County, N.C., provided us with a timely illustration of how they hide unpleasant information when presented with the opportunity to do so. According to the county's largest newspaper, the names of close relatives of two county commissioners were omitted from a delinquent-tax notice published in a local weekly paper. The Robesonian also reports it was the second straight year the names were excluded from the list, so it's clear it wasn't the result of a simple mistake. A public official in the county whose identity has yet to be revealed made it happen. Perhaps even a better example came to us recently from Michi- gan, where late last year the state's environmental agency published a notice about a Nestle Waters proposal to pump more groundwa- ter from public wells for its Ice Mountain bottling plant in the state. The agency knew it was a controversial matter since earlier attempts by Nestle to use public groundwater met with widespread opposition. Yet the only notice the agency provided about the proposal was posted on its own website. The notice had been buried on that website for 41 days before a reporter from the Grand Rapids Press discovered it and wrote a story about the proposal. For those 41 days, the notice had attracted zero public attention or comment — not even from an environmental organization that has for many years fought Nestle in court to reduce the amount of water the company can withdraw from Michigan wells. Within the first three days after the newspaper's story was published, the agency received 3,000 comments and the public outcry over the proposal forced it to extend the comment period and schedule a public hearing. It eventually received over 80,000 comments. In retrospect, it's pretty easy to see why the agency decided not to publish the notice in a local newspaper — an option it had been granted a few years earlier by the state legislature. Public notice laws were enacted in all 50 states by previous genera- tions that understood that some information is so important we can't rely on public officials to voluntarily surrender it. So they passed laws stating precisely when and where such information must be published and didn't leave it to the government to do the publishing. Excluding newspapers from that process would be a significant blow to transparency and a threat to the proper functioning of our democracy. Richard Karpel is the executive director of the Public Notice Resource Center, a nonprofit organization that promotes effective public notice and educates the public about its right to know. PNRC is primarily funded by newspapers and newspaper organizations. This column appeared originally in The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. Opinion experiencing historic and competi- tive challenges from organic market forces," said Mark Zieman, vice president of operations at McClatchy, which operates 29 newspapers. "These tariffs for local news are unneces- sary, unfortunate and ill-consid- ered." The preliminary tariffs were imposed in response to a petition from a papermill in Washington state called the North Pacific Paper Company. It is one of five remaining newsprint mills in the U.S., but it was the only company to petition for the tariffs. "NORPAC is an outlier, owned by a New York hedge fund operator, with no additional pulp or paper operations in the United States or globally," 32 representa- tives including Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) wrote in a letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. "In contrast, the majority of U.S. newsprint manufacturers, and even the national trade association for the U.S. forest and paper industry, the American Forest and Paper Association, as well as their major U.S. customers, oppose NORPAC's petitions." The ITC rarely reverses its course in final phase hearings, but users of newsprint may have other avenues for recourse. Earlier this month, a similar case concerning U.S. countervailing duties on Canadian glossy paper used in magazines was upheld at the ITC. The case then was taken to the World Trade Organization, where the global trading body handed Canada a win. Congress itself has tried to move forward with legislation to counteract the new paper tariffs. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) introduced a bill in May, which has the support of over 20 Republicans and Democrats, to pause the tariffs for an impact study. An identi- cal House bill introduced by Rep. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) has over 20 co-sponsors. In the meantime, however, the cost cuts and downsizing at newspapers have continued. The Madison Press, which serves readers in Ohio, announced last week it would stop publishing a paper edition and transition to a weekly paid digital publication partly because of the price increase from the tariffs. Ben Chavis, president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which represents more than 200 African-American publishers, wrote against the tariffs in a piece published by The Sentinel — the largest African-American paper in California. "Amid the rush to comprehend the ramifications of a full-scale international trade war initiated by the errant and backward tariff policies of the Trump Administra- tion, there are results of the tariffs that need to be challenged by Black America," Chavis said. "The financial sustainability of the Black Press of America is now facing a catastrophic and a possible deadly impact, because of these new tariffs." Tariffs Continued from Page 1 Public notice laws were enacted in all 50 states by previous generations that understood that some information is so important we can't rely on public officials to voluntarily surrender it.

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