Here is why you need to tell the Associated School Boards of South Dakota to change its outlook on Public Notices. For those who don’t know, Public Notices are the minutes and financial reports of our government institutions published in legally designated newspapers. This is a tradition as old as the nation itself. The simple reason this is done for transparency and accountability. The people deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent and what their elected leaders are doing.
One of the things Shannon said, and the reason the ASBSD gives for wanting to get rid of Public Notices, was that publishing public notices is expensive. I won’t say that isn’t true. Why, last year the school spent $3,225 with me to publish all of their legal notices. That does come out of the school’s general fund. Salaries for employees and programs come out of that same budget, and it’s the budget that’s tight right now. I understand that. But if you look at this year’s projected general fund budget of $5,114,842, I’m only 0.0630518% of that total budget. Barely a blip on the radar or a drop in the bucket. Working out the math with my partner, paying a part-time employee to do the work I do for the school at a generous $11 an hour salary, jumps that cost to about $9,460 per year (and that’s not a full year it’s only during the regular school session). I’d say the school is getting their legal notices published at a more than generous rate.
By far, my biggest customer for legal notices is Minnehaha County. Last year (an election year by the way, so they are usually much denser for legal publications) they paid us a total $20,718.19. A decent chunk of change, that’ll buy you a decent new or used car in pre-pandemic prices. However, if you compare it to their overall general fund budget last year of $36,057,954.21, that leaves me with getting only 0.05745803% of their organization’s annual budget. Again, just a drop from the bucket.
My biggest expenses are salaries, printing costs and postage. We need to get paid, because as much as Carrie and I love Garretson, we’ve got to make a living doing this or the community doesn’t have a newspaper. Printing costs are pretty steadily on the rise, as is postage. That money gets spent quickly, and legal notices are about 40 percent of our income, depending on the year. It is significant enough that it will probably kill us if Representative Jon Hansen of Dell Rapids has his way.
Now, Hansen is on the budgetary committee that very recently voted unanimously to give us our rate increase this coming year, a rate increase we haven’t had since 2018, and before that since 1998. Why he changed his mind after almost viciously opposing us last year in the legislature, I’m not sure, as he hasn’t traditionally returned my calls. Make no mistake about it, last year he started pushing this idea of a State-controlled Public Notice website, with the express purpose hurting the free press as a political goal. Sadly, that means I’ll trust him only if I’ve got a legally certified contract in my hand, and maybe not even then.
I don’t think a database where all public notices are available for free for anyone with a computer or a smartphone can look them up is a bad thing. In fact, I’m all for it, and we’ve already done it. It’s been operational for years and we’ve just updated it with some new tech partners from a very savvy company called Column. Go to www.sdpublicnotices.com and see what we’ve already built. It’s already there and operational. And it’s paid for by the South Dakota Newspaper Association as part of our membership dues. All the newspapers in the state decided, quite a while ago actually, that this information should be available at no cost to all South Dakotans and the world, whether or not they have a newspaper subscription.
What Hansen proposed last year, which fell apart because he didn’t have support or a workable plan, would have pointlessly spent taxpayer dollars. It likely would have ended up as an unfunded mandate which the school business managers, city finance officers and county deputy auditors would have had to backfill with a metric ton of information. I don’t know what you all think about that, but those people are already overworked and underpaid in my opinion. Either that or it would have all been dropped in the lap of the Secretary of State’s office, who would have then had to liaison with all those aforementioned parties. A logistical nightmare, and most certainly requiring a larger budgetary appropriation and perhaps a whole new department to run it. So, you could do that, sure... or you could rely on local newspapers who’ve been legally mandated to provide this service to you since statehood.
Let me talk about newspapers in South Dakota for a minute. In a digital age, where whole sections of the country are operating with news deserts, South Dakota is South Dakota strong. SDNA just completed a readership survey for South Dakota, with a local South Dakota company called Coda Ventures, and the numbers are amazingly heartening. According to our survey results 83 percent of South Dakota adults read their local newspaper either in print or digital form! 70 percent are under the age of 65! 77 percent read public notices in their print or digital newspapers and 72 percent believe that public notices in newspapers should be required. 86 percent name their local newspaper as their most trusted source of information for public notices! Also, 8 out of 10 of those readers are also regular and registered voters. I’m obviously really happy about this.
So why has the ASBSD been our traditional opponent as regards Public Notices during the last and previous legislative sessions? I understand the motivation of being fiscally conservative, wanting to spend every tax dollar wisely. We as newspaper owners know that, and we have. The South Dakota Newspaper Association isn’t your enemy. In fact, we can and should be your strong advocate and ally. The legislature has continuously underfunded education in our state. In fact we have always been the first people to point that out. Pierre needs to do better for education, and it’s up to us to make them do better. Support us by telling the ASBSD to change its stance on Public Notices. Don’t sweep away dollar bills in the search for a couple of pennies. Instead, stand with us to support policies that enrich our state, to make it a better place for our children to live and work in!
-My thanks for your consideration, Garrick A. Moritz, editor and owner of the Garretson Gazette and Vice-President of the South Dakota Newspaper Association.
