FALL 2006 NEWSLETTER
GEORGIA FOI ACCESS
GEORGIA FIRST AMENDMENT FOUNDATION

AROUND THE SOUTH

The region’s public notices move inexorably into Cyberspace, and families
and their lifestyles are at grave risk

By Tom Bennett

     Decatur, Ga., Sept. 7, 2006 – The Texas Building and Procurement Commission publishes the ESBD – the Electronic State Business Daily.  How’s that for a slap in the face of  the snail’s pace of publication for public notices in weeklies?  These venerable periodicals reach a few Lone Star State subscribers.  Meanwhile, ESBD can be seen by every contractor on earth.

    “LaPAC,” or the Louisiana Procurement and Contract Network, displays today its requests for bids to do public-agency work in categories ranging from agricultural supplies to window treatments.

    It’s interesting to note that by our Google search, Georgia seems the most organized of all. Its Georgia Procurement Registry has a list that is neat and simple,  for all to see. Here is a display so fair that it can be downloaded by Eskimos.  Everyone on earth and astronauts in space can view what are the current desires of state government, city and county agencies for upgrades and improvements in the lives of citizens.  It’s no small thing, either.  Millions of dollars are at stake.

    The city of Jefferson in northeast Georgia wants some company to step forward and design a plan for downtown’s “streetscapes.”  The city desires to “transform two central traffic islands and move the monuments.”  Over in west Georgia, the city of Powder Springs calls for bids to renovate the senior center. Way to the South, Tybee Island wants “design of infrastructure improvement.”

    Georgia Tech needs unarmed guards,  and the University of Georgia is ready for new washers and dryers.  The Department of Agriculture in Atlanta needs to re-pave the parking lot.

     I can ascertain all this while sitting at this personal computer next to a window looking out upon a meadow.  I am browsing state government websites – anathema now to the once comfortable journalism kingpins across the Deep South.    A public-notice revolution is in the works, and there could be publishers who soon will be taking scissors and cutting out their own coupons.  They could be spending them at Dollar City instead of the trendy shopping malls of Savannah or Nashville or Gulf Shores or Dallas.

   “Conservatively speaking, there is $600 million to $800 million in gross revenue annually, nationwide,” states the Newspaper Association of America. This is in a Powerpoint show that you can pull up this very moment on the NAA website, if you desire.

     Hey, they’re not kidding that they are  “conservatively speaking.”  Our own unofficial research has been based on the average cost of a public notice in a newspaper published one time a year across the South. Now it’s a fact that we disappointed our math teachers many times.  Yet our calculations in this area of journalism,  done several times,  show that one notice type run one time a year could annually produce hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local government spending with newspapers AND lawyers,  in just the Southern states alone.  And each state has hundreds of notice types.  The publishers have lobbied them into place at least since the Nineteenth Century.  Publishers have served as state governors and House speakers.

     All revolutions bathe in irony.  The gist of this one is that the newly posting government agencies want to become transparent in order to become fair.  They can inch nearer this elusive ideal by running out the RFPs for everyone on earth with the Internet to see. Yet this cyberspace display of them is calamitous for the future of county-seat newspapers.

     I once asked a 50-year “Golden Circle” member of the press association what subject he had editorialized on most in that time.  “Oh, we never run them,” he said.  For those who do step out bravely upon the editorial path, even if they duck taking a position on local contretemps, they always will have state government to bash for being “corrupt,” i.e., handing over contracts to relatives and friends.  And here is the irony. The remedy for that
corruption – transparency of every agencies’ calls for bids – is producing economic peril for the editorialists and their papers.

   That students plagiarize with impunity, or that brash New York Times reporters sometimes file from Brooklyn with Kansas City deadlines… these aren’t the biggest ethical issues in print journalism.  No, the biggest is this: How much open-government law are the publishers and their trade groups willing to bargain away in order to retain good will in the legislatures of the South and stave off legislation shifting public records online?

     House Bill 833 cleared one house in 2006, and Georgia has a biennial General Assembly session.  If you think it won’t return, you don’t know the determination of the Department of Administrative Services at 200 Piedmont Avenue in Atlanta to carry out the wishes of Gov. Sonny Perdue for modernization of procurement in Georgia.

   There needs to be a summit meeting in the South bringing together the FOI non-profits and the more income-minded press associations, to negotiate and set limits on what open-government law will be left at risk, until the day comes – and it is inevitable that it will – when public notices move fully onto the web.

IMPORTANT SOURCE’S NAME CHANGE

   The Reporters Committee site is www.rcfp.org  As you probably have noticed, its definitive lawyer-written overviews of state FOI, once called, for example, “Tapping South Carolina Secrets,” nowis called “The Open Government Guide,” and it’s in its fifth edition.