From the Southern Pines Pilot (4/19/11): We'll be upfront here: The Pilot has a financial dog in this particular legislative fight.
But even if we didn’t, we would still be speaking out editorially against House Bill 472, now before the North Carolina General Assembly, which would allow local governments to post their public notices online instead of in print.
There’s a reason these things are called public notices: They are intended to be noticed by people who have an interest or a stake in their subject matter, be it a town council meeting, a planning board hearing or a solicitation for bid proposals on a public project.
These are known in the trade as legal advertisements, or “legals” for short. If they appear in the pages of your local paper, though perhaps it might cost more to put them there, they are surely a hundred times more likely to get noticed — and acted upon — than if they’re buried somewhere in the bowels of a county or municipal website, which is where the sponsors of this dubious legislation would prefer to see them.