A bill would allow town meetings to be publicized online.
Rep. Paul Stam, an Apex Republican, said he filed the bill to expand a local program in small towns in Wake County that allowed them to avoid expensive legal notices in the local newspaper.
Instead, the towns of Apex, Cary, Garner and Knightdale have posted notices of upcoming zoning hearings and town council meetings on their Web sites. Stam said the program saved the towns money while still getting the word out.
"Most people aren't affected by it," he said. "Most people don't care whether there's an ad in the paper or not. The purpose is to put it out there publicly so that someone who wants to know what's going on has a source to find it."
The bill would not affect all legal notices. Towns would still have to notify neighbors of affected properties by mail, and foreclosure notices and civil actions would still have to be publicized in local papers.
In addition, Stam is considering adding provisions to help local officials determine whether they have sufficient Internet penetration.
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Re: Bill: Post meeting notices online
"The purpose is to put it out there publicly so that someone who wants to know what's going on has a source to find it."
No, it's not. The purpose is to circulate the notice as widely as possible, so that a lot of people are aware of the meeting, not just, "someone who wants to know".
I'm sorry, but this is a mistake. You want to put that on the town's website in addition to the paper, drive on, and more power to ya'. Putting it there to replace the newspaper-published notice will guarantee that only a handful of people will know.
You want to talk about Internet penetration? Okay. Craigslist is HOT. It's in the top ten most popular sites on the Internet. But it still only has a reach of less than 2%. That's 2% of the people who go on the Internet, that is, meaning their actual reach to the general public is lower. If something as hot as Craigslist only attracts that percent of people, what kind of "reach" do you think a town's website would get? Exactly.
Apex's little newspaper circulates to over 5% of the population, and Cary's paper has a circulation almost half the size of the city's population, although a lot of those probably go outside the city. Taking these notices out of the newspaper is a bad idea. It's like blowing out a candle and saying, "Ah, now I can see much better."