Published: October 29, 2009 05:21 pm      

OUR VIEW: 'The legals'

Our own Sen. Charlie Dean has proposed taking legal notices - those foreclosure, bankruptcy and public meeting notifications that regularly appear in our pages - out of the newspaper and putting them on the Web. Exclusively. If you've got Internet access, fine. If you don't much care for computers, too bad. There's no telling what you'll miss.

As it stands now, "the legals" must be printed in a community's newspaper of record, so as to ensure access by all to countless events and public proceedings. For example, the Department of Environmental Protection was required to publish notice of a Branford cement plant's application to burn automobile remnants rather than coal during a 20-day trial, possibly resulting in greater levels of harmful emissions. (We wrote about that in our Sept. 30 issue.)

Dean's bill would change all that. Senate Bill 376 allows government agencies to avoid putting important notices in print, posting them instead only on their Web sites, provided they're "publicly accessible."

Therein lies the problem. Just because a Web site is "publicly accessible" doesn't mean everybody has access to it. We're not sure what things are like in Citrus and Marion counties, where most of the votes lie in Senate District 3, but here in Suwannee a fair number of folks don't even own a computer, and

more than a few who do can no longer afford Internet access, due to the economic downturn.

We're not alone. A recent Pew survey showed that 57 percent of U.S. adults over 65 don't use the Internet. Forty-four percent of Hispanics and 39 percent of African-Americans don't go on the Web either. That's one reason that the AARP, NAACP and numerous other national groups have opposed measures like Dean's, which would effectively put public information out of reach of millions of Americans.

We're not saying public notices shouldn't appear online. Ours, in fact, along with those of most other Florida newspapers, already do, at floridapublicnotices.com. (That's where you're taken when you go to suwanneedemocrat.com and click on Florida Public Notices.) And it's all free - as long as you have an Internet-capable computer.

We're well aware the Internet is the wave of the future. We work hard to promote our online offerings. Some items, in fact, we publish exclusively on the Web. Bonus coverage, essentially.

That ought not be case with official government business. Come on, Sen. Dean, don't turn out the lights on thousands of your constituents.